Today was an eventful day.

Dad and I left before 10 a.m. to work at the Paige House, to get it ready for sale - sweeping, cleaning, throwing a lot of junk away and deciding what junk we wanted to keep, that sort of thing. We had lunch at Wilson's Restaurant, a place that's old-fashioned and down-home, but unlike most old-fashioned and down-home places, Wilson's is just that way naturally, without even trying to lure tourists or anything. It's on a state highway between one small town and another, right next to a hunting/sporting goods store.

After we got back from our last dump run, we found Gretchen there waiting for us. She had got bored and called my home and my mom told her where I was, so she came over to say hi. I did a little more sweeping while talking with her, and I gave her a little tour of the place, then we went off and sat on the stone benches around the old, overgrown fishpond for a bit in the shade. I tried to apologize to dad for slacking off, but he didn't care. He asked us to drive for a bit until my cell phone found a signal so I could call mom and let her know we'd be home in an hour or two. We decided to go to South Royalton because I had seen in the paper that there was a new band shell on the town common and I wanted to see it. And when we got there, we didn't find a cell phone signal, but there wasn't just a new band shell on the common - there was a carnival too. A Ferris Wheel, a big inflated slide-type thing, chickens being grilled by the dozen, a fried dough stand, and so on. We didn't really do anything there, just walked around a bit and reminisced about how everything looked smaller than it did when we were younger.

But at the carnival we ran into the father of Amanda, who had been Gretchen's roommate this past year in college. He told us that she and and her boyfriend Dan were around there somewhere, so we went looking and eventually found them and hung out a bit. We went to Amanda's house which was right by the common and met her younger brother (who has the same name as one of my cats) and I called Mom from there. But we left before too long because I didn't want to keep my dad waiting.

Just a mile or so outside SoRo we passed Katie, a friend of ours who was in Gretchen's class in high school. Gretchen had tried and failed to call her earlier today, so when she saw her going the other direction we turned around and tried to find her. We hoped she would have stopped when she saw us, and when that failed we guessed she might have been going to the carnival, but we didn't notice her there either. So we set off again - but when we were driving through Royalton, I saw a guy on a ride-on lawnmower going down the road, and it was none other than Colby, from Tae Kwon Do! (Gretchen found it funny how I shouted "Colby!" out of the blue as she was driving along.) So we turned around and I ran after him for a little ways until he noticed that I wanted his attention, and we talked briefly, just saying hi and catching up and stuff.

And finally we made it back to the Paige House. Luckily, my dad had only been waiting around for twenty minutes or so. Then we stopped by Lilliesville, the old neighborhood where the house we used to live in was, and I went to see if the blackberry and raspberry bushes were in bloom yet (they weren't) and I hiked up the hill before we came back here to Middlebury.