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Saturday, February 2, 2008

Out and About

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Nice doggie .... staaaaaaaaaay ..... and when papa comes back he'll take you for a treat.



This well behaved labradorable was outside O'Connor's religious supply and bookstore. He made up for the fact, that once again, O'Connor's is absolutely useless, except for holy cards, rosaries and medals, and the odd cruet or two. Oh, 25 years ago or so, they had book stock worth looking at, but not anymore. This doggie parked out back made up for it.

I hate shopping with a purple passion. HOWEVER, the only two kinds of stores I enjoy are bookstores and CD/DVDs stores. The grocery store is tolerable, but other than that I'm not really "contributing to the economy." Then I went perusing a few used bookstores to see if I could find a nice clean hardbound of something I wanted, rather than just a paperback. Much more successful.

Those of you who followed my San Diego Fire saga last October might remember me mentioning we only get 9 or so inches of rain a year. Unfortunately, it tends to come mostly in a six week period. One sure way to cure a drought is to take your car to the car wash. These two dorks did this today (perhaps we should thank them?) thereby providing the city and county of San Diego with a public service. Guys, perhaps next time you can do this in the summer when we really need the rain...and not wait until it has actually started to drizzle? Just a thought.

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8 comments:

Anonymous said...

We have a labrador..Charlie! sweet dogs..

gemoftheocean said...

Oh, yes. It's been a little while since you featured him. This one was as good as gold, and though attentive when I passed him when getting to the backdoor of the store, he didn't go berzerk barking like a lot of dogs would have. I was surprised the owner had let the window down as far as he had. I wasn't in there for long, and just after I got back in, the owner came out, have the doggie a nice little nuzzle and then toook him for his treat.

Karen

Stephen said...

My aunt, when I was a kid, had a dog (total mongrel, large-ish but of no clear breed) who was so well-behaved that she could take him to ASDA (big supermarket), leave him at the entrance (without tying him up or anything), say "stay!", and he'd still be there when she came back, even if she was gone for two hours. He was the sweetest, most good-natured dog I've ever encountered.

Mind you, he was scared shitless of our cat.

gemoftheocean said...

Stephen!!! ROTFL.... for all that was not an "alpha dog" where the cat was concerned.

I must say I don't meet many cats I like or who like me, but occasionally one meets a cat that is sociable. There's some very nice bookstores in the Normal Heights section of San Diego where you can find out of print books at reasonable prices etc.

And the Adams Ave. Bookstore had two cats, one of which when I went up to peruse the religious/theology etc. section came up to give me a nuzzle and did the "pet me, I'm more like a dog than a cat" routine. I would have gotten a picture of this ginger cat (for some reason it seems the ginger cats like me, go figure) but then "papa" came by and started following him before I could get my camera out. Fickle. All my friends who harbor cats have cats that hate me, or at best tolerate me.

Adrienne said...

In addition to book stores - my number one favorite - you would have to add office supply stores, hardware stores, and art supply stores.

Row upon row of screws and nuts, passages filled with paper, pens, and notebooks, and displays of fine oil paint, brushes, and drawing supplies - yes, that is heaven on earth!

Stephen said...

One of the funniest things I've ever seen* was this dog, whose name was Sam, trying, in pure terror, to climb into my Aunt's lap when our cat (who, admittedly, was very territorial and tended towards the cantankerous when faced with animal visitors) hissed at him.

That was cat #1. Cat #2, Sooty (named becauase he was black, not because he was orange), was even more of an individual. Sooty was hand-reared by a friend of my mother's when his mother was killed in a car accident soon after he was born. Therefore, he never learned to meow - cats apparently learn to meow the same way human children learn to speak. All he could do was squeak. He would notoriously only accept food from my father; once, years after I left home (and about 3 months before I moved to Canada), I burned up some paid holiday days from work by house/cat-sitting while my parents went on holiday. I was actually driven to inviting a friend who's a vet round for dinner because I needed a credible witness that I really was feeding the cat! I told Helen - the vet - exactly what would happen when I put the food down, and I was right - Sooty stalked into the kitchen, sniffed the food disdainfully, shot me a look of pure hatred, then stalked out through the cat-flap and went over the road to paw at the neighbour's window (while my parents were away, he'd accept food from Bert and Valerie over the road, but not, it seems, from my brother and I).

* The funniest thing I've ever seen, bar nothing, was my maternal grandmother, aged about 80 and somewhat arthritic, trying to extract herself from the front passenger seat of a Porsche 924.

gemoftheocean said...

Stephen, Grandmothers and porsches do NOT GO TOGETHER its a fundamental law of nature! And was Sam a Great Dane or something? :-D The bigger the dog, the funnier. As to cats? Well, okay, he was offered, if he'd rather catch rats than eat kibble, that's his affair!

Adrienne - when I was in my teens I did have a bit of a thing for stationary stores. The art supply store a while back in the late 90s and early part of this decade was also "the thing" I have some very nice winsor and Newton watercolors I ahven't fooled with in a while, and was just recently thinking of doing that for some fun again.

I became hooked when I took Theatre Design I, where we had to use different media to do renderings of sets and costumes. I thought, boy the wet paint with water is MUCH MUCH better than those crappy solid cake things -- blech.... much easier to deal with.

I like the small heavy water color paper that comes in a block where after it driee you life it from the block with a palette knife. Back in Oct. I had posted one of my efforts of the scarecrow on this item here. it wasn't great art, but it was fun.

Karen

Stephen said...

Sam, yes, was a big dog - total mutt, but there was some Alsatian in there, and that's the sort of size he was. So, yes, seeing him try, in utter terror, to leap into my aunt's lap was very, very funny indeed.

Re: The Porsche - yes, they're ridiculous cars. My aunt on my mother's side had a couple of them (sam belonged to my aunt on my Dad's side). My grandmother never really grew to like them. And watching her try and get out of it was really, really, REALLY funny (yes, we did help her rather than just fall about laughing... eventually).

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