greetings from the temple of smoked meats

As you may have guessed, we're absorbed with holiday shenanigans and then some -- and on top of it all, I leave tomorrow for 10 days up in the holler to see my mother through surgery. Yes, I'm from Appalachia, and we pronounce that Apple-LATCHa, thankyouverymuch.

At the moment, in fact, we are in beautiful sunny northeastern Ohio. Not so much with the sunny.

K and I volunteered to cook supper for the family tonight (latkes, smoked sausage, and blintzes with cherry sauce for dessert), so we headed off the supermarket ("the Click") -- and that's what I'm here to write about.

You know I have elaborate opinions about grocery shopping around Pomona, and I don't exactly suspend judgment when I'm away from home. And shopping at the Click was an eye-opening experience: Don't tell me that modern communications have smoothed out geographical differences.

Our list: Lemon, a fresh veg for dinner, smoked sausage, beer, snacks, and ice cream.

Grab a basket
I now remember that when we moved to California 13 years ago, I found the grocery aisles awfully cramped, and the horizontal aisle (the cashier-line overflow lane) most of all. I had forgotten about that, but the Click reminded me in a big way. Such vast expanses! I felt like I was strolling a linoleum prairie.

Pick up a lemon
Then there are the differences dictated by climate -- otherwise known as the produce section. It's just inside the door, like at the Von's and Albertson's on Foothill, but keep an eye out, because if you blink, you'll miss it. There's a decent supply of apples, but the citrus section was almost exactly the same size as the trunk of a Miata -- and it contained peaches (at $5.29/lb.) as well as oranges, limes, and lemons. What's that you say -- you want grapefruit? Tough luck. Here, have a single lime for $1.99. Welcome to the Frozen North!

What veg do you want for dinner, honey?
The green veg display was a mixed bag. The zucchini looked pretty good ($1.99/lb.), as did the green beans ($2.99), although there was only a mixing-bowl's worth of them. I spotted two, count 'em, TWO crowns (not bunches) of broccoli, to K's relief -- he does not share my adoration of the broccoli (rhymes with "Adoration of the Magi," of course).

Arugula, to my surprise, was well represented -- on the herb rack, in one-ounce blister-packs, as if we would need no more than a tablespoon, minced finely. And one ounce was $1.99, just like the 14-oz. bags we buy for salad at Trader Joe's.

Where do you think smoked sausage would be?
Other differences are dictated by demographics, and things look considerably brighter here. As you probably know, northeastern Ohio is dominated by Slavs of various nationalities, and boy howdy does ontogeny recapitulate phylogeny.

Back in Cali, smoked sausage resides in between the bacon and the hot dogs in the run-down suburbs of the meat counter. But in Slavlandia, cured meat products have the whole back of the store, with separate signs in giant letters reading BACON and FRANKS and SMOKED SAUSAGE, the way that our stores have signs that read "Produce" and "Dairy." As K marveled, "We truly are in the temple of smoked meats."

Hey, we need beer!
We moved to Cali from Georgia, where we couldn't buy beer on sunday or after 11pm, so we thought we'd died and gone to heaven when it came to beer. Anchor Steam! Pete's Wicked! Imports in every store!

But in fact we don't know from beer compared to northeastern Ohio. They have such an amazing selection of local beers here, I almost passed out. When I mentioned it to K's mother, she scoffed and told me that the other store has a much better selection.

Your mom wanted snacks
We did get potato chips as commanded, but while wandering the aisles, we saw a container of sauerkraut balls. Both K and I are krautophiles -- we looked at one another, and no one even needed to say, "Are you pondering what I'm pondering, Pinky?" Into the basket they went. (In the event, they weren't half as good as the sauerkraut cakes I make from scratch.)

Um, don't need wine
On the other hand, this ain't no wine heaven. Barefoot Red was $10.99, I kid you not. There's no Trader Joe's around here, but if there was, I bet they'd sell Eight-Buck Chuck.

