Mama Mia

My 76-year-old mother has recently discovered ABBA, nearly thirty years after most of the world did, and she’s become a little obsessed with them. I find this absolutely adorable, and I apologize if that sounds condescending. It’s not meant that way.

It’s a testament to the power of iTunes, I guess. I put one or two ABBA songs on her new Mac Mini several months ago. I have my suspicions that she initially latched onto the Swedish superstars because she didn’t know how to sort any way other than alphabetically (the default), nor had she quite clued into the whole “party shuffle” thing. Thus, they’ve always been at the top of the page whenever she opened the program, sort of like AAAAA-1 Plumbing in the Yellow Pages.

My mom actually bought ABBA – Gold. At full price. She usually shops in the $1.99 CD bin, and winds up with things like the Flamenco guitar version of the entire Burt Bacharach catalogue.

Today at lunch, a Blondie song came on. She asked if it was ABBA. I told her it wasn’t, and then wondered for a moment how a Blondie compilation might change her life. Blondie starts with a “b”, so it would be pretty easy for her to find in iTunes, right?

Either way, I think it’s just about time for her to see The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert. Or maybe just Mamma Mia.

I’m Still Melting

It’s 11:00 at night, and it’s still 90° outside.

I’m Melting

Notice how their layout doesn’t even allow for the possibility of three-digit temperatures? That’s because weather this hot is just wrong.

Endangered Durham

Endangered Durham is the kind of website I live for: the author is trying to document pretty much every piece of property in downtown Durham, over time and with vintage and current photos. This is the sort of obsessive mission the web is supposed to be all about, dang it.

Early Birthday

I had my birthday six days early on Saturday night, since Mark will be in The City of Doom on Friday. I got a tripod, and some really good books, a Wait Till Your Father Gets Home DVD (or four), a cool set of fake plastic food, and a Pizza Elmo, which is one of my favorite Elmos so far.

Sunday being the hottest day of the year so far, we had also managed to plan a road trip to the hottest part of the state: the greater Rockingham-Hamlet-Laurinburg metropolitan area. That whole chunk of the state from Fayetteville south is so incredibly bleak and depressing. Rockingham and Hamlet remind me of Pixley and Los Banos in California, the former being a place where all hope seems to have vanished and the latter apparently exisiting only as a highway stopover and home to the area’s obligatory Wal-Mart Supercenter.

At least there’s a Piggly Wiggly in Hamlet, but it’s closed on Sunday. We had to visit the Food King instead. It’s a cool store, and it used to be a Piggly Wiggly (and before that, an A&P) but I was a little disturbed to note the mold growing on one of the cakes they had displayed. I was even more disturbed that the cashier didn’t really seem to care when I mentioned it to her.

We circled back through Charlotte, which is not really on the way unless you drive the way we do, and visited some friends and passed out tomatoes. We have lots of tomoatoes.

All in all, it was a good weekend.