I’m writing this Sunday evening, August 8th, but am serializing an otherwise overly long journal entry and back-dating those portions which happened earlier in the week. Hopefully this will make writing (and reading) these pieces more "manageable." In any event, the last four days have been incredibly busy ones, every one of which has included a fair amount of physical exertion. I'm downright pooped.

I took Friday off of work to get up early with Steffi and drive over to Graham/Burlington, NC for the Hospice League 15th Annual Flea Market, an event considered the “largest charitable flea market in the southeast (with) 110,000 square foot of cleaned, polished, departmentalized low-priced merchandise.” As is always the case with such a flea market, the earlier one gets there, the better the chance one has at getting good stuff – so we tried to arrive as early and as close to the 8 o’clock opening time as possible. Well, predictably, shortly after entering the sales halls around 8:30 we discovered that nearly all of the good furniture was spoken for. Steffi and I, however, have come to be (perhaps embarrasingly so) adept bargain hunters and left four and a half hours later with a nice collection of quality items, of which the highlights include: A $3 chest of (5) drawers, a $1 black rotary telephone, and a $4 bicycle for Steffi.

The chest of drawers was the real winner, an incredibly cheap addition to our kitchen that, in moving, provided the day’s exercise for me. Personally, though, I’m probably most proud of the old rotary telephone which required some elbow grease to get to work since it doesn’t have the “modern” square plug we’re used to using to connect it to the wall socket. I needed about 20 minutes to splice some wires and jury-rig a functiong cable for it. Although the dial and handset work perfectly, the ringer, unfortunately, doesn’t.