8.00ish pm, Sunday July 26 ....full

I have just eaten too much dinner. It was so good and I wasn't feeling full, until now. D made whole wheat pasta with tomato, artichoke and black olives, while I breaded, herbed and fried eggplant slices.

D's family is lovely. L is the type of man Steinbeck writes about: sweet-natured, smart, competent, patient and great with children. B, the little one, is, like all one-year-olds, self-entertaining. He is squirmy and warm and quite a little dancer. True to form, I've bonded with the baby and the dog, a chocolate retriever with a big, warm, wet smelly tongue.

This morning we joined C and S for a trip to the Cave of the Mound, a large cave featuring the shiny plastic look of stalactites and stalagmites. Anice tour, but I don't find cave formations to be as beautiful or impressive as I should. I preder a forest, which is much more mundane. Maybe it is the unspectacular colours of the formations that don't do it for me.

Last night D and I again talked into the dark, though not so late as the previous couple of nights. After returning home from the caves and eating a lunch of fruit salads and vegie burgers we went to the Sow's Ear Cafe cum knitting shop, located in an imitation Victorian house. A lovely cafe, there was a string of skeletons wrapped in tiny shawls, one with a tiny knitted sock hanging from his foot. There were ladies knitting at long wood tables, armchairs in the window, coloured skeins of yarn hanging on the back wall and male staff, one young man sitting in the back of the shop, knitting. Out front were metal tables with rainbow umbrellas under which D and I sat to drink our coffees.

For dinner I bought a bottle of Penfold's Koonunga Hill Shiraz Cabernet, a not very expensive but quite lovely wine, all agreed.