More Dog Days

How was your week during these Dog Days of August (in the northern hemisphere, anyway)?  What wonderful little moments did you experience this week?  At Susanne's blog Living To Tell The Story, you can add your Friday Fave Five and share what five things, large or small, made your Thankful list this week.

Here's mine:

1. We finished our week of dog sitting by venturing out to the beach with his lordship.  We could have spent our walking time gazing at beach apartments facing the ocean, imagining what it would be like to sit on that balcony and enjoy the beach scene view every day,

we could have laid out our beach blankets and watched the sunbathers, the surfers and the boaters,

or the colorful bikers whizzing past on their color-coordinated cycles;

but mostly we did this--watched and waited while our four legged charge investigated every curious smell at every post, garbage can and tree.

2. This is County Fair week!  On Tuesday, I was scheduled to demonstrate spinning during the three hour afternoon shift at the Ventura County Handweavers and Spinners Guild booth, so The Professor and I drove up to Ventura in the morning, wandered around the fair visiting the textile arts building (of course!) and checking out what exactly Fried Kool Aid was (yes, truly, it was sold this year along with the chocolated covered bacon and all the other usual suspects of fair food).  I thoroughly enjoyed interacting with so many people who strolled past our booth, stopped to watch us spinning and weaving fiber into beautiful fabric.

3. Evidently, I signed up for the perfect day to volunteer because we discovered that The Beach Boys were performing that evening!  Of course, we stayed for the concert!  What fun it was to sing along to all the Beach Boys songs with a standing room only crowd of Beach Boy lovers of all ages.  They certainly got a rousing cheer for "I Wish They All Could Be California Girls" and "Surfer Girl".  That's not surprising since all the women in the audience were California Girls and we were in a stadium no more than 1/2 mile from Surfer's Point in Ventura.  They sang for almost two hours!  What's your favorite Beach Boys song?

4.  The rest of the week when I wasn't typing up lesson plans for next school year (yes, it's coming on really really fast), I was busily knitting on the February Lady sweater.  Making great progress, I'm done with the body and nearly finished with the first sleeve.

5.  Do you ever happen upon a book that you've heard about but then forgot and when you see it, you think, "I've heard about that book. I think I'd like to read it."  When we were in the local libary yesterday, I saw How Starbucks Saved My Life by Michael Gates Gill sitting on a shelf.  I grabbed it and sat down right there and began reading it.  It was good; not great, but good. Gill is an entertaining story teller and his story of being "an advertising executive who had it all, then lost it all--and was finally redeemed by his new job, and his twenty-eight-year-old boss, at Starbucks" grabbed and held my attention through the whole book.

So that's it--Willow's Week.  There was actually so much more--another phone call from The Grad Student, this time from Singapore, to tell us he was on his way to Indonesia for the next six weeks of study.  And there was eating our fresh ripe garden grown tomatoes.  And more reading.  And more knitting.  And more organizing.  But those are topics for another day or another Fave Five.