We should get the ice cream last
Just as one outer wall was devoted to smoked meats, the whole right wall of the store was lined with ice cream coolers. Slavlandia clearly loves its ice cream, because each brand had several sizable cases and a big sign overhead -- and a dozen brands we'd never heard of, many of which are local premium creameries. (We still got Haagen Dazs, to be safe.)

All done
After having checked out, we passed a large table of marked-down Christmas items. I think we both deserve voluminous praise from all quarters for having resisted the temptation to buy My First Drumkit for the niece and neph -- but every child we know gets a drum from us sooner or later.

keeping up with the pomones

Everyone else has been blogging about last night's city council meeting and the fracas between Mayor Norma Torres and Police Chief Joe Romero, and I refuse to be left out.

Not that I went to the council meeting. I wanted to, I tried to, but a bottle of wine with a colleague was too tempting, especially as I won't be seeing her for a good long while. Go ahead, mock me.

But I do have something to say. When the fracas first came to our attention, I wrote to Mayor Torres expressing my disappointment -- an actual paper letter, since those tend to carry more weight with elected officials than emails that take 30 seconds to dash off. Supposedly, anyway; I have yet to receive any reply at all (surprise, surprise).

Yesterday morning, I sent email to each of our city council members, saying this:

Just a quick note to express my strong support for Joe Romero. I'll do
my best to come to tonight's council meeting, but in case I don't make
it, I wanted to let you know how disappointed I am in the Mayor's recent
behavior in this matter, including her letter to the *Daily Bulletin*
yesterday.

Please join me in supporting the police chief!

Thanks very much -- and keep on doing a great job!

I got a nice reply from Paula Lantz within the hour. She can't possibly remember me from our brief meeting back in august, but she certainly wrote a nice personal letter -- matching my rhetoric and responding directly to my note.

Then, this afternoon, I got email from George Hunter, reporting on what happened last night. Without his permission, I won't post his reply, but it was personal and specific, and I was generally quite satisfied.

No word from the other council members with published email addresses (one doesn't have email, it appears).

For some reason, the first hit I got on the phrase "city council" was for Lubbock, Texas, where I was conceived (so I am told). I wonder why Lubbock tops the list, above the councils of larger and flashier municipalities?

animal planet

I spent enough time in Central and South American in my wayward youth to recognize the sound of a flock of parakeets before I saw the 100+ green bellies overhead. It's quite a racket, and full of menace, like some flying threat out of Harry Potter. All the cats ran for cover the moment they heard it.

My neighbor says that the flock of parakeets hangs out in the LP every year about this time, for a couple of weeks. She thinks they spend the rest of their time in Arcadia. Does anyone know more about them?

It is amazing to me that such a bizarre animal -- garish, noisy, and cheeky -- does so well in the non-native wild. There are escapee flocks in Austin and San Francisco, and probably plenty of other places as well.

Switching from the avidae to the felidae, the stray-cat situation is I think pretty much under control. Yesterday morning I trapped Wombat (the stray mom) and took her to the vet for spaying. Goodbye, $125. In the afternoon, I trapped the friendliest of the kittens and took her in for similar treatment when I picked mom up. Luckily, my neighbor is going to pay when she picks it up and takes it home this afternoon.

We still need to catch and spay the last two kittens, but my most serious cat concern is taken care of: After seeing me put Mom in a box and then Sister in a box, the kittens want nothing to do with me, our porch, or Voiceover. For his part, Voiceover is much, much calmer.

mid-week update

So, I called the city this morning about a composting program. The person on the phone was quite friendly and gave me the phone number of the head honcho, except that she is out with the flu or a bad cold (interlocutor wasn't sure which but said that boss was really miserable yesterday). More info to come.

I never did find a home for the kittens, although I found a home for the mom. They are now at the obnoxious-teenager stage, which is starting to annoy Voiceover (our cat). In order to avoid dealing with them, Voiceover either wants to stay indoors or lights out for the frontier across the street (where he scraps with various adult cats).

