Oct 10
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

I went walking around downtown today, because it was sort of raining, and I didn’t want to ride in the rain. It was persistent, and penetrating, but not pelting. As well as astonishingly alliterative. My brain wanted me to stop and have coffee, or hot carbohydrates – it walked me past Woodstar, and the Bakery Normand, and Haymarket and Starbucks and Fresh Pasta Co, and the new place for panini and back past Woodstar again just in case I didn’t get the idea the first time. I managed to take a bunch of door pictures for later, and not get any additional coffee. Then I managed something even better; lunch with Al. Which was, in fact, hot pasta with duck and roasted tomatoes.

I even retrieved the couch cushions, so the arms of the couch are almost the right height again. Having the old couch reupholstered is not, in fact, like getting the old couch new again. It is like getting a completely new couch that you thought you were going to like but turns out to have suffered a slight personality change through getting its guts replaced. It is very disconcerting. I imagine we will either beat it into submission and recreate the (remarkably comfortable) imprints of our butts upon it, or replace it in aggravation in a couple of years.

Nothing to do with couches goes fast at our house. It took us two years to decide to buy one, three months of testing to settle on this one, a year of holes in the cushions before we could decide between re-upholstery and replacement, and now I fully expect a solid six months before we can sit down and not say “didn’t it used to be…?”

Other things go quicker. We purchase bikes every fifteen years whether we need to or not. Boats seem to be raining upon us (to my great delight). Non-stick frying pans have a half life of 3 years.

Or maybe we are just extraordinarily slow individuals.