In The Secret Garden

Spent the morning doing this week's library volunteering. I organized M through 0 in the picture book section...and boy, did it NEED it! A lot of things were rearranged, put in order, and put back in the sections where they belong. The children's picture book section at the Haddon Township Library isn't large, but it's a good size, and it took a while to get everything done.

On the way home, I stopped really quick to buy bread flour and tea. I went to Dollar Tree to see if they had any Tupperware to put the bread flour in, but left quickly. There were a bunch of kids just outside the entrance to the store shooting each other with Silly String. I don't know why they couldn't have taken it someplace where there was less people, not to mention somewhere that wasn't public property.

I spent the rest of the afternoon raking the front yard. My landlady Eleanor is elderly, and she just had surgery on her knees not long ago and can't move around as well as she used to. I don't mind helping her rake at all, and not just because I earn $10 an hour. With so many trees and shrubs around, the front yard can often end up being something of a mess. It's really my yard, too, and I want it to look nice as much as she does. One of her grandson's picked up large sticks and branches, and I dumped as many leaves as I could on the curb to be picked up this week.

I spent the rest of the evening baking Victorian Milk Bread and watching The Goonies. The Goonies is one of the most famous movies of the 80s, the tale of a group of Oregon teenagers who search for a pirate's treasure in order to save their homes from developers. One of the things I realized when I watched tonight is how realistic the kids act, around adults and each other. I found myself shaking my head several times as I was reminded of how my sisters and I behaved at this age...and yeah, it wasn't THAT different from these kids.

My sisters and I loved The Goonies. The plot seemed just slightly more plausible for us than for other kids because, like the title characters, we lived by the beach, in a historic small town where kids were told pirate stories the way other kids were told fairy tales. My sisters, our friends, and I spent years digging for treasure - our favorite place was under the porch of the cottage on Maryland Avenue in Cape May before it was sealed over. We never found anything besides a rock with initials, but that didn't stop us from trying!

Oh, and though Lauren and I did finish the actual Monkees role-play story tonight, don't expect to see the tag or any stories, including next month's main one, any time soon. I'll post everything but the tag for this story within the next few days, but Lauren is very busy moving and finishing her college class this week, and then she'll be without Internet access the week after.