The Gift(s): Part 2

[below is the continuation of a story begun on a friend's blog. If you'd like to pick up where I left off, post a comment with a link to your blog continuation of the story.]

"I dunno. What if he remembers?" She looked down at her hands.

"He won't."

She shrugged, "Well, I can't just let them go. Not without making sense of them."

He tilted his head forward and peered at her over the top of his glasses—a judging look. "Uh, yeah, that seems to be going so well."

An awkward silence drained away a few seconds, feeling like minutes.

Then her eyes narrowed, and the corners of her mouth turned up ever so slightly. "Actually, I think I have one figured out."

She pulled out the drawer of boxes, rapidly opening and closing the tiny boxes as she searched for the one she wanted. When she'd found it, she thrust the open box up under his nose. He stepped back so that he could actually see what was inside.

"A purple plastic dinosaur?"

"Yep." She smiled.

"So?"

"There was this time we went on a daylong road trip to see all the cheesy museums in a thirty mile radius. There was one filled with old sewing machines and another with moldy looking miners' clothes and pieces of fool's gold. It sounds boring, but we'd pop into a museum for twenty or thirty minutes—just long enough to take it in—then we would get back into the car and imagine what the people who owned the artifacts would think of their belongings rotting in a hokey small-town museum only visited by people passing through who needed to stretch their legs on the way to somewhere better. It was a great time."

Her eyes were unfocused, and she was smiling as she reminisced. He waved his hand in front of her face to bring her back to the present.

"And the dinosaur? Did you visit a museum of old dinosaur toys abandoned by children for generations?"

She punched him in the arm affectionately. "No. One of the gas stations was an old Sinclair station with a big cement dinosaur out front, but instead of being green, theirs was painted purple. I probably would have forgotten about it except when we got back in the car he pretended he was the dinosaur and lamented being stuck in the middle of nowhere painted an unnatural color. It was only a couple of seconds of insignificant joking."

"Maybe it wasn't so insignificant. Do you think he knew why it reminded him of you when he bought it? Or do you think he had no idea and bought it anyway?"

Hobby Adventure!!!

I like to define myself by my hobbies rather than what I do for a living (because what I do for a living isn't that interesting or meaningful to the world), but I think my hobbies are a bit too broad in scope.

I crochet. Well that's nice. What do I crochet? Originally, only rectangular things and only one stitch. This meant lots of scarfs and blankets. I branched out to hats using a cheater method called the "nifty knitter." This past summer/fall I learned a new stitch and began making hats on my own, and not just any hats but animals hats. Of course, animal hats aren't really that high in demand unless you know a lot of little kids. No, what I want to do now is protest crochet following in the spirit of these awesome protest knitters.

Also, I used to be primarily a baker, then I branched out into cooking, and I have lost the touch with some of my baking. It's time to reclaim the world of baking and perhaps emphasize savory things because I don't like sweets that much. Though my first desire is to bake something like what I ate for breakfast, which was sweet. It came from a local mexican bakery and looked like one of those McDonald's apple pie pastries in shape and had the same little breather gaps. However, it wasn't hard and crusty like the tiny apple pies. It was just about the flakiest pastry I have eaten and had a cream cheese filling. Taste-wise, it was like a cheese danish, but less sticky and more flakey. Absolutely amazing. I want to make those first.

Then I will focus more on useful pastries--things I can take for lunch. Little quiches, pot pies, a homemade hot pocket things, stromboli, etc. I better start getting better about stopping by the Y after work.