back in the saddle again

Hidey-ho, neighbor! (as Mr. Hanky would say)

I'm back from my sojourn in the Old World, where I had a great couple of months -- but I'm happy to be home. All hail John and Ed, who kept the lights on here at the blog! (And I hope they'll both agree to continue as co-bloggers.)

The first (blog-relevant) thing I did when I got home was to go grocery shopping. K. on his own has a rather different diet than when I'm here, so the larder needed restocking.

Many stops and forays later, I have two grave observations:

1. The vegetables may be a better deal at our Stater Brothers, but the bread sure ain't. The same loaf of mass-market seven-grain bread costs $4.19 on Garey Ave. and $2.99 (NOT on sale) at the Baseline Von's. That's a 40% poverty tax, unless Mnemosyne has robbed me of my arithmetic micropowers. Harrumph.

2. The carniceria on the corner of Indian Hill and Arrow has closed! Now, there's only one thing I ever bought there, but that was an important thing: BEER. They had a pretty excellent selection of non-clear beers, and the prices were decent as well.

Where are we gonna buy our beer now? The stuff at Trader Joe's is skunked half the time, and at BevMo it's skunked even more often than that (plus BevMo has pissed me off with their wine bait-and-switches a few too many times). Sure, you can get a twelver of Full Sail or Sierra Nevada at the supermarkets, but that's pretty much your choice unless you yearn for yellow.

Where does Lincoln Park buy its beer?

At this point it will be obvious that K. and I -- economic refugees from NorCal -- do not subscribe to the philosophy behind the LA Beer Curse found in local restaurants: twenty lagers and a Guinness.

For the frontispiece, I wanted a photo of someone kneeling in the dirt with a desperate look on his/her face, shaking a fist at the skies, but when an image search for "damn you" returned a fridge full of beer, I took at as a sign from above.