A Very Leisurely Sunday – August 9

We had a leisurely morning today.  Tom and I breakfasted in the utilitarian restaurant atop this hotel where we visited with two interesting fellows.

The older was of the origin of the people of this country, but had been born in Africa and had spent the last 35 years of his life in the UK.  He was here for a family wedding.

The younger man had two Master’s Degrees, one from this country and one from Ireland.  He’d been born in the northern part of this nation, but had most recently lived in Virginia and Georgia, as well as Minneapolis.  He is here heading up some aspect of Target’s expansion into this area.

It made for interesting conversation.

After breakfast, and after the last of the ladies had arisen, we enjoyed a worship service of sharing, singing, and prayer.

This afternoon we all took a walk down the same pathway I’d utilized two years ago when I was here with Mark Carlton to teach.  This time as we stepped across that cement drainage ditch, however, it was not a pile of human excrement or a dead rat that caught my attention in the bottom of the gutter.  It was a live rat the size of a tomcat.  It scurried quickly among the refuse and exited the ditch through a hole half its size in the concrete sidewall.  It had only about a fourth of its tail.

Of course I had to call the attention of the ladies to my sighting, but they gamely crossed the ditch anyway.

We walked and shopped for a couple of hours, taking in interesting sights that included a cow coming down the sidewalk and four men trying to open a clogged sewer.

I stopped to talk with them a bit.  Plugged up?  I said.  Ya ya, a jam, one of them said.  I got an interesting couple of photos out of that encounter.

And then, on the return trip, perhaps the saddest thing we saw on the whole excursion.  There in the middle of the sidewalk were the remains of perhaps a distant cousin of the rodent I saw in the drainage ditch.

All shopping trips should be so interesting.   But, of course, I am being facetious.

All in all a very restful and relaxing Lord’s Day here.  As I write this it is 5:47 Sunday morning for you all, while we are preparing to go to The Only Place for an early dinner (5 pm or so) of filet mignon.

Tomorrow the pace will be considerably more frenetic.