Tragedy Strikes Mons...and Mom

I'm surprised Rita still has the spirit to post entries. She's been listless and depressed since the day a couple of weeks ago when we walked down the pedestrian shopping street in Mons and discovered, to our horror, that the Zigzag had been destroyed by fire! (Sorry, no English version of the story; it's real local news.) The Zigzag was our favorite store--and hard to describe. It was kind of a tiny, two-aisle, hip dollar store. Everything was priced at only a euro or four. It was a great place to get things like candles and holders, cute coffee cups, cheap wall clocks, cutting boards made to look like Swiss cheese, bread baskets, rubber ducks and duck-shaped soap (Rachel), and cow-shaped salt and pepper shakers (Linda). And now it's gone, destroyed by a fire set in the trash that wasn't collected as usual because the garbage men had Saint Barbara's feast day off. Ironically, Saint Barbara is the patron of fire-related professions. *Sigh*