Coffee heat rising

Idle essays

Safeway = Albertson’s?

by

So what do you think of the pending takeover of Safeway by the parent company of Albertson’s?

Moi, I think we can expect higher food bills.

Actually, around here the competition among grocery chains is pretty stiff. That has kept Phoenix consumers’ grocery costs pretty much under control. Though our taxes are quite high — almost 10% on all non-grocery items (higher, in some municipalities), and during the Great Recession we had a food tax that was only recently repealed — food prices in general are pretty reasonable compared to the rest of the nation.

That notwithstanding, the locals regard Safeway as a more expensive place to shop than Albertson’s — even though the Albertson’s in my neighborhood jacks ups its prices to take advantage of the un-automobiled poor folks who live in the tenements across the road, and so it’s simply not true that the Safeway five miles from here is higher than the Albertson’s within walking distance. Even if the Safeway were higher, though, it still would be a better place to shop: the parking lot is safer (management keeps the panhandlers off the store’s private property, which you may be sure Albertson’s does not), the meat is 10 times better, produce is infinitely better, and the wine selection is far, far superior.

I expect the Albertson’s management will cheapie down the Safeway where I’ve been shopping — and I don’t mean lowering the prices but lowering quality all across the board. That Safeway now faces competition from a brand-new Sprouts, from a brand-new Whole Foods, and from an established and much-loved Trader Joe’s. The last couple of times I’ve been in the Safeway, it was practically empty.

It’s too bad, because you can’t get all your shopping done at a Sprouts or a Trader’s. There are just some things you can’t buy at those specialty stores — cleaning products that actually work, for example, and your preferred personal products. If you don’t shop at the Safeway, you end up having to go to two or three stores during a shopping trip, a real pain in the tuchus.

What I expect they’ll do is get rid of the wonderful selection of wines in the $8 to $12 range, figuring they can’t compete with Trader Joe’s selection of rotguts. They’ll lower the quality of the meat (which ain’t great but is good enough). They’ll add a lot more gross processed foods, which must be far more profitable to sell than real food. And they’ll limit the selection and reduce the quality of the produce.

Truth to tell, though, I had pretty well stopped going to our Safeway. Costco has better meats for the same price. AJ’s (local gourmet grocer) has far better produce for…uhh…well, astronomical prices. Sprouts has comparable produce for less money. Whole Foods has awesome meats and fish for not much all that much more. Trader Joe sells neat things (like the packages of baby artichokes) that you can’t even get at Safeway, and most of its produce is cheaper.

Could be, I suppose, that these old standard stores are turning into dinosaurs. Huh. Wonder if we’re looking at the tyrannosaur eating the brontosaurus?

😀

The Sky Is Blue Again…

by

…out of both eyes!

Yesterday it dawned (heh) on me that suddenly the sky no longer looked like a smoggy day when viewed from the right eye — the one with the weird flashes. In spite of being declared free of retinal detachment, ever since that episode it’s felt like someone smeared a microscopically thin film of Vaseline over the lens of that eye. And when I look into the sky, it’s blue out of the left eye but kind of brownish from the right.

The optician — glasses dude — speculated that in addition to whatever is wrong inside the eye, I may be developing a cataract, too. Nice.

But suddenly, yesterday morning the sky was BLUE blue through both eyes! If anything, it looked even brighter blue from the right than from the left.

Hallelujah.

Most of the annoying floaters had disappeared, too.

One of the websites I stumbled across while mining the Hypochondriac’s Treasure Chest for information on whatever ailed me said that sometimes the floaters reabsorb after one of these incidents, though it could take three or four months. But the vision was so badly hazed — to the extent that if this had happened in both eyes, there’d be no way I could drive at night — and it seemed so unchanging that I figured I was just going to lose that degree of vision permanently, and that eventually I would pretty much go blind in that eye.

So. It’s reassuring to have the sky come back.

Image: Mohammed Tawsif Salam. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

On the Road

by

Friend of mine, a lively lady who happens to be a long-haul trucker, sends this entertaining story of life on the road:

* * *

I used to write letters to people when I was sitting at loading docks. It was not uncommon to be parked for 4 to 6 hours at grocery warehouses, so I had plenty of time.

One letter that I wrote to Bob and Roberta began innocently enough.  My truck was in the shop at a Kenworth dealer in Fort Worth, Texas.  The mechanics told me I could hang out in the truck while they worked on it. This was cool.  I love mechanical stuff, car/truck stuff, and especially mechanics doing manly things in the vicinity of cars and trucks.

I was writing the letter from the bunk and the curtains were open.  Did not want to ruin the view!  I had just placed my pen to paper when the passenger door opened and in popped the handsome face of a greasy mechanic.  In uniform and everything.  Did I mention I love things like that?

