I am really enjoying being with Amelia and Kevin. She is trying to entertain us, but I just like hanging around and doing ordinary things with her, watching the cat, and talking.

The breakfast here was really annoying--all styrofoam plates and plastic containers. I ate a small individual yogurt and an English muffin--dry because there was no peanut butter and I didn't want fake butter or jelly from an individual plastic container. The juice was horrible and watery. I shared Ray's styrofoam plate and didn't have any cereal and milk. I used one plastic spoon. We showered and dressed and tried to figure out what we would want for all day. It was almost half an hour to Amelia's.

We loved it. She has described it and I have seen pictures, but it is really great. A renovated tobacco pouch factory in the Golden Belt. The neighborhood is mixed, "the other side of the tracks," as she says. They have a little patio and Amelia is growing a few herbs and veggies. There are artist studios on site and they are trying to get a restaurant to move in near her. We walked over to where a new market is starting. She bought some interesting tea. We went to the scrap exchange, where you can buy all kinds of odd things, like styrofoam blocks. Or old test tubes.

We looked at knitting patterns and hung out. Kevin took his lunch break and we went back to the market to buy some sausage. The sausage truck said they were closing up, but we bought sausage from a meat vendor and brought it back to the apartment. Amelia had some really old butternut squash soup that she wanted to throw away and I said Ray would eat it. He ate half of it and I ate the rest--yummy with cloves, no dairy. I tried the sausage but it was too spicy for me. I ate the rest of the lentil salad we brought with us and what Amelia was having--leftover stir fry with rice. I heated mine in the greasy sausage pan.

Amelia and I drove about 20 minutes to Hillsborough, an old town near by, to the knitting shop. It was a great store and I bought some needles there. She bought one skein of sock yarn that was on sale, but she's not really supposed to buy anyting more, but use up what she has. We also went through a funny old hardware store with some of  everything, cluttered together. The town is really nice; we only saw a bit. Did I mention it was cold and rainy all day?

For supper, Amelia had made a delicious lentil and eggplant casserole, with mashed potatoes, like a vegetarian shepherd's pie. I was having some stomach pains though and ate mainly dry toast and tea. In a situation like that, I am so curious. Was it the butternut squash soup? Was it the sausage? What did I eat (or do) that made me sick? No one else was sick, so part of it is my delicate digestive system. We drove to Chapel Hill to see a play. The traffic was horrible, including 3 accidents, and construction. We barely made it in time, and all the parking meters had covers on them: No Parking. Amelia went in and asked and Ray waited with the car. "It should be all right tonight," they said. So our procrastination netted us a spot right in front of the theater. And we were in time.

The show started with old television commercials and photos from the late fifties and early sixties: Bosco, Rice Krispies, Esso, Ajax...there were live musicians, dressed in striped prison outfits and sitting in the remanants of a bus, at the back of the stage. The theater is almost in the round, with the stage in the middle, amphitheater-style, and we were up in back. It was an ensemble cast, with everyone playing different parts, black or white, male or female. This was a tad confusing at times, but I like it overall. Names I recognized: Stokely Carmichael and John Lewis. It was about the Freedom Riders and is called the Parchman Hour. Parchman was a prison in Misssippi where they spent 3 weeks. We saw violence portrayed: beatings, and a hunger strike, arguments among the riders. The time line was hard to follow.

CORE was an organization that came up with this plan. Send black and white northerners to test segregation, college students mainly, I think. They rode the buses, Greyhound and Amtrak, and sat in the white waiting rooms and used the white restrooms in pairs.

The Southern authorities blew up the bus in Anniston, Alabama, and they were arrested in Missippippi. But the prison was the background for the rest of the action, flashbacks, I guess. They sang a variety of songs. The actors were very good, especially some of them who could do accents. One young woman also played Bull Connor, police chief (?) in Birmingham, who arrested them and drove them out of the state. Anyway, I am sure we will hear more about this play. It was like watching the first draft of something very good, although it's really more like the sixth draft, I suspect. It just needs a little more polishing.

It was about 10:30 when we got back to her place. We had some homemade ice cream she had made: two choices, chocolate chocolate (very rich) or vanilla yogurt with ginger (what I had). Kevin had gingerbread beer. He has been testing all the seasonal Halloween beers. It's one of the things he likes best about Durham, is the large number of "craft breweries." Whatever.

So by the time we got back here it was almost midnight again. Slept pretty well, but my Mom was in my dream, eating crab cakes in a restaurant called Peekytoe (is that a kind of crab--not sure where I dredged that from), with my Dad and Ray and some people, supposedly from choir, but not anyone I know now that I'm awake. There was a woman with two sons...one sharing a giant plate of food with the rest of us...