Clearly, this cannot be borne; the kittens must go, and before they start spawning. I called six different pet-rescue places this morning, and none of them have space. I have advertised at work, twisted friends' arms, put ads in the Recycler and Craigslist, and been generally obnoxious to everyone. The only thing I haven't done is take them to the Farmers Market and sit next to the bouncy house and the coloring-book station, and I'm afraid that if I do that, my friends with kids will never speak to me again.

Do I take them to the pound and hope for the best? Call animal control? What's a meg to do?

give us our daily bread

I haven't yet managed to call the city to find out if they'd be interested in some help to get a composting program off the gound, but I'll report back when I have.

In the meantime, it must be time for a food post, since M-M-M-My Pomona seems to oscillate back and forth between neighborhood agitation and dining reports.

For this dining report, we head back to Claremont, and indeed, the new mall, as I have been to le Pain Quotidien twice this week. As you may know, it is a chain, based in Belgium and with outlets in France, Kuwait, Lebanon, Russia, the UK, and NYC. I'd give it pretty good odds of lasting, although it's imperfect. (I refer here to an anonymous comment a few months ago hypothesizing that 60% of the businesses in the new mall will be closed in a year.)

The main thing you must know about le Pain Quotidien is that it is PRRRRRRRICY. Most of the things I had were good, but it was still a bit of a rip-off. The coffee is good (not quite as good as Some Crust's, but better than Starbuck's), but it is $2.85 for 11 oz. The hot chocolate is tasty, but a small will run you $4.15. The pastries are $3.75, and you'll drop $5 for a cup of soup and $7 for a bowl. Meanwhile, the service is friendly but inexperienced, which I know will come as an enormous surprise to you. (There are a couple of exceptions: You'll see waiters moonlighting from the Press and Casablanca.)

In general, le PainQuot seems to be imposing a preciousness surcharge, and judging by the custom this week, it looks like they can get away with it. I was pretty disappointed in the Jambon de Paris sandwich, but everything else I had was good, and I've had good reports from friends. In the late afternoon, it's a nice place to read or write Christmas cards, and I don't mind paying a salubrious-environment surcharge, so I'll go back. But it won't be often, unless my employer gives me a 10% COCLA (Cost of Café Living Allowance).

fish fry: worst or first?

I'm spinning the comments from the previous post off into a separate post, because it's a theoretical issue rather than having anything to do with compost (although my inner anarchist notes that discussing governments always involves large amounts of compost). Namely, should the city address problems on a worst-come-first-served basis or in a more distributed fashion, working on a selection of bad and not-so-bad problems that cause both a spot of bother for middle-class residents and serious harm for the city's poorest?

Anonymous wrote yesterday, in part:

Sorry for the rant, and I do agree the city has "larger fish to fry" than composters, but it's a start. Shouldn't it be in a city where the average resident would never contemplate a Smith & Hawken composter, that the city actually makes it happen.

I may be taking this post farther than Meg intended, but should we really be arguing for mediocrity? Can this city move forward if it never looks beyond those "few other problems"?

An excellent question (and, Anonymous, you can hijack the comments any time). I see both sides of the issue, to be sure. On one hand, it really is bogus for me to be whining for a composter when babies are being shot on our streets and the median family income is $12,000 below the national median, even though our cost-of-living index is so much higher.

On the other hand, addressing our effete middle-class concerns surely makes Pomona a more attractive place to move for other effete bourgeoisie, who will then get involved and work to improve the town for everybody. I'd also argue that on average, the middle class is less easily intimidated by city hall, so a strong bourgeois presence may agitate toward improved, more transparent city governance.

That class question cuts both ways, it seems to me. Who am I to demand the city buy me a fancy-schmancy Smith & Hawken composter? But then who am I to say that composting is a middle-class issue?

BTW, Anonymous -- and all your anonymous comrades out there (if any)... I would take it as a great favor if you'd end your comments with a pseudonym, just so I know which anonymous poster said what. You don't have to -- keep commenting, in any case -- but it would help build community if we had some name, any name, to attach to a given comment. It would be nice to be able to tell Conan The Librarian apart from Captain Underpants.

compost redux

Several people -- not just Ed in his recent comment -- have expressed Santa Monica envy re the discounted composters. One pal even wondered if he could bribe K into picking up one for him (and then said, "Oh, I guess I oughta return his cds before I ask a favor like that.")

