"it was a good day. i dunno. it was a good day."

today my friends anna grace and elizabeth claire made that treacherous trek all the way from salisbury just to visit me! such happy times were never had.

here they are! (with their orange sherbet, through a window, in case you were wondering.)

we spent the day downtown buying those sweet mary janes from sunnyside that are so very on sale and so very lovely. those being the two conditions i require for any purchase, i was quite happy. elizabeth wears a size five, and i can't even begin to explain how cute her feet were in her bright red pair. we practically forced her to buy a pair--in fact, anna and i bought them for her, simply because they made our eyes so happy to behold them on her adorable little feet that it didn't matter if she wanted them or not (which she did).

i lifeguarded at two, and i must say it was a most enjoyable day all around. i don't think i've ever actually enjoyed lifeguarding as much as i did today. i couldn't figure it out at first--why was i so happy?--but then i realized:

annie and quinn were there! that's why. little annie's a good soul. and she has my name, which automatically makes her a good soul of some sort in my mind, but she is actually a good soul in real life too. and quinn--well, there are two words which need to precede that boy's name each time it is written out or spoken or otherwise displayed: "dear" and "good".

Dear Good Quinn.

that's what i call him. he's seven years old and is just the best little thing. not many seven-year-old boys i know have earned the Dear Good prefix, so it's pretty exciting.

(look at his sweet hands.)

if some toddler drops his toy shark in the pool and can't get it, quinn will lumber up to the scene of the catastrophe, flop into the pool, and come bursting to the surface with a goofy grin--those two front teeth of his dwarfing the remainder of his chompers in the sweetest possible way--triumphantly clutching the helpless shark. as the toddler's mother thanks him, he lumbers off again, still smiling, without saying a word.

all the mothers love him, and so do i.

oh, but on a more depressing note, i found a dead rabbit in the filters today. a dead bunny. that's a first. i guess that's what i get for saving a frog. yeah, it was a real downer, to say the very very least. i'm a little bit scarred. a lotta bit scarred.

aaand on a happier note, i quite finished nicholas nickleby and it was quite wonderful. now i'm starting on jane austen's northanger abbey--and aaaah, it's so good. i love books. i love black ink forming letters forming words printed on sheets of paper bound together, preferrably penned by brilliantly witty minds before my great-grandmother was born.