Today my friend took me on a birthday lunch. Wherever we go, we find trouble, it's our specialty. At the little cafe, well, the electricity was off, which of course I noticed instantly, what with no lights or whirs. The significance of this is that even though the cafe is a no-cook restaurant, that's right, eat it raw, well, everything we ordered, the brand-new-first-day waitress had to come back to our table and announce, I'm so sorry, but we are out of that. So, we'd order something different, and a few minutes later, here she is again, Well, we can't serve cold soup because we don't know how long the electricity has been off. Later, we learned why the electricity has been turned off -- the owner forgot to pay the electric bill. We struck up a nice conversation with her. We actually struck up conversations with everyone in sight, that is our specialty. My friend is exceedingly specialized in this department, among many others. She is a Day Brightener, she leaves happy smiles in her wake.

We followed this up by going next door to a Moroccan shop where everything is handmade/hand painted. However, the sign on the door said, CLOSED, back at 11:00 AM. That seemed unfortunate, since it was 1:30 PM. I turned the doorknob anyway, wouldn't you? It opened right up and we walked right inside and no one was around. But then we heard a noise in a door to a side room. A young man came out and we said, You are closed, but the door was open, so here we are. He said, I was just going to the bathroom. Okay, what do you say after that? We looked at all the neat stuff. We struck up a nice conversation with him. On the way out I said, Are you still closed? He was not, so I flipped his sign to OPEN. Good deed for the day.

Then we trotted off in the direction of ice cream. We got detoured somehow and the next thing you know, we happen upon a very fresh car accident. It didn't look pretty and it didn't look nice. We did not strike up a conversation.

We then had delicious chocolate chip frozen yogurt and also Prawline frozen yogurt. On the way out we struck up a conversation with the young woman owner. She was standing behind the counter, which is very low, so we had good visibility to see behind the scenes. Not that we were looking, but it's hard to miss a giant black lab lying half way in a huge box on the floor (the box was on its side). Hello. Turns out this dog was nursing her two boy pups, born less than 24 hours prior. Let's hope the pups weren't born right while they were serving up ice cream, right for all the world to take in, in-between slurps and licks. Am I talking about the dogs or the patrons?

Okay, I think I'll quit while I'm ahead. Am I still ahead?
KEM