Pour your sweetness over me

[austin_dern]

The second day with bunny_hugger began with a diner visit. It may sound like we spent a lot of time in diners, and it will, but we did, and she seemed to rather like that since New Jersey diners are a slightly different breed from those in her home state. But after that we began the sort of slightly overplanned day which results from being worried ahead of time that we might run out of things to talk about and therefore should be racing from one thing to another. This would prove unnecessary, but one has to learn that, after all.

One of the things we went to see was The Book Garden, which I visit reliably, as it's a fine used book store, with a florist's shop (and various cute little collectibles), and some comic books available too. I've been going there nearly twenty years, and it turned out they had flyers promising their 19th Anniversary Sale soon, although it wasn't there yet. So we spent hours walking about, and looking at books, and discovering books we'd both read in childhood, or that one had read and was surprised the other hadn't read, or in my case looking for copies of what had been my fourth grade history textbook which had been there in the past but wasn't now. We carrying on like that in such detail that the store reached its closing time before we had got to more than about a third of the shelves. (It's surprisingly long, behind a narrow storefront.)

Emerging from there we drove over to the nearby Wawa, in order to get something to snack on -- Mallow Cups -- and something to drink -- Extra-Sweet Iced Tea. I've praised that in the past too, and while I picked up a few bottles she went to the fountain vending machine and got what she believed to be the sweet iced tea. I didn't even imagine using the fountain vending machine for that, which is all right since they didn't seem to have the extra-sweet sort there. But given the real extra-sweet stuff, she loved it, and that got to be the unofficial drink for her stay, when a Wawa I visited wasn't out of it. It's a deservedly popular iced tea.

Trivia: The Johnson 17, a barge carrying 100,000 pounds of TNT and 25,000 detonators, was the first ship to explode in the Black Tom explosion, at about 2:08 am 30 July 1916. Source: The Detonators: The Secret Plot to Destroy America and an Epic Hunt for Justice, Chad Millman.

Currently Reading: The Go-Go Years: The Drama and Crashing Finale of Wall Street's Bullish 60s, John Brooks.

Comments

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

I wish I had more of that tea. I keep seeing the empty bottle that I brought to drink here, and wishing that I had some more.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Aw. I had a feeling we should've got more as you were heading up. It's addictive, I know ... I had to make myself switch from it to the Diet and less-sweet iced tea for driving in to my extruded office product. Too many food-calories for something so easy to drink in one gulp, you know.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

I very much enjoy Wawa Diet tea.. I make it a point to grab some whenever I'm within WaWa territory. (quite beyond that now, though, and will be about another month.)

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

The diet is fine enough. You'd think they'd go nuts with the sugar substitute, though, as long as it is for the moment on the Generally Regarded As Safe list, and as long as they have got southern New Jersey hooked on the extra-sweet regular.

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

I understand. Sugary drinks, which I regrettably love, are a strictly special-occasion indulgence for me. My visit counted very much as a special occasion.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I have lived on mostly diet drinks, besides miscellaneous fruit stuff and iced teas, for most of my life, but the extra-sweet makes it awfully hard to stick to that resolve.

I used to make it worse in the office's break room with the sugar, but I switched to the non-caloric substitute and that was as good and, to be honest, I felt better using the paper packets since they worried about bugs in the sugar shaker.