The only reason this is noteworthy is that I had not had a date or boyfriend in ages as a result of having sworn off of both.  Unfortunately, my resolve had been slowly wearing down.  A clear indication of this was the giant poster of Green Bay’s golden boy Brett Farve, pre-scandalous behavior, with a milk mustache displayed prominently in my bunk.  I could gaze at it every night before going to bed.  That poster brang me back to life.  Thank you Brett – and USA Today – and the Milk Producers Association.

So here is this hunky mechanic sans wedding ring (I checked) with his torso draped across the passenger seat just a couple of feet from me.  He was fiddling with some wires in the dash.  For some reason my pen would not move.  I am not sure how long I sat there, frozen, unable to break the spell this dude had on me.  But I enjoyed the experience completely.  He apologized for being in the way – are you kidding me?? – and I assured him that it was not a problem.

Only after he exited the cab area of the truck was I coherent enough to begin my missive.  I had recently completed a disastrous run from Wisconsin to Los Angeles (or somewhere out West) and was eager to share it with my bro and his wife.  It ended up a 13-pager.  Don’t remember how long I sat in that shop, but it must have been a while!  After I signed off, I added a title to the first page.  It was called “A Christmas Story”.

Thanks again for the story.  Brings back fond memories for me!

XO,
Connie

PS  The Brett Farve poster was eventually replaced by a calendar of hunky priests given to me by my sister.  She found it in Italy when she was there with the choir.  That was one “attractive” calendar.

Priest October

Teva Teva Teva Teeeeevas!!!

by

Heeee! Who would think a pair of shoes made of rubber, Nylon, and Velcro could be soooo kewl?

Well…they’re probably not. They’re probably kewl only to a certain nerdly type.

Last year I bought my first pair of Teva sandals, hiking/loafing footwear favored by the outdoorsy set. I had resisted for quite a long while, because they came highly recommended by SDXB, with whom, by the time his love affair with the things began, I had become profoundly annoyed. If he liked the damned things, I reasoned in my girlish way, they couldn’t be much.

In spite of myself, last year I tried on a pair and was seduced into buying. And I’ve come to love them.

I wore them almost every day all through the summer (wading through water and mud and gravel and dust and grass and weeds in them) and then with socks against the cold all through the winter. That pair beginning to look a little tired, I decided that before the heat comes in this year, I should buy another pair. Several styles exist; one was much cuter than last summer’s style, and I thought maybe I should try that.

So it was off to Sportsman’s Warehouse, conveniently located next to my second-favorite middle-class Costco store (the Costco nearest me is conveniently located between a desperate slum and a Walmart). Tried on the “cuter” style and found, as I’d found a year or more ago, that it threatens to raise a blister on the tenderist part of the arch. But LO! The model I’ve come to love and worship now comes in…yes! LIPSTICK RED!!!!!

Who could resist?

So I bought a pair of those. If anything, they seem to fit marginally better and feel even more incredibly comfortable than the old black & grey model.

While I was at it, I also picked up a pair of Teva flip-flops (“slides,” the company calls this model). These, I don’t even have to bend down to pull on the feet. They won’t do for those two- and three-mile de-fatting walks around the ’hood, but they’ll be mighty handy around the house and yard. Assuming Pup doesn’t eat them. 😉

Here they are: Nerd High Fashion:

P1020860And your favorite fashion footwear is…?

Tales from the Crypt…uhm…the ’Hood

by

Now that was an entertaining dog walk!

Last night along about sunset, Cassie and I were headed homeward through the more upscale neighborhood to the west of us. It’s an area of old 1950s ranch houses, some of them very large, on large, irrigated lots: classic North Central. And as neighborhoods go, it’s seen better days.

The properties are tired, and a few need major, major fix-up. Some in fact have been purchased by affluent folks who want to live in a central location and who like large, grassy, shady lots in the center of the city. The houses lend themselves to upgrading, and because of their size and location, once a place has been spiffed up, it can be worth a lot. Values in the area hover in the $500,000 range.  Within steps, right around the corner are houses on the market for over a million dollars.

But. It’s mixed: some owners have been there for decades, and so a few places are a shade on the decrepit side.

In the middle of this small part of the ’hood is an old abandoned house, a place that must once have been a very nice property, indeed. It’s on a pie-shaped lot with a huge front yard, shaded by vast, once spectacular orchid trees. It’s been running down for years; of late it has been abandoned. The old guy who lived there alone disappeared — I assumed he’d been shipped off to the nursing home. The house is a real wreck.

So the hound and I are strolling past this pile when we come across a couple of the neighbors. I notice someone has hacked limbs off the overgrown trees and shrubbery in front and left the debris laying there, so I ask, while chatting, what’s the deal.

