Friday, March 19

Up at 6:30 to get ready to go to water aerobics. The morning started cool, but warmed up beautifully by noon. I would have thought more would show up for aerobics, since it was a nice day, but there were only eleven of us.

At home, Hubbie told me that the downstairs potty isn't working, so he called a plumber, who of course couldn't come until Monday. He was advised to buy muriatic acid to pour in the toilet and allow to stand for several hours.

After getting ready for the day, I went to the medical clinic at 11:30 for bloodwork, as a follow-up to my visit three weeks ago. Back home, Mother had heated the tomato soup, and Hubbie made grilled cheese sandwiches to go with it for lunch.

Following lunch, we went on an outing...our intention was to visit the home of one of the ladies from water aerobics, who invited us to see all the jonquils growing in and around her yard. I'd asked the lady her address, but somehow I translated Sweet Gum Road to Sandtown Road, so we traveled the wrong road for several miles, finally coming out on a highway in a small community north of our town.

We gave up finding her house, and decided to look for the second place on our tour agenda...a hydroponics farm featured in our local newspaper this week. We had some difficulty finding this place, too, but finally phoned the owner for more specific directions.

We arrived there around 2 p.m., and visited the small store adjacent to buildings housing the vegetable plants. The farm produces a prodigious amount of tomatoes, cucumbers, eggplants, bell peppers, lettuce, etc., but today they had sold out of everything but tomatoes and lettuce. We bought some of each.

Before we bought the veggies, we were encouraged to taste a small tomato, which was richly flavorful. The tomatoes are deep red, pristine clean, and very shiny, like they have been individually polished. But we were told that this is the way they come off the vine.

We had hoped to see the farming operation, but were told that they only allow folks into the buildings on winter days, when the weather is 32 degrees or colder, which assures that no insects enter the buildings.

We weren't back home long before I decided we should go pick up tickets for a concert Saturday night, featuring several local performers, as well a group from a nearby tourist town. We've seen all of them in concert before, but thought it would be interesting to see them again.

We stopped first at a bank, which had only bleacher tickets left. Mother would not be able to manage bleacher seating. Next, we checked at a radio station...nope, just bleacher tickets. Finally, we stopped at the college where the concert is to be held. They had tickets for regular seating, but they were $15 each, which is more than I want to pay. So we'll skip the concert.

Back home again, I mixed a quadruple batch of whole wheat pancake batter. Hubbie did the honors of cooking the pancakes for supper.

After supper, Mother went home, and Hubbie and I went grocery shopping at the WDCS. The store didn't have several items that we needed, so we had to swing back by a grocery store to get those things.

I had programmed the DVR for a college basketball game we were interested in seeing, but Hubbie gave me erroneous information about what channel it was on, so when we sat down to watch it, I discovered we had recorded the wrong channel. I searched live channels and finally found the game, already in the second half, with our team over 20 points behind.

It was a day for road blocks, it seemed.

"Alice in Wonderland" movie report: the movie takes a few liberties, like making Alice a young adult, instead of a young girl. It's rated PG, because there are some scary characters in it, like a dog-like beast with a double row of teeth that dashes at Alice and even injures her by scratching her arm. The Cheshire Cat is a little weird, and the Mad Hatter is a lot weird. There is also a fire-breathing dragon that Alice beheads. I think that these characters, especially in 3-D, might be frightening to very young children. Also, the story line is probably too sophisticated for very young children to grasp.