My beautiful afternoon and New England quirks

The fact that today's afternoon was beautiful has nothing to do with me. It's mine because I was able to enjoy it. I had dropped Toebzilla off at a pet hotel yesterday for reasons I'm not going into here. On my way to pick him up today, I stopped off at a bagel place for the first bagel I've had in Massachusetts this year. In a rather ironic twist, bagel shops aren't all that common in the MetroWest area. There around, but there's just no prolific quality chains, like Noah's Bagels in the West Coast (to the people that hate Noah's, they are still far better than many places, so I consider them quality by comparison). I'm sure there's a bunch of bagel places closer to the Boston area, but I'm not driving an hour for bagels. Anyway, the place I went to was OK. Service was slow and understaffed for a Saturday. The bagel was fine. I picked up Toebzilla from the pet hotel and then drove to a farm ice cream "parlor". I'm not sure why it's called a "parlor" since you don't actually get to go inside. I think I mentioned this in a previous post. I had a small ice cream in a waffle cone. You got to watch out at the farm ice cream places. Smalls are typically still quite big. Toebzilla was a bit impatient with me as it took me forever to eat my delicious ice cream cone. The farm ice cream shops opened earlier in the season this year since Winter weather ended a bit early. One surprize in New England is that the Diary Queens typically close during Winter too. I've never seen Diary Queens do that before. It was quite disappointing in November to be forced to get soft serve at a McDonalds. As an alternative to Diary Queen, I do miss Foster Freeze, which is a smaller California chain of soft serve ice cream parlors (you actually get to go inside at these places). Oh, one more comment about the farm ice cream shop; they do serve soft serve, but I had "hard serve" today. After coming home, I relaxed on our balcony in the sunny and warm afternoon. Toebzilla doesn't get to go on the balcony often, so he was sniffing around quite a bit, and investigating how far he was above the ground. When I went back inside, he followed quickly. Both of us then sleep for the rest of the afternoon with the Sun peaking through the blinds of the bedroom. I think I'm well rested now. I might actually not fall asleep during SNL tonight.