Along with usual stuff, my wife and I tracked down the Cousins Maine Lobster food truck; it moves around, and we managed to run it down at a gas station turned to a unusually well-stocked wine shop (?). The truck drew a big crowd, a beer vender, a cookie dough truck besides the lobster roll truck, and a musician (no comment on that). My wife has a mobility problem, though she gets around in a determined way. I stood in line and she ventured around at the store and various stands. It took about 40 minutes and about 40 bucks to get two jumbo lobster rolls. She dearly misses these from her years on Long Island, so it was easily worth the wait, and frankly they were the best lobster rolls I've ever had, incredibly fresh. This Sunday morning, we went to church and then to the annual congregational meeting (not too exciting but astonishingly well-run and brief) and we picked up three potted plants at the benefit plant sale. Then we spent the better part of an hour winding our way through police blockades all over the downtown trying to get to our artisanal baker. The city had permitted a poorly planned (from a public traffic point of view) Ironman bicycle race. Basically if you weren't in the race or a spectator, you couldn't use any streets in the center of the city from early morning until late into the afternoon. I cussed colorfully for a while, but finally relaxed into batter and sarcasm for the shoddy planning. The 5K and 10K races used to be scheduled so they ran in the cool of the morning and were all relaxing at the finish line by about 9 a.m. This was catastrophic --forget retail, restaurants, museums, or anything else in the city, except this race. I'm all for Ironman, just not at the expense of 40 or 50,000 other people's plan for the day. Oh well, we finally made it to the baker (which was totally empty). Maybe I'll vent to some city official on the bad planning. I got the plants home and unloaded and gave them all a deep drink of water to get them going.
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