Friday/Saturday 4th and 5th October

Friday


Was out and about and busy.   Went to a cookery talk held on the first Friday of the month, this one was about breakfasts.   I don't quite understand the set-up, it is run by a department of Oklahoma State University, but is situated in Shawnee, whereas OSU I think is in Stillwater, about 60 miles away.

It was given by a very friendly, pleasant young woman, I have been to her talks before.   She talked about the importance of breakfast, and provided blenders so that we could make smoothies, and she cooked us some whole wheat pancakes with spiced apples, which were very nice.  Americans have never heard of pancakes with lemon and sugar.  I told her that is how we always have them, and prior to Shrove Tuesday our supermarkets are stacked up with displays of lemons and packets of pancake batter.   She said she was going to try it.  

These storage units were outside the OSU office where we had the cookery talk, but they are all over Shawnee, dozens and dozens, perhaps even hundreds, of them.  You know how we all have stuff up in our attics, most of which are things that are never going to be looked at again, like our kids' academic papers, because shock! horror! "you can't throw them away, not after all the work I've put into them" .   Well here, this storing of stuff that is never going to be looked at again is taken to a whole new level.  When the attics are filled up  they rent these storage units, they PAY MONEY each month rather than sort out and throw away their unwanted clutter, because when one storage unit is filled up they go and rent another one.   I can't wrap my head around it.

On Friday evening I went to a reception and lecture at the Art Gallery.  The current exhibition is a collection of Russian lacquer boxes.   Actually it wasn't so much a lecture, a professional story teller told, in a very enchanting way, two of the Russian fairy tales depicted on the boxes.

Saturday

When I did my hospital chaplaincy round yesterday a patient asked me to visit again today, but that was my only trip out, otherwise I have spent most of the day reading.  I have read more books while I have been here than all the rest of my life put together.   Mostly Amish fiction, and as soon as I have finished one book I am downloading its sequel to my C-Nook.  Acquiring books has never been easier, long gone are the days when one had to traipse off to a bookshop and look.

It is now actually Sunday morning.  The dogs over the road were barking and at about 1.30 am I called the police who came straight away (there can't have been much crime going on) and silenced the dogs, but then I was wide awake.