"Roundheads and Ramblings"

daily drama

Preparing Gingerly for My First Trader Joe’s Visit

Posted on Saturday, September 22, 2018 10:43 AM

I’m not sure how I managed to get this old without setting foot in a Trader Joe’s but somehow I had never even seen one. Maybe it had something to do with being an Air Force wife and living in so many off-the-map places that had nothing but an Air Force base and a commissary. Whatever the reason, I had no idea why people were so enthusiastic. When the rumors of a TJ coming to Germantown first circulated, I may have been the only person in Memphis who was not excited.

Still, the hype eventually piqued my interest, and when the store finally opened last week, I started to make a list. I asked everyone I talked to about their TJ favorites, and I soon had a long list, but one invariably topped by two items: Mandarin Orange Chicken and Cookie Butter. Other treats jostling for top sport were Triple Gingersnaps and something called Ginger Chews. Then came bagel seasoning and various exotic produce items.

Armed with my list, a friend and I ventured out to explore. No one warned me about the traffic—not outside, but in the aisles. Related images kept flashing through my mind as I struggled to push my cart into a slow-moving line of discriminating shoppers. Imagine the Santa Ana Freeway at rush hour; an inbound evacuation route as a hurricane bears down on the coast; the Salmon River during spawning season.

I hear it’s a beautiful store, but all I saw were people and whatever happened to be at eye-level on the shelves as I passed by. And if I missed an item and wanted to go back . . . well, imagine being a car going the wrong way on that rush hour freeway. Just turning around caused a ripple effect of clashing carts.

Eventually I gathered most of my items without spending too much money and came home to indulge in some sampling. The results were . . . instructive. First came a Ginger Chew, which sent puffs of peppery steam right through the top of my skull. Too late, I read the bag, which recommended these as a cure for travel sickness. Maybe so! Hoping for something a little milder I tried a Gingersnap, which turned out to have three kinds of ginger and not much else. A peanut butter pretzel cooled my taste buds, and I decided to try the orange chicken for dinner. You guessed it. The most prominent flavor was ginger.

Still searching for the ultimate TJ high, I tried their plain yogurt for breakfast. Not even raspberries and granola could add any sweetness to it. So I turned to a crumpet (yes, a TJ crumpet) topped with cookie butter. That wasn’t too bad, but you probably don’t need to be told that cookie butter tastes like gingerbread. What is it with these people? Have they never heard of garlic? Oh, yes, there’s always the bagel seasoning.

Will I go back? Of course. It’s the next best thing to visiting a street market in Morocco. Besidesnow I understand the origins of the word “gingerly,” which means to do something with extreme caution.

It Takes So Little . . .

Posted on Friday, July 27, 2018 2:46 PM

I was not having a particularly good day today. A brief rain shower had simply turned the world into a steam bath, I've been a little under the weather with a stomach bug, and now I was whittling away at a growing list of chores. The proofs of my new book were waiting at home, begging for me to finish the careful line-editing they needed. I had spend too long standing in lines at the bank and the post office. And now, here I was, standing in another long checkout line at the grocery store.

As the cashier started to sort through and unload my cart in some sort of order known only to her frowning concentration, I could tell that the little old lady behind me was staring intently at my purchases. Now, you need to know two things before you judge what happened:

(1) I'm a little old lady, too. We were both pushing eighty, so you can't accuse me of being "age-ist."

(2) I had the requisite items in there--eggs, zucchini, corn, bread, Ritz crackers, applesauce, peanut butter, bananas--boring stuff--maybe not entirely virtuous but reasonably healthy.

When she caught my eye, she grinned and put her hand on my shoulder:

SHE: "I like your shopping list--wine and cookies--all the necessities."

ME: "And cat food--don't forget the cat food."

SHE: "Absolutely! Life's good!"

And she high-fived me. As our hands met over our heads, i could see that everyone around us was smiling--cashier, bag-girl, customers. My day got better from then on.

