Shopping and lunch

Yesterday we were still a little shell-shocked with the latest results of Joan's CT scan. We went and did a shop, looking for something that Joan may be able to eat. Bought some fillet steak and she will prepare it with some Portabello mushrooms we have growing in the shed. We know she can eat the mushrooms. I bought some Blue Swimmer Crabs locally known as 'Blue Mannas'. Maybe a fresh bread and crab meat sandwich will appeal to her....it certainly will appeal to me.

The young part-time checkout girl
perfunctorily inquires "How are you?'
Not really expecting a negative reply
and not really even caring how the customer is
managing in this fight with the monster

The customer replies 'good thankyou',
conditioned to the niceties of convention
when what is really needed
is a raging protest about the unfairness of it all.

For lunch we went to Cockburn Central about 10 kilometres from here. The food was OK and Joan was able to select her small meal from a Chinese self serve stall. I went for Indian and although it looked good, was just! On the way out Joan bought Peter Carey's latest blockbuster, Parrot and Olivier in America knocked down from $49.95 to $19.95.

I am re-reading for the third time, Jack Finney's Time and Again, a wonderfully plausible time travel adventure returning to New York in the 1880s. We have had two copies of this book lost or swiped and don't want to lose this one. Some time in the 1980s I made that fact clearly on a label I pasted inside the cover.