And from this chatty, chatty woman comes a story:

The house  is foreclosed, and it’s taken years to get that way.

The old guy was not the owner. He was living there rent-free and had been, for years. One day he just up and disappeared.

The owner himself was a tax protester, of the BAT-SH!T CRAZY variety. This guy carried one of those “sovereign citizen” cards around and proclaimed that the US gummint had no authority over him and therefore he did not owe it (that would be “us”) any taxes. He had his own bank in a DYI basement under the structure, where he would hide money. He gave out fake addresses — including a fake address for the house — so when revenooers and other creditors would come around looking for him, they couldn’t find the place. When last heard from, he hadn’t paid taxes — or lived in the house — in over 10 years.

In the attic, which you access by a trap door over the carport (rather common in these parts), there is a hidden closet. God only knows what’s in there. From that closet, you can access the interior of the house through another, hidden trap door.

Somebody recently bought the house out of bankruptcy, but they are apparently raving idiots. They hacked back the plants but have done nothing more, except they tried to get into the house through the attic. They failed to find the closet and so did not find the door into the house from the attic. So they took an ax and chopped their way through the ceiling.

The chatty lady with whom I was speaking, it develops, is a cat lady. She has eight cats that she allows to roam around the neighborhood, stinking up people’s yards and killing the wildlife. When it was observed that cats are very destructive and make a mess in the neighbors’ yards (yes…I did actually say that), she said oh, no, her kitties are good. Then she remarked that one had just killed a hummingbird. They also have several dogs, rabbits, chickens and the like. Her husband said they have 18 animals. Godlmighty.

She is enraged at one of the neighbors, who called an exterminator to remove a hive of Africanized bees that had taken up residence in the haunted house’s front yard. Just because they were swarming her koi pond, Chatty Lady thinks, was no excuse to murder all the little thangs.

He’s a retired lawyer. They’re graduates of Pomona and Claremont.

Heee! Money doesn’t buy good sense, eh?

Several of the places on the street where the haunted house stands have been fixed up handsomely. One of them was recently purchased by a young family with a cute young boy, who was playing outside when the dog and I strolled past. This is always good: more young families are moving in, and they’re exactly what an older neighborhood like this needs. The parents settle in and fix up the houses, and the young adults and their children are just grand to have around.

Heh. Betcha they don’t know they moved in next door to a level 2 sex offender.

That guy lives in another run-down house, right next door to the haunted manse. He appears to be living with his mother.

Across the street from him is yet another run-down house occupied by two young men and another elderly woman, presumably their mother. The gents have converted the carport into an automotive shop, and a fine mess that is, indeed! When you walk by at night, you can see into the front room and see that the interior of the house seems tidy and rather nice. But that garage! Lordie!!

Chatty Lady said one of the guys who lives there likes to work outside at two in the morning.

That’s good, I suppose. Keeps an eye on the sex offender, and also on the various wandering burglars who come through after dark.

Self-employment Mantra: Paying Work First; then Playing Work

by

So I spent about half of yesterday in a prolonged flinch reflex. Heh…that would be another way of saying “diddled away hour after hour after in raw procrastination.”

There was this little job I needed to do for the current client. The previous day, somehow I’d managed to convince myself that this was going to be another of the exercises in tedium that blight my career. And I think I’m developing an allergy to tedium.

Now, if I’d scheduled a couple of hours right after I got back from the (somewhat abortive) meeting, along about 9:00 or 9:30, to perform said spate of tedium, then by lunch it would’ve been done and I could’ve filled the entire afternoon with the things I wanted to do, like writing chapter 4 of the next book and organizing the cookbook and walking the dog in the park and generally dorking around.

But nooooooo…. No, not a chance.

Wrote a blog post instead.

Moving on: lunch. Grilled mahi-mahi, avocado salad. Dates stuffed with walnuts. Tangerines. Read the paper. Read an article in the New York Times.

Very nice. Killed another slab of time.

Next: dream up the backstory for a character who’s proving singularly difficult to turn into a live human being. Or a representation thereof.

That wasn’t especially productive. Well, maybe, on a subliminal level. But not so much that, say, a credible dialogue could be gagged out.

Getting fat: still haven’t dropped the two pounds picked up after the greasy, salty breakfast at iHop. Go for walk: 1.75 miles.

Welp, now it’s gettin’ along toward three o’oclock in the afternoon. Huh. Time to start working. I guess.

The stupid project only took about an hour and 45 minutes. Soooo….

If I’d prioritized the paying work (in some sort of serious way) and done it in the morning, $105 would’ve been in the bank (or good as) by lunchtime. With the wildly over-anticipated tedium out of the way, I would’ve felt a lot less stressed when I sat down to novelize…and maybe that character would’ve come to life.

Moral of the story? Paying work first. Then playing work.

😉