Here it is. Fall. The smell of dying leaves and foliage in the air. We were so busy this year that we didn’t do our annual ride to Grizzly Camp. We would have needed to do this when the fireweed was in bloom. Now it’s hunting season. I just looked up the season schedule. I thought it started earlier and ended about now. It (sadly) goes from August 25 to September 25. You can hunt bear any time.

It was a beautiful day today, weatherwise. I spent a portion of it distributing books. And I ran out of books before I was done.

Late yesterday I sprained my ankle. I got up once last night and realized that it was no better than when I went to bed. I figured I’d be laid up a while. Got up this morning and discovered that it was no better. I could not even walk on it.

Pete came to the rescue. He massaged my foot with his large, gentle hands and then applied athletic tape. My ankle felt fine. What I felt was not akin to relief. It was relief. I was in fact ecstatic because I thought that I would not be able to do anything for some time. My foot felt fine all day – and yes, I did do more heavy lifting than I should have.

It's hard not to do the heavy lifting because it’s there to do. I am getting better at asking people to give me an assist, but this is when they are around. The other evening, I told Micah, who is a work colleague of Pete’s, that the newspaper box outside of the college fair booth, had been relocated. Micah took care of the problem by picking up the newspaper box and putting it back on the booth porch. I was really impressed since this was a large, heavy box.

It felt good today to sort of have a day off. Sort of. I still had a lot of work to do in the former banquet room of the historic Eagle Hotel. I got more boxes of books from U-Haul and brought them back to the hotel and sorted them, removing and stamping the one’s that we’ll have on hand at the fair.

We are going into the home stretch, the final weekend of fair ho ha. No one is happier than me except maybe for my friend Dan who is working in Potato Palace, preparing potatoes and their dressings for the masses.

Tomorrow he will go to Anchorage and get books, which will be a welcome change for him, I’m sure.

235. 9/2/26: The Real Hero