Of a dagger and jewelry and a lot of good eating

I would just like to make an announcement: my sister is back in the state! HURRAY!

So yesterday my family and Kay and I all trotted to Albuquerque to retrieve her from the airport. It was a lateish flight, so we were forced to go down early and play. We had some leftovers before we went...and had a 3:00 second lunch (tomato bisque and rolls on a patio)...and toured Old Town and had 5:00 ice cream (mocha fudge and raspberry sorbet)... and shopped a bit more and met my parents for 7:30 dinner (salad and French onion soup with a raging rainstorm outside)... and shopped a bit more and retrieved the sister, and then, strangely enough, over to IHOP for sustenance and talk.

We had taken, as a mission (because shopping is always more amusing with a mission, however insignificant) my two watches with dead batteries, and it was our intent to hit every jewelry store in Old Town till we found one that could put them into working order again. We parked and went into the store right there. The salespeople were really anxious to help, but didn't sell batteries, but we should try Naranjo's three buildings down. We tried Naranjo's. It was one of those century-old buildings with uneven floors and the smell of having been in a time warp for the last few decades. A little old lady took my watches into the back room, and perhaps fifteen long quiet minutes later came back. Hurray! It's not that I couldn't just buy a new brown watch--it would have been only a bit more expensive, and a lot faster, since one of them had been out for several months--but it's nice, I think, to have things that aren't completely disposable. Besides, Grandma gave me one of them and I'm attached to it.

So we'd completed our mission on the second try, and just touristed for the rest of the afternoon. :-) The old church dominated the plaza, with thick adobe walls painted inside and a lovely gardeny garden out front. Old Town was full of beautiful jewelry. We admired the turquoise and the amethysts, the lapis and the Nantucket-blue stones from the Dominican Republic that were named something I'd never heard of before. We looked at the sidewalk vendors and expensive Mati place and random semi-upscale tourist shops. We like jewelry.

The salespeople were a perpetual source of amusement. One artsy lady in an artsy store said how much she liked my necklace (hot pink wooden beads). I didn't tell her it was $7.50 from a teenager store--though possibly she was buttering me up because I was a customer. There was another clerk who talked interminably to his buddy about local boxing. And then there was the young guy who spent a long time showing us amber, and I did finally buy some earrings from him. I'd been wanting amber earrings for quite a while. I think they, and the ice cream and batteries, were our only purchases in Old Town.

We finally did get the sister home. It's so good to have her back. She showed us what she got in Morocco, and we had some little presents we'd gotten for her because we missed her, and a cheerful time was had by all.

She brought me a dagger, an antique silver-worked something-or-other hard-bargained from the medina, with a curl to the blade and a Five Nails of Fatima design on the sheath. HAPPINESS!