Despite James soothing me back to sleep when he woke me while getting ready for work this morning, I slept badly the rest of the time and did not feel very refreshed upon rising. It was 9 a.m. and the temp was soaring already into the 80s; I went out to refill the bird feeders and put the new one out and was nearly smothered.

James mentioned going grocery shopping after supper; since it would be even hotter at six, the very thought was nauseating and repugnant. So I got dressed, grabbed the coupons, and headed out for some redistribution of wealth as well as weight training. :-) Made a quick stop at Lowes for more safflower seed and ended up getting all my birdseed there, then maneuvered so that CVS and Food Lion would next come up on my right. Was astonished to find no large bobby pins in CVS. Regular size ones will not hold my hair up.

I had a single reason to go into Food Lion: I like to have some of the Campbell's "Soup at Hand" containers available for quick meals. But neither the Kroger nor Publix we go to stock my favorite flavor, the vegetable with mini-noodles. This is what irritates me so much about grocery shopping: I have to go to multiple stores to find what I want. Only Walmart has the turkey Jimmy Dean breakfast sandwiches made with egg and not egg white. Only Kroger has the bread I like. Only Publix—and only the Publix on Johnson Ferry!—has small size low-carb whole-wheat tortillas. And only the Food Lion has the vegetable with mini-noodles. I am hoping when the big new Kroger opens just down the road from us in the fall that some of this nonsense will stop.

However, the stop at Food Lion was fortuitous: I found seedless grape at 99¢/pound, Jello sugar-free pudding on sale, Hebrew National Franks on buy-one-get-one, and Rachael Ray dog food well discounted (Willow is now sick of "Lassie food" and has adopted RR's dog food as her new favorite). The Soup at Hand was on sale, too, and I found one more thing: Hormel prepared meats at $5 each. Usually we keep some of these on hand for Sundays when we are too lazy to cook. But with Memorial Day weekend coming up, I have declared this pseudo-vacation week, "pseudo" because we still have to go to work. But James shall have a vacation from heavy-duty cooking this week; all we'll have to do is fix a veggie or something simple like Ramen noodles as a side, and over the weekend we'll eat out.

There weren't twofers worth stopping for at Publix, so I popped in Walgreens—no large bobby pins there, either! Ye Gods, will I be reduced to searching the internet? I confess that I didn't stop at Rite-Aid because I was getting decidedly light-headed from not having had breakfast yet. Instead I stopped for gasoline at the Kroger pumps (yay, 3.76⁹ with my card) and then finished the essential shopping: milk, yogurt, bread (bakery fresh), apple juice via James' request, and some odd things, and was home well before 11:30. I've done a few smidges of housework, had one of the soups with half of a Portuguese roll for "brunch," rearranged the books in my to-be-read piles, and am now entering the last third of The Mistaken Wife (French spies have now come to the fore). Schuyler's sitting near me on the sofa and the History Channel is murmuring softly in the background.

I am happy: the birds have accepted the new feeder first thing. Usually they give a new one the gimlet eye before condescending to eat from it.

Labels: books, food, pets, shopping, weather

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 2:22:00 PM

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