We were sitting in the kitchen in Casco trying to think what we needed to get for Thanksgiving dinner (things like enough table space, serving utensils,…) when I noticed some motion in the crabapple tree. It was a grouse, standing on a branch, eating crabapples! That’s three grouse sightings from the house by now. I tried to get some pictures. None of them were the kind you’d want to put in a nature guide to show people what a grouse in a crabapple tree looks like, but at least they show what protective coloration can do.
We went to Windham to look for a folding table and the other things we had figured we needed. We looked first in an antiques mall that we’ve passed lots of off times but not been in before. These antiques mall places are stores divided into small areas that different dealers fill with their goods. It’s sort of like a fleamarket that goes on all the time, with the people who are minding the store keeping track of what dealer gets paid for what items. This one had several drop leaf tables, but none that would fit the space we had in mind and look right in the room.
Next door to the antiques mall was a store packed full with souveniers, dollhouse furniture and kits and building materials, toys, and antiques. It looked as though the owners would look at catalogs and say, “Neat! We can find some place to display that, if we just push some other stuff together a little tighter!”
We drove out the first road to the right in Windham, looking for The Village Knittiot. The road goes out over a bridge onto an island in Lake Sebago, with very pretty water all around, but no sign of the store. When we got back to the main road we determined that the store is right there at the corner, but there were no lights on just after five.
Somewhat reluctantly, we looked through WalMart and almost got a 24 x 48 inch table. Arlene decided it was really too small. We left that parking lot and continued to Lowe’s, where we found a 30 x 72 inch table, which will be comfortable for more people plus have space enough to leave some serving bowls on the table.
It turned out that Borat was showing at the movies in Windham. We looked in a restaurant (Thatcher’s?) right next to the cinema, but it was packed. We looked in Friendly’s, across the parking lot, but there were people waiting to be seated ahead of us, and less than an hour to movie time, and we remembered how slow Friendly’s can sometimes be. We settled for fast food, and got to the movie in plenty of time.
Oh, what did I think of the movie? There were some outrageous scenes (mostly the naked fight and run through the hotel), but on the whole I didn’t think people were made to look so ridiculous as they seem to feel they were. In the rodeo scene, for instance, people were cheering for things like “support the troops” and “kill all the terrorists”, but when Borat was singing things on the order of “Destroy Iraq so that not a blade of grass grows there for 1000 years” the audience really didn’t want to support that sentiment any more. I did think that a lot of it was awfully funny.