Baby Consumers

Gainesville

Today was supposedly vacation. And what did I do? For the most part, same thing as I did yesterday-- read about comics (the wonderful Hatfield Alternative Comics) and work on organizing my comics-related collection, which is looking very good indeed. Spent a little time on home Blessings, though more is needed, especially hot spot control.

Bill has made great progress getting our AV system functional again. We now have TiVo back, plus the DVD player. If I'm still awake when I finish this, I'll take advantage of the latter and watch an episode of Battlestar Galactica on the big (all of 27"!) screen for the first time. I also have lined up Neil's fantasy drama, MirrorMask, and Norman's surprise gift, BBC's Eroica. Then on to the rest of the huge backlog of movies and TV shows. An embarrassment of riches. Anyway, this leaves just a VCR and the feed into the kitchen TV to go, and we're completely back in business.

Haven't faced up to next week's menu plan, because-- well, what's the rush? I have all next week to figure it out and go to the store as needed, plus I want to go through FC and pick out a few things to make and... Bzzzz! WRONG! This is a bad way to look at it, I know. I need to keep to the cooking routine that works. Making basic decisions in advance saves a world of hurt later in the week. I will do it in the morning, and go out shopping in the afternoon as usual. Need to make a liquor run and a Best Buy run too.

While I'm thinking of it-- does anyone out there have any suggestions for what to do with whiting filets? I have some frozen-- they turned out to be relatively little fish, and I don't have good ideas about how to deal with them.

Enjoyed last night's details about the original Rancho shops, and who owned them. I'd forgotten the drug store started out as Clifford's. And how nice to remember Tony and Bill at the "Bottle Shop". It was a kinder and gentler time, when kids could actually go into liquor stores without people getting hysterical about it. And the little restaurant was named "Barbara's" -- of course! Sweet memories of discovering cherry cokes, lemon cokes, chocolate cokes, vanilla cokes, and the grand slam combo, suicide cokes! All to be accompanied by french fries, if possible. They had great burgers, too. A nice little upscale greasy spoon.

Rancho was where we kids learned to be consumers. It was like a miniature town, on a scale we could deal with, walk around in and feel safe. We learned what a given amount of money would buy. Prior to that, the only independent shopping I remember doing was in downtown Los Altos, walking from San Antonio school to Girl Scouts meetings. There was some sort of candy store we stopped at and spent our precious pennies-- they actually bought things back in those days. That, and candy/popcorn purchases at the movies.

'Nuffa this. And probably too late to think about watching DVD's. Time to kick my [lace-up] shoes off, do not fear, and bring that bottle over here...