Harold, Jim, Mrs. Friendly and others

I see Harold every Saturday morning. He stopped at my table as usual and asked what I was writing. I've tried to explain web logs (blogs) to him, but if you've never seen one, it's hard to imagine. Who reads them, he asked. Not too sure, I said, but I'm a good writer. Jim stopped by too to ask me where the Wall Street Journal was. Another lady waved and spoke--don't know her name. Mrs. Friendly (don't know her name but she's friendly to everyone) mentioned that she was tired of snow. Chatted with the manager. He hasn't yet looked at the Panera's fan page for 5 points that I started. He and another clerk told me about FB on their cell phones, but my eyes glaze over at the complexity of it--just like Harold when I tell him about blogs. When I left, Jim had decided to read the Columbus Dispatch, instead.

I was trapped in an elevator!

"How have you been?" I asked the adoption lawyer as I put on my coat to leave as she was settling in.

"The most exciting thing? I was trapped in an elevator!"

"Are you claustrophobic?"

"The lights and fan stayed on and I had my cell phone, so I called my staff and told them where I was. When I finally got to court, everyone clapped."

Met a Vet student today

At coffee today I asked the young man seated near me at the fireplace what he was studying, and it turned out it was large animal veterinary medicine! And he was a farm boy. When I was a librarian at OSU vet library, my best student employees were the ones raised on farms. Great work ethic, and rarely ever called in with crazy made-up excuses for not showing up. My favorite student type. He had graduated from the University of Finlay, so we chatted a bit about Marathon. That segued to the book we'd read for bookclub, The mighty queens of Freeville, and the story of butchering "Shirley," one of the cows. He told us that on his farm they had bottle fed and raised two cows which eventually his father slaughtered and put in the freezer, but his mom didn't want to eat them. One day when his dad was gone his mother had the children dig a large hole in the pasture but didn't tell them why. She then had them carry the packaged meat from the freezer and bury it.