6/30/07 UPDATE: Information on the veggie booty recall is at WebMD and at the corporate web site.
I've had an uneven weekend. Some animal has been crapping on my front lawn every morning. The craps are smaller than a dog's and larger than a cat's. The culprit is almost certainly the fat bastard living behind my garage. Not knowledgable in the ways of suburban members of the rodent family, I can't tell you what it is. A woodchuck, a muskrat, a craprat, who the hell knows.
On Saturday night, in a cheap ploy to get out of the nighttime routine, I volunteered to run out to do the week's grocery shopping. "This the BEST time to go. Really. Don't forget to read Jonah three stories. Bye."
Then for some reason, the Shop Rite threw me into a fit of depression. It's huge. Three times the size of what we were used to back in the city. The trouble is that I don't want to buy anything in the place. They have Wonder Bread, but not crunchy, crusty, Manor Loafs. They have 27 varieties of baked beans in a can, but only one kind of soy sauce. The cheese comes in individually wrapped slices.
(OK. I'm showing my snobby city side now. I aspire to be a populist, but when it comes to food, I'm an elitist snob. I can't help it.)
A short trip from our old place in Manhattan was the Fairway. I've been mourning my separation from the foodie mecca all weekend. It was a fraction of the size of the Shop Rite, but it had all the best stuff. They saved a lot of room by cutting out the Wonder Bread and having less varieties of sliced pickles and baked beans. Like a city street, the aisles twist and turn, and there is always too much traffic at the deli section. In the produce section, there is a mountain of mesclun, an organic area, and a bushel of fresh basil. By the deli, they have an olive bar, three variety of heavily herbed chickens, bagels that are bagels (not rolls with holes in the center), and a huge cheese section. 100 variety of cheeses are available -- goat cheese, feta, fresh mozzarella tied up in bags, obscure moldy cheese that fermented under some French guy's armpit for two years. And meat, fish, and dairy is in a walk-in freezer. You and your kids put on communal coats before entering to buy extra firm tofu and organic yogurt. Everything looks so fresh and exotic that you're immediately inspired to try out the recipe from the Sunday Times. Shop Rite only inspires me to nuke some frozen pizza.
Steve mowed the lawn for the first time. Big huge manly grin on his face the whole time. Flash to the scene in the John Hughes's flop She's Having a Baby, where the suburban men do a synchronized dance while mowing their lawns.
We spent the day pruning back the overgrown yard, taking down an old fence, and watching the kids ride their bikes on the street. Later, we grilled hamburgers on a $8 charcoal grill.
If we could just catch the crapping bandit and find some arugula, life would be good.