Back from the beyond...

or at least Stillwater (local tourista town with many bookstores and antique stores). Jana and I went off to spend 2 days at a very nice (and terribly cluttered) B&B called "The Elephant Walk" by way of celebrating our 15th anniversary together. The B&B owners spend a lot of time traveling in Asia, mostly Thailand and Vietnam and they're big collectors so every square inch is covered in something from SE Asia. It's lovely and the breakfasts were quite spectacular. They were also quite smitten by the notion of having an actual book artist and conservator staying with them and Jana got to do one of her series of morning lectures (the other one involves the LDS and leaving the LDS - for some reason, sooner or later, someone always brings up the Mormons at breakfast). Once the series starts up, I'm just the other one with the credit card. :-) Unless they're book artists in which case, they're weirdly fascinated by IT.

Apart from that, there was a whirlpool tub and it was all very, very relaxing. :-)

Bopping around downtown Stillwater was pretty sad though. We hadn't been back there for about a year, due to lack of time and chronic allergies to anything related to Michele Bachman, so this was all new to us. Several bookstores have closed due to the high rents brought on by some colossally poor urban planning and the ongoing economic fun. Kmitsch Girls/Heart of Tibet is now closed, which is a huge loss; we loved shopping there. A number of the antique stores appeared to be closed or were closing. We did check out Books on Chestnut (a new antiquarian bookstore), St .Croix Antiquarian Booksellers and Valley Booksellers (the bookstore that sells new books), a few antique shops and the tea room on Main Street as well as Marx, which we thought was good if a tad overrated. The book haul included: A Lady of Quality by Georgette Heyer, Our Admirable Betty and The Broad Highway by Jeffrey Farnol, Haunted Women edited by Alfred Bendixen, Oriental Ghost Stories by Lafcadio Hearn, Not Much Fun: The Lost Poems of Dorothy Parker edited by Stuart Silverstein and Paddy Whacked: The Untold Story of the Irish American Gangster by T.J. English. Viewing the last as a species of family history since my great-grandfather apparently had "connections" when he and my great-grandmother arrived in NYC from Ireland. All in all, a pretty good anniversary.

Now off to go finish pulling the last of the grant proposal together. Not to mention cleanup seeing as the cat threw up on everything in our absence.