So the only thing I’ve done today besides work, work, and more work is to run out to the Walmart just up the road from the ‘hood. After the Fall of the Bush Economy, the fairly shiny Food City in that shopping center (shiny as Food Cities go) was shut down as the owner of the local grocery chain struggled to keep his company in business at all. The anchor tenant’s space was vacant for awhile, and then finally a Walmart Neighborhood Market went in there.
I’ve stayed away from it because I get quite enough of the slum-parking-lot experience at the nearby Albertson’s (where a bum once actually chased me around the cars — did the same to a neighbor, too, I later learned) and Sprouts (where you can watch a hooker pick up a john). But the other day when I happened to be at the Walmart shopping center, I noticed they have a couple of pretty fierce-looking security guards patrolling the place. So, being in a hurry and not feeling much like driving way to hell and gone to the nearest safe Walgreen’s or Safeway, I decided to dart in there this morning.
And was pleasantly surprised!
The Walmart down near M’hijito’s house is just like the scene depicted in a YouTube video: dark, grody, and full of strange downscale specimens:
This store was more like a regular grocery store. It was clean, brightly lit, and didn’t have a single avatar of “Walmart People” as far as you could see. Staff were friendly and didn’t seem especially put-upon. And the shelves were well stocked.
Prices were not noticeably cheaper than other grocery stores around here. To my amazement, they carry Talenti ice cream — at exactly the same price as Sprouts charges. That would be the stuff that ran up the $15 bill the other day. Picked up a fistful of fresh asparagus — about the same price as Safeway. And a couple of other things.
No money was saved, but I was pleased to find a place that seems reasonably safe to shop in a lot closer to home than my usual haunts.
One thing they do have is paletas — Mexican fruit popsicles — and the gringo version, which sell under the “Outshine” brand name. Made by Nestle, of course they’re sweet. But mostly because the fruit purée in them is sweet. The regular line has some sugar — pretty far down on the list of ingredients — but they sell some that contain no added sugar. I can’t tell much difference between them. They’re really good, and pretty light on the calories.
One of my students contributed a bunch of paleta recipes — the alcoholic variety, actually. But that’s an extra embellishment. The real ones are basically fruit. Get a copy of the 30 Pounds/6 Months cookbook for the recipes!
Certainly lighter on the calories than the Talenti sea salt caramel ice cream I’ve been using to soothe the bilious belly.
Almost finished preparing Honored Client’s book to post at the print-on-demand press’s web page. Actually, I uploaded the contents and soon observed that, because the template we’re using has very narrow margins, the guy’s footnotes were getting truncated. He loves footnotes. {sigh}
So I set about converting those to endnotes after each chapter. Ducky. This process, naturally, fucked up all the work I’d done fixing 436 pages’ worth of widows and orphans, a chore that occupied most of yesterday. So I had to delete all the fixes I made yesterday and enter a whole new raft of fixes.
Then back to marking up page proofs for the current index. Needed to get to page 134 today. Didn’t make it.
But I have made it into bed…and now am about to go to sleep.
Try those paletas!