Maybe I'll call up the city tomorrow and see what it would take to get something like that started for Pomona. I gather that it's a special deal with S&H, as a number of municipalities around the country have the exact same pricing structure.

I think we'd absolutely have to have the non-resident boost, since all the Claremonters will be swarming city hall asking for their Smith & Hawkenware. But there are worse things than Pomona earning a reputation as the greenest town in the Pomona Valley -- without going so far as to astroturf public lands. Talk about the tragedy of the commons!

happier than a pig in shit

The Santa Monica city government has a special deal: For $25, city residents can get a fancy-schmancy Smith & Hawken biostack composting unit. The best part of the deal is that for a mere $10 more, non-residents can get one too. So a few weeks ago, K. picked one up for us on his lunch hour.

It was dead easy to put together, and since then we have been getting our compost on quite happily. I feel mildly guilty about having the mow-and-blow guys (whom we inherited from the previous owner), but the fact is, without them, composting would be more of a challenge: We have no trouble collecting the kitchen scraps that can't be used for stock, but raking leaves (read: carbon sources for the compost) is pretty much beyond us. Yeah, we're capable, but it ain't never gonna happen.

But thanks to the mow-and-blow guys, we always have a bin full of leaves and clippings to toss into the compost bin with the eggshells, squash rinds, and limp greens. And when I say "toss," I mean with a shovel and (meager) upper-body strength (yeah, so says the woman who can't lift a hand to rake the yard).

The results have been pretty amazing. In less than a month, all of our kitchen leavings and yard scrapings have generated a pile of stuff that is well on its way to earning its compost certificate. Before I left on my business trip, there was a two-foot-high pile of multicolored gunk, but when I got back, it was only a foot high and all brown, with a pretty consistent texture, smelling vaguely of garden. It's a miracle!

Pretty soon the question is going to be what to do with the compost. We can put some on the roses, and of course my container garden, but I don't see any point to fertilizing the grass. If you need compost, drop us a line!

one tree, two tree, dead tree, blue tree

I thought K. might wade in to post some Pomoniana while I'm off on a business trip, but I see that I'll have to do it myself (said the Little Red Hen). Three cheers for Marriott's free wireless!

I learned something on this trip: When a fruit tree is dying, it puts out one last enormous crop of fruit before it gives up the ghost, called a "distress crop." The moment I heard this, I knew that was what went on with our plum tree this summer. The guy who was telling me about it said that often the crop is so big, it breaks branches (check), and the fruit, while plenteous, isn't very sweet (check).

Dawn Van Allen pointed out that the tree wasn't long for this world when she was over in September, and now it really shows. One whole portion of the tree is bare and dead, and the gems of crystalized sap that dot the bark are of increasingly-large carat. Once the hustle and bustle of Thanksgiving (the first time we will have had the table pulled out to its full length in the new house!) is over, we definitely need to make an appointment with Tracy the Alpinist-Arborist.

Pomona, city of mystery

Lincoln Park residents know Crime Corner well: Garey and Alvarado. The Stater Brothers is home to drug-dealers and general no-goodniks; the methadone house draws former sinners that could go off the rails at any moment; and the Auto-Lodge features more peignoir-clad ladies lounging in doorways at mid-day than is quite proper even in a Tennessee Williams play.

Now I've noticed something else -- Avarice to add to the Lust, Sloth, and Gluttony that we pass by every day.

Namely, why is the Philips 66 charging 11¢ more per gallon than any other station? K. -- who takes his motor sports seriously -- hasn't heard anything about P66 being special as gas goes. The station itself is as grubby as you would expect of Crime Corner. And yet self-serve unleaded was $3.37 yesterday.

