Daily Archives: 29 July 2007

Shopping in the Rain

by

It doesn’t have quite the same ring as “Singing in the Rain” but we weren’t feeling sing-y as much as chatty today. We slept late. Well, sort of. It’s all relative. When you go to bed at 3 AM, sleeping til noon isn’t really sleeping late. It is, after all, a mere eight hours. We just…don’t live an 8-5 life. Never have. Don’t really ever want to.

So we went to Cracker Barrel for breakfast food in the afternoon – because breakfast food always tastes better the later in the day that you eat it, so long as it’s cooked fresh at that moment. We then crawled along I-20 to PetSmart, dodging morons who apparently have no recollection of last month, because they were all driving as if rain was something new and unexpected. Okay, it was fairly heavy rain, but still.

After PetSmart, we went to Tom Thumb. Our neighborhood, Westchester, is a planned community where all the stores are twinned. So one side of the street has a grocery store, drug store, gas station, dry cleaner, and a couple chain restaurants, and the other has the same stuff, different brands. Fuzzy prefers Albertsons, because he knows their layout. I prefer Tom Thumb, owned by Safeway, because they have better meat and produce. Seriously better. So I have salmon fillets and an ahi tuna steak and ground turkey breast, and a massive amount of seedless grapes. Grapes and cherries are like candy to me these days. This week, I’m eating green grapes and red cherries.

Albertson’s has cheaper floral arrangements. With a club card, you get three bunches for $10. Tom Thumb has larger bunches, ranging from $5 – $8. I came home with a bunch of yellow daisies, a bunch of long-stem red carnations, and a bunch of red mini-stem carnations. I’ll mix all three, and fill three or four vases. They go in the living room, my office, my downstairs desk (where the MacBook is residing for a bit) and the kitchen table, in that order. I love fresh flowers. I would rather have fresh flowers in my house than designer coffee in a cup in my hand. Truly.

But I have both, actually, because we stopped at Starbucks for a sugar-free nonfat vanilla latte, and so I shall spend the evening watching Shark videos and readig the Sunday paper, and sipping coffee while a gentle rain falls outside.

Life is good.

It Happens Every Summer

by

Today is the beginning of the Discovery Channel’s SHARK WEEK. I’ve been a fan of this week of summer since they began it, though it used to air closer to my birthday, in mid-August, rather than at the end of July. I guess they figured out that no one’s around in August – it’s sort of the desert of the calendar.

As I write this, I’m watching footage of divers swimming with giant manta rays off the coast of Baja California Sur. The narrator has a slight…not a lisp exactly…but he speaks as if his tongue and teeth are too large for his mouth.

I don’t know WHY I’m drawn to sharks. Maybe because I feel the pull of the ocean in my blood, maybe because they’re such elegant creatures. Simple. Direct. They don’t go through any great machinations, they just swim, eat, and breed. It’s sort of refreshing.

There is, of course, the element of horror mythology. Sharks are scary in a primal way, because being eaten is one of the worst ways we can imagine meeting death. Especially when you’re being eaten alive.

And then, I feel for sharks because people seem to always want to kill them, and I always root for the underdog, even if the underdog is really a fish. They’re animals. It’s not like they’re sitting off-shore going, “Hmm, let’s go snack on people today.” It’s pretty obvious that they wouldn’t be sinking their teeth into human flesh if we weren’t taking over, and destroying, their environment.

But anyway, it’s Shark Week, beginning today, and that means a week of fascination and of wishing my pool was really wet entry to the ocean, and of being inspired by endless hours of silvery fish swimming across a blue screen.