Recent Musings

1. Wheat Pennies are pretty cool. I got a Wheat Penny back in change at Walmart the other day and got a little unnecessarily excited :) If an image of said coin doesn't spring immediately to mind, no worries! I just happen to have a picture of the one I got most recently, which I have included for your benefit :) Granted, it's supposed to have more detail - the detail on mine's been rubbed off. Just look for an image on Google. I'm not a serious coin-collector, but I have to admit, I think wheat pennies are pretty cool-looking, so I've started taking them out of circulation when they pass my way :) This most recent one was more exciting than the others I have because it's the oldest one I've found so far: 1917. They started minting the wheat penny in 1909 and then changed the wheat design to the Lincoln Memorial image in 1959. The 1950's don't seem that long ago, but 1917! That's the year we entered World War I! That's before Prohibition and The Roaring Twenties. Before the Great Depression! That penny has been around for a lot of stuff! Okay, enough from the history geek.
2. Laptop keyboards are incomprehensibly difficult to type on. This observation comes on the heels of the purchase of my new computer a couple of days ago. A laptop, to be exact. My old computer crashed during a scan last week and then continued to crash about every thirty minutes after that. That could be a slight exaggeration (I am my father's daughter :) ), but whatever it was, it was extremely inconvenient. So I am now happily tapping away on a small, shallow laptop keyboard and loving every minute. Correcting a lot of typos in the process, but loving every minute!
3. I am strangely amused by the fact that during the summer, hot water comes out of the cold-water tap (coming from the warm pipes in the ground outside) and cold water comes out of the hot-water tap (coming from the cool pipes between the faucet and the water heater)? Maybe this comes from hanging out with fourth-graders all week. I've been doing VBS and we have been entertaining them with cheesy illustrations like making raisins float in Sprite. They thought it was cool. (A related thought: Despite the fact that our curriculum is really good, there have been times when I have stopped reading in amazement and thought, "Really???" Like when they said that the bubbles that make the raisins float "are like convicions," making you "rise to the top" of a situation. Really??? Sounds like the stuff that got added into my English papers when I tried to write them after 2am!)
4. Does anyone else feel like there's always either nothing happening or everything happening? My computer gives up the ghost right as I start working VBS which runs into the family reunion which falls over Fathers' Day...

Farmers' Market

I went to the Historic Longview Farmers' Market this morning! They just started holding it this year, and I've been wanting to go ever since it opened in May. Actually, before then, even. Chef David from The Cook's Nook helped organize it and get it going, so he has been talking it up for a while. (There were a couple of months in which we got a lot of fun calls from farmers with great East Texas accents at the store :) ).

Wait, it's "historic" but it just opened this year?, you ask? I know, it confused me, too, at first. Notice the position of the adjective "historic." It's describing Longview. Because it's in the old downtown ("historic") area of Longview. Aha!

Anyway. I was finally in town on a Saturday, so I took the opportunity to get some fresh produce.

Loved it! I bought some sort of Italian green beans (which I'm not sure how to cook at the moment), tomatoes, onions, blackberries, and a huge, fragrant bunch of basil. I loved the farmer who was selling the basil. When I asked for a bunch, he pulled one out of the bucket and held it up to his face, took a deep breath into the leaves, and said, "I love it!" :) It did smell so good.

In case you're interested in finding a farmers' market near you, check out this great website I found, localharvet.org! Obviously, it isn't an exhaustive list, but it's pretty thorough.