A Beautiful Day in P-Town

It's a blue collar town in a blue collar state. There is only one large city, which feels more like a small town than a state capital. Downtown has the state house and a few hotels, a bus station and a park dedicated to Union Army General Ambrose Burnside.

The East side of Providence has Brown University and Rhode Island School of Design. It is filled with glorious 19th Century homes, the majority of which appear to have all their rooms and garages and sheds rented out to students. Plot and Duck walked past these on Sheldon Street yesterday, after their daily walk down to the hardware store for more fix-it supplies.

Plottie has been cooking and filling BZ's freezer. This is the Asado de Bodas (a delicious mole) from the other night.

And this is last night's pizza at Caserta's. Plot and Duck have eaten more pizza in the last two weeks than in the last two years. Good as East Coast pizza is -- Plot has had enough pizza for awhile.

It is always strange to be away from home and not doing something tourist-y -- museums, trekking, hiking. It is pleasant not to do them. Every day in Providence BZ goes to work and Plot and Duck fix stuff. Even after plenty of years, Plottie is always amazed to see what Ducknik can do to an apartment with paint and curtains and a little elbow grease. The drill is like this: Plot cooks and fix-its, Duck does all the big stuff.

Last night's short drive to the Antiques Mart in Pawtucket, a mandatory trip each voyage East, netted BZ the perfect gate-leg table for next to her stove and Plottie yet another cookbook. The pizza came after and was not expensive but still cost more than double the table and cookbook.

Ducknik found a tray that did not have a price marked on it. So she asked a kid to go upstairs and ask the owner how much he was selling it for. When BZ, Plot and Duck went upstairs finally to buy their table and cookbook, and Ducknik asked the owner the price of the tray, he gave her a price.

He then said in the four years he has owned this antiques mall, he has never made one sale on an item without a price marked on it. No matter what he says, it's the wrong price. The person already has an idea in his mind about how much it should cost, and if the owner says more, they customer doesn't want it, and if he says less, the customer still doesn't want it because he figures he was wrong about how nice the piece is. This makes no sense to Plotnik, but there seems to be empirical evidence to the contrary.

Duck did not buy the tray. Wrong price.