Reflecting on what has occured over the past few days...I have realized how lucky I was, and still am. It does not lessen the sting of of the tragedy, however. I am almost certain that people I knew, people I assisted in the store while they were passing through the town or on vacation for the summer- are gone.

Still, one cannot allow the sadness and misery to overcome themselves. We keep moving on, if only because we cannot do anything else.

I found a marvelous thing while shopping today: noise cancelling headphones. I've never bought them before, since I've never thought they would work, but they do! I have half a mind to wear them while working in the store so I can play dumb whenever a customer gets a little snippy. Of course, they're rather ostentatious, but still, they're quite amazing.

Quite surreal that the end of the year is almost here. How the time flies! I don't have any plans, other than possibly going to watch the fireworks that everyone does, weather permitting of course. So far, it does seem like it'll be at least tolerable. Shame it can't be like that for the rest of the country; I heard about Iowa getting hit badly by snow recently.

I do think that is the last time I take a suggestion from my siblings as to what to wear for a costume. The odds of me needing to go to the dentist in the coming days are extremely high I'm afraid... hopefully I may only need fillings and not pulling, as that would be dreadful.

I do love this time of year. It's when we start getting out the Halloween stuff. I know, it's still August, but one can never start too early. After all, the day after Halloween, the Christmas stuff goes up in it's place. Which is all well and good, of course, but we never seem to do much business around Christmas. The mind boggles as to why.