If it was a front for drug-dealing, I would think the prices would be normal, in order to promote enough honest traffic to cover for the dishonest (à la dry-cleaners and copy shops). I hardly think it's a crypto-bordello, despite all the promising jokes about putting a tiger in your tank (if you're old enough to remember the old Esso ads) -- a gas station doesn't really provide much privacy to get your happy ending on. I just can't figure it out.

Any hypotheses out there? And failing that, any suggestions for how Crime Corner can cover the other three cardinal sins (wrath, envy, and pride, in case you've shaken off your parochial-school training)?

(com)post

If you live in SoCal and have a hankering for a composter, the city of Santa Monica is here to help. For $35 ($25 if you actually live in Santa Monica), they'll give you a Smith & Hawken Biostack composting unit. This weekend I had every intention of making my own (after buying a plastic garbage bin and a 1/2" hole bit for the electric drill), but I could spend that time better on other things. Esp. since K volunteered to pick up the composter on his lunch hour.

Today's tasks: Cut down the volunteer ficus tree that is currently where we want the composter to be (Dawn Van Allen recommended taking it down anyway); put together the composter; load her up; and clean off the porch railing where one of the pumpkins has left its rotting spew.

Woo hoo, Fish Fry!

I've been happily following along in David Allen's blog as he explores Pomona's dining possibilities. He just finished singing the praises of the Pomona Fish Market, which sounded like a pretty fun, low-key kinda place.

Meg & I tried cruising by last week, fairly late, only to find the place closed, and the bar next door chock o' block with a bunch of motorcyclists, with bikes lined up and down the road for quite a ways. Cool, but not scratchin' my fried-fish itch.

We headed down Friday at lunchtime, out-of-town guest in tow. The place was nothing fancy, but was reasonably friendly. It took 'em about 10 minutes to fry up our fish to order from the huge front case, and deliver them on plastic plates with plastic forks ("No knives! No knives!").

We had oysters, sand dabs (with bones), and snapper, and it all seemed pretty solid. The breading was really thin corn-meal, which was different from both the fish-fries of my southern youth and my more recent encounters with fish and chips at various pubs. I wonder if it just a tradition from another region? The place had a bunch of references to New Orleans, or perhaps the Asian counter-woman had brought it from some other place...

All in all, it was a fun, cheap lunch.

a shout-out to the Brothers

I could start a whole new blog on grocery-shopping in the West Inland Empire, and I'd have posts for at least a year. I may start a "stations of the cross" series, in which your intrepid shopper takes you to her favorite ethnic grocery stores, one per episode.

But that's for another day. Today, I just want to say: However much they suck in other ways (can you say "bread"?), the Stater Brothers on Garey has a great produce section. Sure, it ain't the farmers' market, but they have a decent selection of organics, and they have both vegetables and fruits that the hoity-toity Claremont stores can't be counted on to have (kale, rhubarb, parsnips...). The produce section is clean and attractive, and there's always an employee there, stacking oranges or whatever. And the prices are lower than at the Foothill and Baseline supermarkets.

I'll still visit the ethnic stations of the cross when I can, and we're now hooked up with Tierra Miguel CSA, but when I need a quick punnet of mushrooms or bunch of tatsoi, the Brothers are there for me.

Beware the Lincoln Park axe-murderer!

I am hereby filing formal notification of intention to become a homicidal maniac. It's not my fault, though: I blame one particular wingman of the squadron of ice cream trucks based at 629 Briggs Ave., Ontario.



The one currently parked in front of our house for a cig break.

The one that hasn't bothered to turn of his @#$%$%$¶§ music.

The one that decided today was a great day to run through his entire repertoire of Christmas music.

I'm going now to ask him to either turn off his music or move along, and if he doesn't comply, I'm going to strangle him with my bare hands, after I pummel him to death with my little gnocchi fists and ram popsicle sticks into his eardrums.

Forget bordellos on wheels (does anyone else think of For the Love of Ivy or is it just me?) -- the real menace is ice cream trucks parking on the streets of our neighborhood and increasing the murder rate!

