Well, I guess I don’t get home alone much. I sure had a long list of things to do and I’m not close to getting them done. I did get to see my friend Altu today. She fed me Swiss chard, a vegetable something like spinach. I love it, my mom used to cook it, too. Altu had harvested hers fresh from a friend’s garden. Yum.

Today I am preparing for Vince, Carol, Max and Asa to visit tomorrow. Or that is, I should be preparing. Instead I ran around town. I visited Ozel Computer to see if I could get a used modem and instead talked with the three guys there for a long while… very good company. Went to La Perla and got some tortillas and black beans, and talked to the man who owns the store, had a nice short chat.

And *then* I went and bought myself a digital camera that was on a super-duper-deal at an office store chain. There are three locations of this chain in Lansing and there was only one (of this sale camera) left in the whole city. I had to drive all the way to the west side which took a lot of time. But:

When I got there, unbelieveably there was a funny tiny car, an Isetta, sitting right out front. And not only that, but the owner was getting ready to get in it and drive away. Fortunately he had his window rolled down and I ran over and said:

“My friend used to have one of those!” (Actually the “friend” was Vince, and I think the truth is that his dad had one when he was young.) Vince has a webpage called “Vince’s Favorite Cars” which talks about this and other cars.

We talked for a minute. I told the driver that my friend has a cut-fold-and-paste Isetta on the web. He said, Oh yeah, Vince… the pictures he used for the cut-fold-and-paste Isetta are actually of this very car! He knows Vince! Turns out the guy is Bob Nelson who has a great page on his own Isetta. Bob knows my dear friend, Vince!

I mean, Vince… who I met online when he lived in New Jersey. Who moved to North Carolina. Then moved to China. And who is going to be at my house in about 24 hours! This guy knows my friend. It is such a small world.

The moral of the story is: Sometimes it is definitely worth it to talk to strangers.

I won’t be posting tomorrow. I get to stay up too late talking to Vince and Carol while we hope the kids sleep. I can’t wait!

Meanwhile, here’s a picture I took with my new camera. It’s our house, with purple steps/porch and salmon pink trim. I need to paint the window trim someday but this is how it looks right now. When I hang my hammock on the porch, it hangs below the porch wall so nobody can see me. You can see our lot is small, not even 40 feet wide (a city bus is 40 feet long) but it is just the right size to mow with what Brian calls his “acoustic” mower. And it is just the right size that I can plant a few flowers without spending my entire summer in service to the goddess Flora, as a friend jokes she does.

Seeya Sunday night!

This entry was posted on Friday, July 18th, 2003 at 9:46 pmand is filed under Purple Houses, Relationships. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.