Friday night the garden club (don't worry I'm not a member and I don't play golf either) put together a nice exhibit of flower arrangements and paintings of flowers. I took a lot of photos of those, but the flash was not kind to them. However, this corner of one of the gallery rooms was more cooperative. Besides Godot, Lefty, and a renaissance of wonder, we are waiting for our lives to change by way of selling and buying. The closing date on the Heron will be delayed a few days while various lawyers get their shit together. We've had nice conversations with Diana, the buyer, who is as anxious to get started as we are to let go; she's coming up later this week for innkeeper practice and the transfer. We have two offers out there on buildings in Unity, one of which has been accepted. That building is an old meeting house, built in 1827, hardly more than a barn. But it sits on rock piers on ledge (bedrock) so its lines have stayed straight. The college administration put it up for sale without exactly consulting their own board of trustees. John Piotti is on that board and is also director of Unity Barn Raisers, the community development group that I'm on the board of. For us to buy the building, we'll have to agree to some guidelines and restrictions that we would probably be following anyway. I think. Probably. We'll see if we can come to an agreement on that. The deal on the other building we are trying to buy is just as complicated. It's a building on Main Street which when we first moved here was a health food co-op. It's kind of scruffy and needs some love, but is is the oldest commercial builing in town, built in 1830. It is still owned by the co-op and we're negotiating with their board of directors. No agents or lawyers on this one. We've extended the time on that offer so that they can contact all their members to see if they approve to sale to us. About half the town seems to be co-op members, so that it feels like we're the subject of some sort of referendum. The building's downstairs occupant, a small cafe, is in some difficulty with the town for trashing out the yard and attracting rats. Thus the town officials and the neighbors are enthusiastic about our buying it, our renovation of the Heron kind of serving as our portfolio. So if you like small town politics, you'd be happy visiting us this month. Actually I do like small town politics, because all of this is small scale dealing with people we know. One of the reasons I'm anxious to have a building downtown is that DSL is finally rolling out here, supposedly starting with a downtown test group. An office with a window looking onto Main Street and high speed access is the place I've been trying to get to for years. In the meantime it's summer in Maine than which nothing could be finer. The garden is at that point of flourishing just before it goes out of control. Two excellent movies we've seen lately: Winged Migration, the ultimate birder movie, and Whale Rider, the movie that you needed to see when you were 12 years old.

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