Weekend

Our weekend was fun.

We got our gear for London ready Friday night. We got our clothes washed and folded just the way Andrew needs to get everything into our bags. He folds everything JUST SO, so that it doesn’t wrinkle, and then he puts everything into the bags JUST SO, so that everything fits. Miraculously, it somehow works. I don’t know how he does it. We each have everything we need for fifteen days packed into one medium-sized bag each.

We rose early Saturday morning and went over to pick up Andrew’s Dad and we all went to breakfast. We went back to Andrew’s parents’ house after breakfast, and Andrew and I did lawn work most of the day, getting everything ready for Saturday evening’s cookout.

The cookout was splendid because the weather was just about perfect. It wasn’t too hot and it wasn’t too humid and there was plenty of shade until the sun went down. It was delightful, actually, and I think everyone had a good time. The dog behaved himself.

This afternoon we visited the Nordic landscape exhibition at the Minneapolis Institute Of Arts. This was the only North American venue for the exhibition, which previously had been on view in Copenhagen, Helsinki, Oslo and Stockholm.

I did not think much of the exhibition, and neither did Andrew, and neither did Andrew’s parents. Only one major painter had a work in the exhibition, Edvard Munch, and all of us had seen much finer Munch paintings before, including in Hamburg, where we had seen the finest of the three versions of “Three Women On A Bridge”, the finest Munch painting I have ever seen.

This week is my final week of work at the bookstore. It was a pleasant job, and an easy job, and a job free from pressure, but it was not a real job—and it didn’t pay like a real job. I was happy to spend a year there, working thirty hours a week, but I never viewed it as anything other than a temporary position. It is time for me to enter the world of real employment, if only for a year. I look forward to working full-time at a real job during the next year.