Excellence.

My excellent friend arrived this afternoon.

We proceeded to eat and drink our way around the village, managing to hit a café, a tea room, a pub, and a tapas restaurant in the space of 4.5 hours, without even trying to get a diverse range of food into our systems.

From the pub, the seeing was most excellent:

We saw birds of many sorts, including a swan who intimidated another swan right out of the water (this one was the victor).

There were also birds on the wing, and I did my best to catch them.

My excellent friend valiantly kept herself (mostly) awake until about 9:30 p.m., when we collectively decided that it was bedtime.

As it is now for me, as well. Tomorrow, Adventures await.

Three things that happened to me today.

I hate to put something else above OK Go and the Muppets, since that video feels to me as though it sums up about 80% of my generational and aesthetic sensibility. For what that's worth.

But here:

Though I have lived in this country--and even this specific county--before, I find myself having a harder time adjusting to the difference in climate this time. Not that it's unwelcome--I would trade even rainy cool weather for the hot sweatiness I had everywhere this summer, any and every time. What I mean is that I can sense myself knee-jerking in ways that aren't appropriate to what's actually going to happen. When I got up this morning, it was so brilliantly sunny that I drew the curtains before snoozing. A sunny day! I thought. Two hours later, it was pouring. Not raining a little bit. Pouring. Oh no! A rainy day after all! I thought. Both of these judgments were just not right for this climate: in the southwest, as I would have imagined I'd know by now, any given day is likely to be both a sunny day and a rainy day. Sometimes at the same time. (You may remember that that was the case in Cambridge, too, but there we had much less rain during the first month of my residency.) And indeed, we vacillated between sun and rain for the rest of the day and on into the evening, leading to this lovely phenomenon:

A setting sun rainbow!

Finally: during the late afternoon's sunny spell, I ventured back to the organic and local hypermarket to shop the outdoors store's late-summer sale (scoring some cut-rate waterproof hiking boots!) and to acquire dinner:

Chances are good that this image will either repel you utterly or leave you salivating. I don't know whether it's possible to feel at all moderately about takeaway fish and chips. "With salt and vinegar?" said the man behind the counter.

Yes. Oh, yes.

And sometime very soon, I'm going back for squid and chips: takeaway dish of the more idiosyncratically inclined, perhaps. I suppose it's fortunate that this particular Shed of Fish offers a healthy grilled option. But I don't know whether that means I'll ever take that option.

Also, Beloit's 2011 Mindset List came out today.

What I've got.

I continue to marvel at the fact that the wisteria on some people's walls is still blooming. I think that the wisteria was all bloomed off by the end of May in Cambridge. I might just be mistaken, though.

If my neighbors have been trying to figure out who the new kid on the block is, they may have seen me dining room dancing to this song. But I don't think they care, at least for now, which is okay with me.

I have a washing machine in my kitchen, and it is also a dryer. This combination turns out to be space-saving but not much else good; it seems that it would take about three hours to dry my clothes (lightweight clothes, too--not jeans yet, for instance) in the same metal drum that just washed them. And so I suspect that I will be line- and rack-drying my clothing for the next year. Because I have been scoping out cultural happenings via Twitter feeds, I am tempted to write #TheMonasteryIsMoreHookedUpThanThis--but that's several kinds of wrong, since the monastery is far from technologically backward, and even having a washing machine in the house is something a person without a car and in a town where laundromats have not yet made themselves visible should remember to be happy about. (But seriously: putting a washer and a dryer together as one unit seems to me a strange choice. I'm happy to be corrected about its brilliance and/or efficacy, however.)

The one conversation I had today was with the man whom I paid for my living room's new tiny end table and 1938 copy of Dorothy Sayers's Gaudy Night at the three-story antique mall on the waterfront. "You have a table and a book," he said. "It seems to me the perfect combination," I replied. "Quite," he said.

Which is another way of saying that it was a lovely and quiet day.