I was ambivalent about going to Durango today with Galina, especially as she had announced an intention to visit four thrift shops in addition to doing a shopping run at the Wal-Mart, but it was the right thing to do, both from the point of view of hanging out with my honey and from the point of view of avoiding incipient cabin fever, or any more lumberjacking.
Between yesterday and the day before, I chainsawed my way through three more tankfuls of gas down at the old pine, and after counting rings, estimated that the bottom branch of the tree was about 75 years old. Looking around at a couple of barely sprouted pines, it's easy to imagine that the tree itself is not much older than that.
The pile of wood from my exertions amounts to something between a quarter and a third of a cord. We'll need to get some hardwood, too, if we expect to rely on wood heat this winter.
The Methodist Thrift Shop in Durango had the best prices by far, and we picked up two lightly used Samsonite luggage pieces for a combined price of $11. The next stop, a shop run by the Volunteers of America, was a bit more expensive, but not as expensive as shop #3, whose affiliation I failed to catch, but whose prices were more suited to an antique store than a thrift shop. The fourth shop was run by the Animal Shelter, so I didn't mind paying a bit more for some intriguing paperbacks.
In the middle of all this, I got an email from my Houston client, asking me to resend one of the translations to another email address, as the editor was working from home. Fortunately, I was able to stop by the Durango Public Library and unlimber my Eee 701, which enabled me to solve the problem in about 5 minutes.
On the way home, we found that the Wal-Mart had set up a trio of pepper roasters outside the entrance, where you could leave bushel-and-a-quarter boxes of Hatch chili peppers from New Mexico to be roasted while you finished shopping inside. I bought a box of the medium-strength peppers to go along with our usual purchases and, after overdosing on the smell of roasted peppers while en route home in the car, I ended the evening up to my elbows in peppers that went into an impromptu chili (turkey based, with yellow and red tomatoes, garlic, cilantro, and fresh basil), into freezer bags, and just into the refrigerator.
I may end up giving some away, I don't know, but I will surely be eating a lot of chili over the next few days.
My two prize purchases of the day - which ran me a total of $3 - were a book of translations of and commentary on some of the works of Confucius by Ezra Pound, and a 4-CD set of something called Music: the art of listening (6th ed.), which seems to have an eclectic selection of tracks, ranging from Beethoven, to Scott Joplin, to Berlioz, to Gilbert & Sullivan, to Bernstein, to names that mean nothing to me, as yet. Perhaps there's time, before hitting the sack, to listen to one CD.
Cheers...
