It didn't even smell right for a used bookstore. I just don't know what.

[mrissa]

I do not, I do not, I do not understand Stillwater.

There is a thing that happens there, where I turn up, and there are obscure books about things I want to know about. Sometimes things I didn't know I wanted to know about. This time I brought home ten of them. Ten! One is The Renaissance of the Goths in Sixteenth-Century Sweden, which is a thing it would make sense I would want. One is George I, The Baltic, and the Whig Split. One is a biography of an Inupiaq woman. One is called East Norway and Its Frontier, which makes me giggle, because I think East Norway might be like West Richfield, where hypatia_j lives. (Sorry, obscure Scandosotan joke, emphasis on the -sotan.)

So: why Stillwater? Why? What is it that makes Stillwater attract a monograph about the alliance between the House of Stuart and the House of Orange and its negative effects on the Dutch people just when markgritter is going to be walking into that little shop?

The thing that blows my mind is that I swear to you that the last time this happened to me, it was a different shop. Aunt Ellen and Uncle Phil waited downstairs while I stalked around the second floor of a shop that isn't there any more, I can't even tell where it was, but it was two stories. And this one was tiny--Aunt Ellen and Uncle Phil and I would have had to decide what order we were going into it in and preserved that order throughout--and had brand new Wodehouse and Fraser by the counter. So it's not the shop. It's Stillwater.

I am confused. But embookened. So there is that. Oh indeed, there is certainly that.