Laurabelle’s Blog

Saturday Jeff and I went down to Olympia for Mother’s Day. While down there, we made a stop by Capital Footwear, a hippie shoe store where the staff care about comfort and quality and only sell shoes made by fairly paid labor. (For example, they don’t sell Doc Martens any more because that company opened a factory in China and lowered their prices.) I only found one pair that I really liked, but it wasn’t for lack of trying, on my part or theirs; I tried on pretty near every shoe in the store. I think I’ll go back every couple of months, though, and see what they’ve got that’s new. It’s a small, quality business that deserves my patronage.

Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) there was a used bookstore next to the shoe shop, so I dragged Jeff in. We bought a delightful stack of cookbooks plus a couple of others:

• The Joy of Cooking (the old edition, but this one is so pristine that it must never have been used)
• The Betty Crocker Cookbook (hardbound, 2000 ed.)
• The Dione Lucas Book of French Cooking
• The Home Book of French Cookery
• The Playboy Gourmet (1972 ed., with a hilarious introduction and a lot of surprisingly good-sounding recipes)
• The Best Pet Name Book Ever! (which has already inspired me to get two cats and name them Patience and Fortitude, after the lions of the New York Public Library)
• A book whose title I can’t remember now, about why western civilization developed into industrialized society while other areas of the world did not. It is not a racist tract; on the contrary, it argues that people in other parts of the world are at least as intelligent as we are and searches for other (more complex and more interesting) reasons for diverging societal destinies.

It was quite a successful trip.

On the way back home, Jeff and I stopped by Weaving Works for their annual Mother’s Day sale. I bought yarn to knit myself a hoodie, the first project I’ve planned for myself! I’m not sure when I’ll get around to making it, because I’ve got a shawl to finish (the last from Christmas 2003, woohoo!) and a baby hat that I haven’t even started, before I think about starting that hoodie. But at least I’ve got the yarn now and can just start knitting whenever I want.

Finally, Jeff and I looked through our new cookbooks, planned our meals for the next week, and made a grocery run. It was a lot of food and a lot of money, but that’s all right, because we won’t have to go back for another week. It’s all planned out.