As of last Thursday, we have a couch. This is a particularly good thing since random bouts of insomnia have caused both me and my hubby to sleep on it at least one each of the past five nights…

 

Also by way of update, we made a quick road trip to Columbia on Saturday. I’ve always liked Columbia, although I’m not sure I’d ever live there. Moving to South Carolina is a mistake an individual should only make one time in his life, and my time was in 1986…

All the same, though, it’s a picturesque sort of place, what with the 1920s neighborhoods around Five Points and the magical place known as Knox Abbott Drive across the river in Cayce, with its long-forgotten fast food and motel prototypes. Note the picture above, which was a Hardee’s design from the mid-1960s. There weren’t very many of them, but my hometown had one which has since been demolished. Columbia’s still exists. And I’m apparently still one of only two or three people in the world who remember when Hardee’s outlets looked like this…

Or maybe not. I just checked, and there’s finally a picture of one of the damned things on the history page of the Hardee’s website…

It was extra fun, though, that we managed to schedule our trip to coincide with the most intense thunderstorm in recent history, one which even managed to shut down the local paper. We got trapped in a Kroger store watching as some brave souls actually tried to enter their cars despite the fact that the water level in their parking spaces was above the floor board of their cars…

Fun Saturday, all in all, and I enjoyed test driving the new Oldsmobile…

Other random stuff:

• In case you’re bored today: try this or this or even this. Sorry about slipping in that last one, but there are only eight shopping days left…
• Congrats to Sister Betty and all your stairways, by the way. As a fellow Best of the Bay winner (1998), I welcome you to the club, and note with amusement that you don’t live there anymore either…