Tina Turner Nails

My brother takes my niece, Jane, to school every morning. She goes to school in downtown Jacksonville at a magnet school, so getting her there is no small feat. They usually stop at a neighborhood cafe for coffee (my brother) and a cookie (Jane) along the way.

On Tuesday, as they drove toward school with me along for the ride, I spotted this incredible shopfront. We went back yesterday morning for photos after dropping off Jane. Isn't that awesome?

And right behind it, parked in a grove of trees...

...is this amazing food truck!

Mom continues to do well. Today she has an appointment at the beauty salon in her retirement center. She is in dire need of a mani/pedi. I think she basically stopped filing her nails at some point, and they're like talons now -- and my mom has never in her life had long fingernails. I keep teasing her about her Tina Turner nails. I told her she either needed to get them painted bright red or we were trimming them back!

Coincidentally, we've taken her to a local diner a couple of times on this trip and both times we've heard a Tina Turner song playing in the background over the restaurant's sound system. I told her, "It's those nails!"

My brother and I spent yesterday continuing to deal with some of Mom's remaining possessions. I make it sound like she has a lot of stuff but she really doesn't. It's just that it requires sorting and the task can be time-consuming. We took some stuff to Goodwill and my brother brought a lot of it to his house. He's painstakingly restoring a lot of Mom's cookware -- which is caked with lime from the terrible water at her retirement center -- by soaking it in vinegar. I had no idea this would work but the pots and pans do come out looking shiny. Like I said yesterday, he's going to store them, maybe for eventual use by Jane when she gets her own apartment in years to come. (She's in eighth grade now so that won't be for a while yet.)

I went to dinner with Mom last night at the little dining room on her memory care unit. I wanted to get a sense of what the other patients are like. They do chat and they seem to interact pretty well, so that was good to see. The food was hardly inspired (gray chicken chow mein and canned spinach, in my case) but it's the same as at the big cafeteria where Mom routinely ate before, so she's fine with it. At least it's easily accessible and nutritious.

I've been so immersed in all this I haven't had time to think about much else. I've barely been in touch with Dave, but he tells me London has had immense amounts of rain. I was shocked to come upon a picture in the Guardian of street flooding right around the corner from our flat! Fortunately our place is up on a hill so I think we've been fine but Dave tells me Olga hasn't wanted to go on her walks in that sorry weather.