This post brought to you by Perkins

This morning, Amy, Will and I found ourselves in Alexandria without coffee. To remedy this, Amy and I went to Perkins, the restaurant sponsor of Team Echinacea (Will did not come because he was too busy — he had to get a haircut). We actually quite enjoyed the food at Perkins (also known as the restaurant equivalent of a farkle), but our visit was truly noteworthy because we sat a couple of tables over from our favorite cashier who works at Cub Grocery. We were too shy to actually talk to him, but we had fun talking about what we would have talked about with him if we weren’t so shy. From there, we went to Goodwill. There, Amy bought a pepper grinder, and I bought some tape cassettes that sounded like they were recorded inside the engine of a moving car. We also visited Alex High School and watched what we thought at first was a football game, but was actually turned out to only be a practice. The afternoon was mainly spent in abject sadness because Will did not come to Town Hall to play Settlers of Catan with us. For dinner, Amy and I ate some roasted vegetables over coos coos, while talking about death, and some other things. To deal with this anxiety over our own mortality, we ate ice cream and watched Arrested Development clips. On and on, sun rise and sun set, ad infinitum.

Today was our last true weekend-day of the summer — we’re going to do a full day of work tomorrow so we can get ahead on our list of things to do for the week. The living up here has been good — there is something very calming and freeing about days off in Kensington. Soon we will be in Chicago, a place as frantic and stimulating as Kensington is simple and charming. But for the time being, we have plenty of things to do here.