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... and I went to a book sale. How very surprising. Well, we missed the library sale earlier this month.
It was an annual two-day fundraising sale. We went last year as well but it was not nearly as crowded! We could barely move at times and maneuvering with a handbag on one shoulder and a book bag over the other through narrow aisles is a bit tricky anyway. I took a water bottle along because I remembered how dry and dusty it was last year but trying to get the bottle out of my bag and have a drink would have been a recipe for disaster in that crowd and I was parched by the time we got out. (And we've both been coughing and sneezing all evening.)
Really, it was crazy (but perfectly polite) in there. I think last year we must have gone on the Saturday instead of waiting for Extra Bargain Sunday afternoon. After about an hour, the lights went out without any warning. People looked up for a moment, then went back to browsing by the light of the few high windows in the hall. Me included, I admit! But it seemed like a good time to wrap things up. There were sections I still hadn't managed to get to but the crowd showed no sign of letting up and I had two full bags of books by then. Usually, I would take the books to a quiet corner, examine them carefully and decide which ones I really wanted. Today, that was not really an option and I was buying by the bag not the book so it didn't really matter. *shrugs* I'm still a little fuzzy on exactly what I bought but there was a Martha Wells novel and a children's novel by Penelope Lively, The Color Purple, a box set of Trollope novels ...
Mum had said she was not going to buy anything today. Nope, she was buying plants not books at the moment.
I said nothing.
I saw her a while after we got there and she had a half-full bag. Was I surprised? Uh, no. And she preempted any comment I might have made by saying, "You're not surprised at all, are you?" "I'm saying nothing."
The lights never came back on and when I joined Mum outside (two bags of books for $16) we found out that a car had hit a power pole not far away. Two ambulances, ambulance control, one fire truck and three police cars had gone by the hall since then. There was obviously a serious hold-up in traffic but we were going in the other direction and there wasn't anything in the news so I don't know what happened ... but that's a lot of emergency vehicles.
It was an annual two-day fundraising sale. We went last year as well but it was not nearly as crowded! We could barely move at times and maneuvering with a handbag on one shoulder and a book bag over the other through narrow aisles is a bit tricky anyway. I took a water bottle along because I remembered how dry and dusty it was last year but trying to get the bottle out of my bag and have a drink would have been a recipe for disaster in that crowd and I was parched by the time we got out. (And we've both been coughing and sneezing all evening.)
Really, it was crazy (but perfectly polite) in there. I think last year we must have gone on the Saturday instead of waiting for Extra Bargain Sunday afternoon. After about an hour, the lights went out without any warning. People looked up for a moment, then went back to browsing by the light of the few high windows in the hall. Me included, I admit! But it seemed like a good time to wrap things up. There were sections I still hadn't managed to get to but the crowd showed no sign of letting up and I had two full bags of books by then. Usually, I would take the books to a quiet corner, examine them carefully and decide which ones I really wanted. Today, that was not really an option and I was buying by the bag not the book so it didn't really matter. *shrugs* I'm still a little fuzzy on exactly what I bought but there was a Martha Wells novel and a children's novel by Penelope Lively, The Color Purple, a box set of Trollope novels ...
Mum had said she was not going to buy anything today. Nope, she was buying plants not books at the moment.
I said nothing.
I saw her a while after we got there and she had a half-full bag. Was I surprised? Uh, no. And she preempted any comment I might have made by saying, "You're not surprised at all, are you?" "I'm saying nothing."
The lights never came back on and when I joined Mum outside (two bags of books for $16) we found out that a car had hit a power pole not far away. Two ambulances, ambulance control, one fire truck and three police cars had gone by the hall since then. There was obviously a serious hold-up in traffic but we were going in the other direction and there wasn't anything in the news so I don't know what happened ... but that's a lot of emergency vehicles.
