Friday was a total bust. I slept late and subsequently went to work late. My overtime log for the convention totalled at 17 hours. No wonder I was tired. I was in reasonable good spirits until I found out about the results of the standoff in Russia. I found myself spending several hours weighing the merits of photos of injured or dead children being carried out of the school. Terrible. You can't unsee something. Most likely my largest occupational hazard is having to look long and hard at things too atrocious for other people to ever have to see. It was a sad day. When I came home, I watched the headlines from the NY Times newsroom. Their Foreign Editor looked close to tears as she gave her report. When I see images that are particularly horrible, I always fear they will replay in my dreams. I was cross with a friend and felt bad about that for most of the day. When I arrived home, I decided to read a book to relax. I chose Timoleon Vieta Come Home by Dan Rhodes off of my pile of books waiting to be read. It looked like I could polish it off in one sitting and it was about a dog. I thought, a nice book about a dog will make me feel much better. The book was undeniably good but unexpectedly depressing and even cruel. Rhodes takes British black humor to a new level of highly polished obsidian. Parts of it are hard. Every character has a post modern Grimm fairy tale quality to his or her story. As you know, those endings were never happily ever after as they were written. I've recounted the story of this book three times today, so it obviously had an effect on me large enough to suggest others give it a look. Saturday, was a much better day. Mouse and I decided to bravely go forth into our local shore communities on Labor Day weekend after rarely venturing too close to the thronging masses of summer visitors. We breakfasted in Belmar after finding parking spots so good that even I can not give the credit to my superb parking juju. Then we went on to a craft fair in Ocean Grove. I splurged on a bracelet made of vintage typewriter keys. The artist was a very cool lady. Mouse put her money down for a bracelet crafted of vintage cufflinks. What sold me on my bracelet was a key I've never seen on a typewriter before. It's a rectangular key with two lines, reading shift freedom. That sort of sounds like a command to me. SHIFT FREEDOM. It could be a political statement as we watch our civil liberties challenged in this dark climate. Or it could be encouragement to follow dreams, shifting away from focusing on securing my financial freedom to exercising my creative freedom. Lately, I feel compelled to be more creative. I stayed awake until 7 am drawing one night recently. I haven't drawn in years. it was quite liberating to make my silly pictures, which I chose to draw on a brown paper bag to insure I was not taking myself too seriously. All the browsing in Ocean Grove made us thirsty, so we met up with Talulah for iced coffee and Italian pastries. Not to totally neglect all my duties at home, Mouse graciously helped me weed an overgrown bed in my garden. She'd win a gold if there was an Olympic medal for speed weeding. I'm more of a freestyle pruner myself. That out of the way, I was guiltfree to go back out for the evening. Parking directly in front of Fins in Bradley Beach on our way to a yummy crab taco dinner, we realized perhaps the summer people really had cleared out already. During dinner and later at the movies, we entertained ourselves with a little game of Local or Bennie. Basically, you observe people for a short time and guess if they are from around here or those that "go down the shore" for the summer. Of course, it would be wildy rude to ask people what zip code they call home, so most of our guesses were unsubstantiated. Except for that group that talked throughout most of the film Vanity Fair and then piled into a van outside the theater complaining they wanted to go home. Hope they had a good trip. I desperately wanted them to go home and stop interrupting my period drama revelry with their chatter, too.