1. My right foot has been giving me trouble for a while. It's not debilitating, but pain regularly swoops around my heel like a wake of vultures. I put inserts in my shoes, a big help, and I wear an ankle support, another big help. I'm determined to see if my foot will accept 5,000 steps a day -- or about two miles. Today, I racked up 5,000 steps, not at one time, but over the course of the day, and, yes, I experienced some discomfort this evening, but nothing alarming. Here's what I must do: get that ice pack out and treat my foot at the end of the day.
2. After a cup of coffee and a triple berry scone and some time with The Talented Mr. Ripley at Panera in Beltsville, I strolled a couple of blocks to an International Market, hoping it would be a reliable store closer to home than the other two international markets I really enjoy. No such luck. It was a dismal, ill-lit, depressing, ill-stocked store. Oh, well. I jaunted back over to the Sube and rumbled out to Wheaton and had a fun time shopping at Hung Phat, my favorite Asian market, and now we have a pretty good supply of coconut milk, curry pastes, sesame oil, and rice noodles. I swear, if I lived closer to Hung Phat, I'd visit this small, superbly stocked, well-lit, jam packed store all the time.
3. The Deke needed some supplies at JoAnne's and so I lumbered down the ill-lit desultory mallway of the Greenbelt Plaza a ways to Books-a-Million and suddenly I jetted back in time to downtown Spokane in about 1977 when a B. Dalton Bookseller opened. Like B. Dalton, Books-a-Million had the table of remainders at the front of the store, shelves jam packed with paperbacks as I drifted deeper into the place, and a great magazine selection on the left wall. When independent bookstores were plentiful, say, in Eugene or Portland, I became snobby about bookstores like B. Dalton, but, now, with independent bookstores having been swooped upon and pecked alive by the wakes of vultures of Amazon and other online merchants, it's a pleasure to have any bookstore nearby and I felt that naive, pre-snobbery B. Dalton Bookseller pleasure of my youth today as I scanned the shelves of Books-a-Million.
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