Today at Logos

When I arrived at the store today, there was a homeless guy sitting and talking with Sandy.  From the sound of his voice and the look on her face, I assumed he had been there a long time and she was desperate to get away.  As soon as I got in, she told him she had to leave and waved goodbye as she walked out the door.

He continued talking, seemingly uaware that his audience had changed.  I guess I wasn't as receptive, though, because he didn't stay long.

However, as he talked, I got increasing worried about the bottle of yellow liquid sitting on the desk and worried, given his obvious homeless state and all his earthly possessions in a shopping cart outside, if maybe it was a bottle of urine.

Fortunately he eventually took a sip out of it.

It was such a quiet day that I almost didn't feel guilty reading my Kindle instead of a real book, as I usually do.  I was finishing the 3rd in a series of Harlan Coben books and was really into the series.  I finished book 1 on Tuesday, read all of book 2 on Wednesday and finished book 3 while working at the store.  Walt said they must be short books, but they are all over 300 pages, so not very!  But they were written with a young adult audience in mind and so perhaps easier reading. Also, wanting to get all the answers, which only came at the end of book 3 kept me reading faster and faster.

It was nearly an hour before my first customer came in, a very tall, very thin woman with a sinewy build, ropy veins in her neck, a Prince Valiant type hair cut and wire rimmed glasses. She looked like John Denver might have looked had he lived that long. She wandered around for awhile and then left.

A UC Davis guy came in.  I know he was a UC Davis guy because he had "UC Davis" writ large down one leg of his sweat pants and the bag he carried had UC Davis written on it.  I could see a blue glass beaded necklace under his t-shirt. He got down on his knees to look through books and finally bought "Pathoophysiology of Disease."  He saw me staring at the title (I wanted to remember it to add here) and he said.  "Doctor.  I'm a doctor."

A guy who reminded me of Raj from Big Bang Theory was wearing a t-shirt with "INDUSTRIAL" on it.  I couldn't read the smaller print, but "INDUSTRIAL" leaped out at you  He had earbuds in his ears and was carrying a cell phone  He spent a lot of time going through the show biz section and bought a book on film making and another book about Monet.

A guy I described as "younger middle-aged" came in, dressed like a business man going for a golf game, in neat khaki pants and a navy blue polo shirt.  He looked around for awhile, stopping to look through "Knives 2005), then asked if we had children's books.  He looked around the kids' room for awhile and asked how the prices compared with new books.  He finally left without buying anything, but saying he should come back with his kids.

A woman brought a donation of a book called "Manhattan Transfer" which wasn't about either the music group or the sale by the Indians but about New York in the 1920s.

A tall white curly haired man with a white beard was entering when I went into the back room to unload the 3 bags of books Walt and I had brought in, but he was gone by the time I came out again.

An unlikely looking fellow in shorts with a beard was looking for romance novels.  He didn't find any in the store, but found one outside, with a big bare-chested picture of Fabio on the cover (has Fabio ever been photographed without a bare chest?) 

My friend arrived at 4:10 and bought a math book and a guide to the Musee D'Orsay.  He asked what I was reading and by then I had finished Harlan Coben and was into "Still Alice," the book about a woman with Alzheimers.  It is much better than the movie because it goes ito her thoughts, which you don't get in the movie.  So very familiar, so much of it!

A tall guy with a baseball cap perched on top of his head, not pulled down like most caps wore blue jeans with suspenders over an orange shirt.  He had 2 bargain books and looked thoroughly thru the craft books, but ended up buying the two bargain books, $2, for which he paid with a $100 bill..  I tested the bill with our counterfeit-detector, but it appeared to be legit.  Giving him change took most of the paper money in the cash register.

A woman came in just to look at our cards by local artist Sandy Granet but didn't buy one and left quickly.

My biggest sale of the day was to a woman who bought 8 bargain books, a book of photographs, and 5 children's books, for a total of $34.04.

The last people in the store before Peter arrived were a nice looking young couple.  He had a camera over his shoulder and she wore a tiny backpack with a stuffed panda hanging from it.  He bought a book of poetry.

We were going to see Cyrano de Bergerac tonight and would have to leave fairly soon after I got home so Walt, bless him, ordered Chinese food from the restaurant near Logos and picked it up as we were on our way to the car.  It was delicious and there is enough left over to have for dinner before tonight's show, Bells are Ringing.