And I'm only half-kidding, in case you're wondering.

recycling ethics

K has a post cooling its heels in the "Draft" penalty box, but until he decides it's fit for general consumption, I thought I'd kvetch about something that has been chipping my paint for some time.

If you're an early riser -- and certainly if your desk looks out onto the street and you try to get a little work done in the quiet of early morning -- you have probably noticed the unprepossessing characters wandering from bin to bin, armed with a garbage bag or shopping cart, into which they toss all the recyclables that can be brought in for cash.

I'm of two minds about this. On one hand, rummaging through trash isn't a fun activity, and if these folks are that down on their luck, then I don't begrudge them the 13¢ they net from our recycling (most of which is paper and wine bottles).

On the other hand, the value they scavenge is taken not from us but from the city; our 13¢ presumably offsets the cost of the recycling program. A recycling program that loses more money than necessary is a bad thing, but a recycling program that is shut down because everything of value is plundered in the dim of dawn, that's a tragedy.

Whaddaya think -- should I sit out on the porch like Granny Clampett[1], rocking, chawin' on my corncob pipe, and shooting at the scavengers with my 30-06?

[1] Yes, I know Granny wasn't a Clampett but a Moses. But if I'd said "Granny Moses," you'd have thought I planned to throw paint at them.

now to clean up all the puke

The pumpkin puke, that is. In addition to the pumpkin with a hatchet in its head, I carved a dyspeptic pumpkin. Not original with me -- our brother-in-law mailed me a photo of a puking pumpkin several years ago, and I've always meant to steal the idea. If Halloween weren't a family holiday, I would have artfully arranged an empty vodka bottle (or ouzo, for an early-autobiographical note...) next to it.

We survived the night pretty well, largely because Mrs. Tiki, Admiral Seamus, and Shhhh came over to help out. Mrs. Tiki brought a tiramisu and a growler of Rogue's Dead Guy Ale, Shhhh brought a bottle of wine, and the admiral brought his mixology A game, so we some some great cocktails to see us through the hordes.

And there were hordes. And more hordes after that. And then a mob, a throng, and a couple of swarms, followed by an onslaught.

We went out for a walk yesterday morning to see the decorations (and these are my two favorites), and we got to talking to a fellow on Lincoln who was putting the final touches on his display. He said he got 800 kids last year -- so we broke out in a run, heading straight for the 99¢ store to get more candy.


In the event, we had enough, but only just. Here's what we started out with (and that's a 10-ream paper box):
and this morning we have about two cups' worth of Tootsie Rolls and a handful of micro-Snickers. At two pieces of candy per person, I'm guessing we had about 300 or 400 visitors.

There were some great costumes -- many bought but some created with a capital C. My favorite, though, was a tiny little girl in a princess outfit... who growled out her "Trick-or-treat!" and "Thank you!" in the scariest voice she could muster. I see a comedian in the making (or else a cultural-studies professor).

we're creepy and we're kooky, we're altogether ooky

We perch on the eve of our first Halloween in Lincoln Park.

If all the decorations didn't tell us that the neighborhood takes the holiday verrrrrrry seriously, our neighbors certainly have. One by one, everyone within a three-house radius has stopped by to warn us to get a lot of candy. No, a LOT. They gesticulate wildly and imitate backing a skip-loader of Mallomars into the driveway.

So, K and I headed down to the 99¢ store to load up on moral decrepitude in edible form. We had a houseguest this weekend who Does Not Approve of candy, and I feel a little guilty about being party to the porkery that is about to ensue. But no way am I going to be one of those killjoys who hands out shiny new pencils (ugh).

Did anyone read the article in yesterday's LAT, in which they interviewed a bunch of professional experts about Halloween? I particularly liked the several who said that with their own kids, they let the little darlings pick out three favorite pieces of candy and then they give the rest away. For one thing, how sadistic. And for another, if candy is so terrible, isn't giving it away even more unethical? If they had the courage of their convictions, they would burn it, in a grand rite (perhaps in the center of Lincoln Park!), wearing appropriate ceremonial garb.

