Summer has arrived....

.... and we have been going to the Kemah boardwalk for brunch. If we get there around 11:00, we can easily find parking. By the time we're ready to leave the restaurant parking lots, cars are circling like vultures, waiting to slip into a vacant space.

Since the Crab House closed (and changed to the mega-expensive Chart House), we've been eating at Landry's, right next door (a dozen restaurants there to choose from). Basically the same menu, more or less, just different sauces offered for the seafood dishes. Landry's has a great seafood salad on their menu (as did the Crab House)..... lots of different greens topped with fresh crab, salmon and shrimp. "The big salad," as Elaine on Seinfeld would say. Wherever we go, as long as they have a large dinner salad on the menu, I'm perfectly content.

Lots of boats out on the water today. And for all the boats on the water, there are three times as many back at the marina, just parked in the slips. Can people afford to buy those boats and just let them sit there looking pretty? Or maybe they can afford the boats, but not afford the fuel and the insurance.


I found a new "toy" on my computer this weekend..... it's a web-site that translates English into other languages-- French being one of them, and that was my intention. I can now type into the computer what I want to write to the war-time friend of my dad, then the computer translates everything into French for me. I have to sit here and copy it out, because I don't intend to send that man a computer-printed letter. That just wouldn't do, especially since his letters to me are beautifully written on pristine note paper.

While I was in Barnes & Noble yesterday, I splurged on a box of very fine Italian-made writing paper. Not many pages and envelopes in the box, but enough for ten letters. I used my best and favorite ballpoint pen, the same pen that daddy gave me for my 16th birthday. This pen has been with me all these years, and I have to get refills directly from the Sheaffer Company because the refills aren't available locally.

I told my husband that I am going to splurge on a fountain pen. Real ink, although I'm sure the ink will be in cartridges. When I was in grade school, we weren't allowed to use ballpoint pens--- only fountain pens, or the nuns would give us a "zero" for the entire assignment. It felt like a freedom of sorts when I went into high school and was able to buy a package of Bic pens for schoolwork. Now I hate those Bic pens.... I use them for grocery lists and check-writing only. Greeting cards, letters, journals... "important" writing gets my Sweet 16th birthday pen.

In Barnes & Noble, I found two additional books for my dad's friend in France: one book of photographs from the 1940s war years, another photo-essay book of New York City. Last week at Half Price Books, I bought a book on Texas and a book on the United States-- all four are photo-essay books, and they all fit into the International Priority box that I got at the post office. I would like to be a little fly on the wall when this box of beautiful books arrives in France next week.

I had planned on buying my dad a book about France, but he's very frustrated with his eyesight right now. He can no longer see out of his left eye, and his right eye gets tired very easily (from doing the work of both eyes, I would imagine). He told me that any sort of reading gives him a headache and makes his eyes fill up with tears. "It's hell getting old," he told me. I told him that the alternative wasn't exactly a good prospect either.