Finishing a Book Is Harder Than It Sounds

Posted on Sunday, July 12, 2015 7:08 PM

It was 97 degrees in Memphis today -- the best reason I can think of to spend the day writing. I started around 8:30, finished at 5:00, and proudly recorded over 2400 words for the day. But those words came at a cost. My first discovery was that in my diligent efforts to write every day of NaNoWriMo Summer Camp, I had inadvertently lost some people. Friends? No, characters. It's easy to get tied up in a dramatic moment and concentrate on the main characters.

In this case, however, those main characters have seven children, and one can't just abandon seven children to take a trip or move a house. They either had to go along or find themselves in a situation where they were not being abandoned in the middle of a street. Some were easy. I sent 2 young men, ages 20 and 22, off to college. But others needed to be a part of the story. i did a lot of re-writing and inserting there for a while.

The other discovery was that my estimate of needing just 22,000 words to reach the end of the book was pretty far from accurate. My finished NaNoWriMo count is now 20,464, and I still have to move a household, establish a school, save a politician from a rabid mob bend to keeping him from making a campaign speech, create a new breed of horse, and take the whole bunch of characters out to one of my favorite spots in all of South Carolina for a lecture on what the Civil War and its aftermath has done to this family. That's not going to happen in less than 1600 words. I've now upped my project goal to 25,000 words, but I don't know if even that increase will be enough.

How will I know when it's done? When most of the problems are solved and all the questions have been answered, and all the characters are accounted for, one way or another. You may now start an office pool, if you like, to guess how many words I'll end up with.

In other news, just two brief reports:

(1) Toronto's dead raccoon has been given a decent cremation and Animal Control officers have been told to speed up their response times.

(2) The Memphis Monkey was caught, examined by a vet, pronounced healthy, and put back in his overnight house, while zoo keepers try to figure out how he escaped in the first place. As i listened to tonight's "60 Minutes" I was struck by the similarities to the story of an escaped Mexican drug cartel kingpin. But please note: Zimm the Macacque got out first!

Eleven Months and Counting!

Posted on Monday, July 06, 2015 4:44 PM

There's a new hot water-maker in my house. It's one of those tankless jobs that only heats the water when you turn it on. At first I was rather suspicious of the idea -- sounded like it would take a long time to get the hot water flowing. But it's amazingly fast, and I've noticed a significant drop on the utility bill, now that we're not paying for energy to keep 30 gallons of water hot when it's not needed.

So that's all good. It was installed around the first of August last year, so there's been plenty of time to work out all the kinks and problems, if there had been any. But there were no kinks and problems. Everything is fine.

Right? Nope! Enter the local Code Enforcer. The tank was installed by a plumber. The gas company had to install a new kind of meter. And the city had to sign off on the whole job to be sure we're not going to blow up the whole neighborhood. Installation of the non-tank took several hours. The gas company changed out the meter while I went to the grocery store and left the gas turned off. And the city? Well, they still haven't signed off. It's been eleven months since they were notified that the job was ready for inspection.

The problem is not that they haven't showed up. The guy in charge has been here so many times that we're on a first -name basis. But he always finds some little problem. Sometimes he comes without calling and leaves a notice on my door that I am "not in compliance" because the project has to be approved within 180 days. On other days, he fusses that there is an extra regulator lying on the floor of the attic. Is it a necessary part of the installation? No. Then why not pick it up? Because it doesn't belong to him. Then why not just leave it there? Because the plumber needs to come get it and give it back to the gas company. But the gas company says it's not theirs and they don't want it. The plumber sends a new guy out to get it, but he weighs 400 pounds and can't climb the flimsy little pull-down ladder that leads to the attic.

And so it goes. On and On and On. Today was visit # 17 in the process. This plumber said "Oh, yes, I know where that regulator goes. It needs to be installed." He had to go for parts, turn the gas off, install the regulator, get the gas turned back on, check the system -- another day's work, all while I'm trying to write. So now it's fixed? Well, that will be up to the Code Enforcer, who will have to schedule another visit to see if he likes it. It would have been easier to dig a well!

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daily drama

Preparing Gingerly for My First Trader Joe’s Visit

It Takes So Little . . .

Finishing a Book Is Harder Than It Sounds

Eleven Months and Counting!