This Week...

Another trip to the fair, and this time we got brave enough to actually enter the avocado fudge booth....sadly, no free samples, and it turns out the fudge is NOT avocado flavored--it's chocolate--and the avocado merely performs the dull and somewhat lackluster duty of 'moistening' the fudge. Humorless signs in bold print told us so. I guess the people working the booth had had enough of people who had juuuust enough beer in 'em to be 'Sparklingly Brilliant' stopping by to make witty comments.

Dang. Missed out again.

N. did score a huge stuffed cobra colored a bright blue with, oddly enough, red flames. She rode rides to her heart's content and we ran into our friend John, the hairdresser who had disappeared about a year ago. To our surprise he told us that he was now owner of the salon and had two more opening up. He had his fiance and her daughter with her, and they looked happy and healthy. It's nice to run into old friends and find them content and successful.

Also on the plus side, tonight I went to a different supermarket, Ralph's. I got fed up with the local Stater Brothers. On a recent trip there the whole market smelled. I mean, it smelled BAD. A friend of mine, whose ex-hubby was in the supermarket management biz, told us that this particular smell is the scent of maggots. Oh, joy. To make matters worse, when I opened the milk cooler I was actually assualted by the smell of sour milk. Double joy. The place was also so picked over, non-stocked or stocked with 100 boxes of the same item, that I asked the two teenage girls lounging behind the deli counter if the store was closing. No, they said, blinking at me dully. The shelves looked like shoppers had stripped them in preparation for a natural disaster. To top it off, we found a block of cheese that had expired FIVE YEARS AGO. So when I went through the checkout I gifted the cashier with the fossilized cheese and informed her of the horrible smells, to which she said offhandedly, "Oh yeah, we need to hire a new janitor." I told her if I was the manager and MY store smelled that bad, I would grab a mop myself and have a go at it.

So, much as I hate learning the new layout, new store. Clean! Bright! Well-stocked! Absence of weird/funky/dead thing smells and creepy science project petrified foodstuffs! I'm happy. What gave me a giggle today was the sign over one of the aisles....yes, it's true..."New Age Soda"! A WHOLE AISLE! Only in California, I snickered. By the way, 'New Age soda' is apparantly anything made by Sobe, Powerade or any variation of flavored/carbonated water.

The other fun thing is the new song my five year old daughter is singing....a la K.C. and the Sunshine Band, that immortal hit from the '70's--(in ohsocute young child voice) "Shake, shake, shake...shake, shake, shake...shake your buddha...shake your buddha..."

Hell NO, I'm not going to correct her! Just as I'm not going to correct her calling her belly button a 'bee butt'.

The mental imagery is just beyond wonderful.