1. Today never got really hot. The skies were clear and the air was mild, a perfect day to do a little gardening. I did a little more cleaning out of the riverstone planters, dumped a bag of garden soil in each of them, and planted the daisies I bought on Friday at Pine Creek Nursery. Just after I had wrapped up this project, the lawn care crew swept in and with dizzying efficiency mowed, trimmed, and fertilized our front and back yards. Patrick and the Deke assembled our new deck table and chairs set. I enjoyed taking a seat in the late afternoon shade and surveying how the yard definitely still has Mary Idell West Woolum's characteristics, and is, at the same time, very slowly, becoming a place the Deke and I are shaping with our own ideas and sense of how we want things to look.
2. Patrick's birthday was a week ago. With him in town for the weekend, we decided to go out and celebrate it a week late. So our whole Kellogg family reserved a table at the Snake Pit. Patrick was very happy to be introduced to the place and we had a good time -- it's remarkable to me that my sisters and their husbands and the Deke and I see each other often, and, all the same, we get together for dinner and we have a ton of catching up to do. So our table was abuzz with end of the school year stories, talk about what's going on this summer, and other news and, if I'm not mistaken, we made plans for more things we need to discuss at family dinner on Sunday with calendars in hand.
3. Christy had a great idea as we were getting ready to leave the Snake Pit: she proposed that we have a nightcap at the Hill Street Depot. The assent was unanimous, so we all piled into our cars and rocketed back to Kellogg and took over the table in the Farrah Fawcett room in Hill Street Depot's far corner. The popular nightcap around the table was a Captain Morgan spiced rum version of the Moscow Mule, although Carol had a Bloody Mary and I tried what the Depot calls a Mama-rita, a mixture of tequila, triple sec, cabernet and lime. It's an unusual and intriguing drink and I enjoyed it.
I drank water and a Pepsi with my buffalo burger at the Snake Pit, so I'd only had the one cocktail as we were driving home. Suddenly, the Deke blurted out that maybe we should end our night at the Inland Lounge. I slammed on the brakes, executed a screeching U-turn on Bunker Avenue, and we hurtled uptown and walked in the nearly empty Inland Lounge. Cas and the Deke engaged in intermittent verbal sparring and the matching of wits. Tracy listened in, amused, and simply shook her head. The Deke and Patrick spent a lot of time talking over any number of things. Cas and I, and later, Ron Delcamp, got all kinds of things straightened out about baseball, construction projects, and life in the Silver Valley -- and I got to hear some great stories about characters around town, both living and deceased.
After thinking we'd capped off the evening in grand style at the Hill St. Depot, it turned out the grand fun we had there carried forward into the Inland Lounge and the Deke, Patrick, and I were fired up in the car as I drove us home, feeling fortunate that the Deke and I live here and that we had had such a good time in the town of Kellogg, not to mention Enaville, and got to include Patrick in our family fun and in the magic of the Snake Pit, Hill St. Depot, and the Inland Lounge.
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