A good morning for books. And strudel. And discount-store groceries.

We had a fun Saturday morning shopping around.

First stop was an estate sale with a lot of vintage books; the late owner of the house had been a French teacher and her collection went way back, maybe to her own school days. I picked up a few books just for interest, mostly vintage school editions:

Corneille: Le Cid (Hachette's French Classics)

Beaumarchais: Le Barbier de Seville

Daudet: Lettres de mon Moulin (Siepmann's French Texts)

Les 100 Plus Belles Chansons (a school songbook from the 1940's)

Notre Histoire, by Brown, Harman, and Jeanneret, translated by Charles Bilodeau. This is a real treasure: a French translation of George Brown's Story of Canada, which is an out-of-print textbook that some Canadian CM homeschoolers like to use. (Ponytails will be using our copy this year.) I didn't know a French version existed (I can find no mention of it online), and I'm not sure yet what I'm going to do with it. I know a couple of bilingual CM mammas who might like to have it.

There were some books in English, too:

The Heart of Midlothian, by Sir Walter Scott

An Everyman's Library book of Modern Plays

The Little Minister, by J.M. Barrie

A Year in Provence, by Peter Mayle

Mr. Fixit took away a few records, too.

Second stop was a rent-a-table sale at the community centre. I found a small dolly for Crayons and a few somewhat tattered Scholastic paperbacks for a quarter apiece to add to our collection: Just Plain Maggie, Ghost Town Treasure, Snowbound in Hidden Valley, and Vicki and the Black Horse.

And a couple of the Squirrelings found earrings.

The community centre sale had a snacks table, but we weren't up for pop and hot dogs at 10:30 in the morning. So we all got back in the 2000 Rav4 (yeah, that's what we're driving right now) and drove to a cafe we had been wanting to try out that opens and closes at weird hours and keeps being closed every time we go there. This morning it was open. Grandpa Squirrel (that's Mr. Fixit's Dad Squirrel, not my map-collecting Dad Squirrel) was in the neighbourhood so he joined us for some coffee, juice and homemade strudel.

Last stop of the morning was Giant Tiger, which sounds like a funny place to pick up groceries, but we only needed bread, milk and a few boxes and cans, and we were planning a trip to the farm stand later to pick up the fresh stuff.

So...phew. That was our Saturday morning. How about yours?