I wanted to find a specific book to look at, (if not to buy) - Robert Alter's, The Hebrew Bible, A Translation and Commentary, 3 vols., and I don't think Ellen had a specific goal. We got a late start - after noon - so our first stop was lunch at the Black Bear Diner. Ellen got an open face turkey and gravy sandwich which was way too much food. Max got chicken nuggets (no surprise there), Paul got a turkey club and I got the 1/2 sandwich-and-soup special - turkey sandwich and chicken noodle soup. I guess you could say it was a fowl lunch! The Black Bear was just your basic American Diner, but with a bear motif in the art work, which was all over the place. After lunch we went to Barnes and Noble. They had a big Bible section, but no Alter. I asked, and they said that "because it costs $120 for the 3-volume set, they don't stock it - they have to order it." But actually, I think it is more because the whole Bible section is oriented toward Evangelical Christian bible translations, and Alter is decidedly not that.* So I didn't get to hold it and look at it. Ellen made the only purchase - she actually found an Ann Tyler novel which she had not read yet.
Paul and Max looked around Barnes and Noble, but Max was mainly interested in getting to the game store which was in the same mall, a bit farther down. The game he was interested in was Fallout: New Vegas "which is a post-apocalyptic role-playing video game and is set in a region consisting of parts of Nevada, California and Arizona, in a world that deviated onto an alternate timeline thanks to atomic age technology, which eventually led to its devastation by a nuclear apocalypse in the year 2077 in an event referred to as "The Great War". This war was caused by a major international conflict between the United States and China over natural resources. The main story of New Vegas takes place in the year 2281." Got that?
I went to the game store just to see what it was like (I have never been in a video game store!), but my eye was drawn not to games but to a display of Funko figures, and that's because my grand nephew, Ryan McQuen, works for the company that makes them out in Washington, and I had never seen one. (I'm totally ignorant of pop culture). I guess they are very popular.
After that we went to Best Buy for the TV. I stayed in the truck and chilled. Paul bought a 55'' smart TV which he got for a great price and he will install it tomorrow. That will be exciting. I guess "smart" means it has a built-in computer and when hooked into the internet, you can just tell it what you want and it finds it. But we'll know more tomorrow.
When we got back, Ellen made sloppy-joes (Yum!); we watched a recording of today's U.S. women's soccer game with England (which the U.S. team won, 2-1, and which had quite a few twists and turns in it. That puts the U.S. team into the final next Sunday against either Netherlands or Sweden - for the World Cup). And after that we played Scrabble.
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| The Black Bear Diner |
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| Bear art |
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| Funko figures |
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| Playing Scrabble with Max is a matter of life or death! |
*Robert Alter is a highly regarded Hebrew scholar at UCLA whose work I am familiar with and who has been working single-handedly on a translation of the complete Hebrew Bible for decades. His goal has been both complete faithfulness to the Hebrew text and graceful English. He has published various sections over the years, but just published the entire Hebrew Bible as a 3-volume work. Recent reviews of this work have been highly positive. I suspect I will eventually own it, but I would like to examine it first. Maybe at a library.
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