It turned out to be a Pretty Good Day.

I hadn't realized it was one of the ArtsFest days, meaning that the entire downtown square was packed with artists selling their wares. I had a hard time finding parking (even though I was there as the stores were opening for the day) and at first feared I was going to have to turn around and go back home.

Also, it was VERY crowded at first. The sidewalks are narrow enough on an average day; Saturday about half the width of some of them was taken up by art displays. And people had the annoying habit of walking in little "knots" - either family groups or groups of friends and then STOPPING suddenly (not always with apparent reason). Several times I had to stop short in order to avoid colliding with a group.

I will say there were FAR fewer of the really annoying cell-phone people there, though. In fact, I saw VERY FEW cell phones. (In the past, I remember a woman nearly colliding with me - twice - in two different antiques shops while she carried on an extended cell-phone conversation complaining about her husband, the gardener, her mother, and how she "couldn't find anything GOOD" in any of the antique shops. My thought was, "Maybe if you slowed down enough to look?" - she was literally running in, doing a scan-and-run, and then leaving. Yeah, she was probably looking for a single specific thing but that's not really the POINT of antiquing, in my book - you may have an item in mind but you also look at the other stuff, because you may find something you weren't looking for that's really cool, or you might spot something that would make a good gift for someone).

I did buy a few things.



It's like a parody of a cuckoo clock! (Sadly, it does not actually cuckoo.) It does, however, tick very loudly, so I put it up in my kitchen over the stove rather than in my bedroom, as I had originally planned. But that's good, because the clock on the stove pooped out and I don't have a real clock in that room.

Yes, it's very pink. The company also makes bright green ones, and allegedly, a silver one (the shop I was in only had pink and green, but there was a picture of the silver one on the box).

It's actually just a little battery-operated clock - the pendulum and weights (which are the drive mechanism in a "real" cuckoo clock) are just for show).

I also bought this:



It's one of those souvenir plate things. I guess they were pretty popular in the 50s and 60s. I have a whole collection of these; they are what decorate the wall in my bathroom.

My bathroom has walls that are half "tiled" with some kind of pressed-board paneling; it is painted a sort of greyish green - for quilters, it's like a lighter shade of the 1930s green - and the upper half of the walls are white. The bathroom is small and when I moved in I thought I wanted something bright and interesting on the walls to make it seem bigger. My first thought was framed postcards, but then I thought that the humidity from showering might damage postcards. I had one or two of these plates, bought on whims over the years, so I put them up. And then started buying more. And now I have such a big collection that I have to be kind of careful what I buy, because I'm running out of room. So I only buy ones I really like, and sometimes replace one with an older or nicer plate (I've not decided what to do with the "discards" yet; I have them put away but I don't have the energy to try to do something like sell them on eBay. Besides, I only have a couple of them.)

But this was one I liked - it seems unusual; most of the plates I've seen are for whole STATES and this is for a single attraction. Also, the coloring is nice and lurid. I like the ones that have the more brilliant painting on them, for some reason.

I'm not even all that sure where Eureka Springs is, or if the "Pivot Rock" is still standing. (Apparently is is. And look, Google even has a little icon of "Pivot Rock" on its map! (heh.))

I spent most of the day Sunday getting the front gardens done - I had not had time earlier. Sadly, there were really no true bedding plants (aside from begonias, which would not survive the hotter sunnier conditions in the front beds, and petunias, which I've never had good luck with in this soil). So I bought some purslane (we'll see how that does) and a few (very few, because they were the large pot-grown expensive kind) zinnias and a few red salvias and put those out. I also got a couple of bee-balms to put in a "blank" space next to my pineapple sage. (Eventually I am going to say "hang it all" and just buy a bunch of perennials, I think, and plant the front garden with those. It's too disappointing every spring to be "too busy" right at the height of the season for planting bedding annuals).

I also bought a couple of watermelon plants and put them in the space I had been reserving for butternut squash (but never found plants or seeds of). We'll see how this works. I had watermelon a number of years ago and they did well until a borer got the plants and killed them.