day trip

J. and I spent most of Friday and Saturday with his family. We went down into Vancouver today, and we made several stops, mostly along Broadway. Mine was supposed to be at "Three Bags Full," which was having a sale. It must have been an awesome sale because we got there and the line was out the door and down the street a ways (I've gotta wonder if they were selling Malabrigo half-price or something crazy like that). A guy half-way down the line said he'd been waiting for about an hour, and since none of the family really wanted to wait two hours for me to get in, we left. If it had just been J. and me, I would've done it, but it wasn't really fair to ask them to wait. I'll have to check out the store another time, when they aren't having a sale. Or, the next time they have a sale, I'll get there early.

So we left and got lunch instead. Then we went to a tea place, as my SIL wanted to stop there. That was fun. I got a couple new teas to try, and J. and I shared a pot of their Earl Grey. It was beautifully understated. There was enough bergamot flavouring to make it a proper Earl Grey, but not so much that it obscured the taste of the tea leaves (one of my biggest complaints about cheap Earl Greys).

We went to a music store so my MIL could look at harps, and I ran across a book I've been keeping an eye out for. Rise Up Singing is a collection of lyrics and chords for over a thousand songs. I know quite a few of them, but I often forget the lyrics. With this, I can have a reference for the lyrics, and I can work on learning to play chords properly on my mandolin. I kept trying to follow J. around the store with my head buried in this book, humming along with different songs. I ran into a couple of people doing that.

And I fell asleep in the car on the way home.