#MicroblogMondays: Labour Day musings

• It used to be that a statutory holiday like Labour Day was truly a holiday, i.e., just about everything would be closed.  For dh & me, though, today has been a normal Monday, more or less:  the bank was not open (although cash was readily accessible from the ABM) and traffic was somewhat lighter than usual -- but the supermarket & bookstore/Starbucks were both open. Both were busy, and the supermarket in particular was a mob scene, with families stocking up on supplies for school lunches, etc. 
• August/September hereabouts is also "tomato time."  This is a predominantly Italian community, and the parking lot garden centres, which were full of flowers & seedling vegetable plants in the springtime, have given way to racks of bushel baskets full of ripe red Roma tomatos, which people buy for processing & canning homemade tomato sauce. When dh was growing up, the tomatos would be ground up via handcranked machine (which the kids took turns cranking). These days you can buy electric-powered machines that do the job in half the time, pulverizing the tomatos and separating the seeds & skins from the pulp and juice. Personally, dh & I have never "done" the tomatos in the 30+ years we've been married (although I am sure we would have, had his mother still been alive) -- and of course, I'm allergic anyway.  :(  Many of his cousins look on it as drudgery but many nevertheless continue the tradition.   
• Two of dh's cousins took their kids to university over the weekend & got them settled into their dorms (as we saw via "empty nest" posts on Facebook & Instagram). 
• This brought back memories of my own (much less emotionally fraught, as I recall) drop off at residence & first days at university, 40 (!!!)  years ago this week (as I posted yesterday). I pulled out my photo albums (not yet digitized) & smiled at the snapshots of my floormates and some of the hijinks we got up to during that first year. Not very many photos of ME (1/ we didn't take as many photos then as we do now -- film & processing were expensive, especially when you're a poor student...!  and 2/ selfies not being a thing back then, lol) -- but I did have the good sense to take photos of my dorm room, both when it was newly set up (with posters of Peter Frampton and the Muppets' Dr. Teeth & the Electric Mayhem on the wall, lol) and then again just before I dismantled it and headed home for the summer. 
• Bracing myself for the fresh onslaught of back to school photos tomorrow...! 
• Wondering whether I need to swap my white purse for something more fall-appropriate yet (brown or black). Does the "no white after Labour Day" rule still apply these days?? 
• Wondering how much longer I can get away with wearing capris & sandals... temperatures are already starting to feel cooler... :(  
• Trying to accept that, for all intents & purposes, summer is over (even if there are still a few weeks of it left officially on the calendar). :(    

You can find more of this week's #MicroblogMondays posts here.