No, it seems obvious that if Halloween has any purpose at all, it is as a reversal holiday, where the lowest on the totem pole spend a day pranking[1] those at the top, like Kalends for the Romans or England's Feast of Fools. It's not a big reversal for the kids so much as it is for the parental control systems: kids may gorge on candy all through the year, but on Halloween, it's with permission. And we all know that kids have a high tolerance for the scary and the gross -- higher than adults' tolerance by far -- but on Halloween, parents allow the love of the ooky to show itself.

Oh yeah, about the 99¢ stores: We checked out both the one on Foothill (between Towne and Garey) and the one at the corner of Towne and Arrow, and I'm here to report that the latter outstrips the former by several furlongs. At the Foothill store, we only found one bag of acceptable candy whose expiration date was in the future -- and given the hygroscopic, bacteria-inhibiting nature of sugar, that's gotta be a really bad sign. The T&A store also had a much larger selection. And most of all, it had cheerful employees in costume, including a long-haired kid dressed up as Jesus. We saw him walking across the parking lot, heading to the Golden Ox, as we pulled in, and when he saw me grinning, he grinned back and gave me the Sign of Peace.

We have not gone all out with the decorations (which is an understatement). Next year we may concoct a mad-scientist theme, but this year we're making do with two pumpkins (one of which will have a hatchet planted in its noggin, so say hello if you're on our street). And friends are coming over to hang out and help hand out candy from the skip-loader in our driveway, so a fun time should be had by all.

Now, sing along with me:
Our house is a museum
Where people come to see 'em
We really are a scree-am
The L.P. families.

So put a witch's shawl on,
A broomstick you can crawl on,
They're gonna pay a call on
The L.P. families.


[1] Yes, I used "prank" as a verb! That shows that I'm keeping my head in touch with America's youth! Suck it, Fowler!

smoke gets in your skies

I don't know which fire it's coming from, but the sunlight this morning has definitely got that weird smoky cast. It's almost apocalyptic feeling. Beware of vampires!

everybody was kung-fu fighting

As I have blogged extensively on my non-Pomona blog, we got a cat about five weeks ago. We've been holding off on getting a cat for, oh, about 16 years now, due to schedules, travel plans, and landlord preferences, but now that we own our home, it was time. We named him Voiceover.

Our block of Lincoln Park is extremely catty. Just within two houses in any direction, there are 12 cats, all but one of them indoor-outdoor cats. And that's not even counting Wombat and the kittens (who still need homes, people!).

Needless to say, with that many cats, there will be some catfights. Voiceover has done a pretty good job of asserting his property rights over a piece of land that had been treated as communal property for so long, but he does have a nemesis, Wheezer (whom I called Condi, for her imperialist tendencies until I learned her name).

Wheezer wasn't interested in our porch when no cat lived here, but once it was claimed, she just HAD to make it hers. Consequently, there are several set-tos per day.

In one of them, about three weeks ago, Voiceover sustained a respectable puncture wound in the head, which got all abscessed and made his poor head swell up like a gourd. You can imagine the consequences: vet, surgery, plastic clown collar, indoor life, unhappy cat.

He's now all better and back on his normal rotation -- of egress and ingress, but also of tangling with Wheezer. I've taken to dashing outside and squirting them both whenever they fight, but does anyone have any other suggestions for pacifying Catlandia? Keeping Voiceover inside isn't really an option; he's not much fun when he's criminally insane.

OSH kibosh, by gosh

Can I just say, I LOATHE Orchard Supply Hardware. Actually, I don't loathe OSH; I just loathe the one on Foothill and White. When we lived in the Yay Area, OSH was our hardware store of choice, at least if the little local joint didn't have what we were looking for. It was a big-box store, but at least it was a regional chain.

I'm generally opposed to shopping at big-box stores. There are only a few things I buy at Von's/Albertson's/Stater Bro's; most of our food comes from farmer's markets and ethnic groceries, plus some TJ's action thrown in. That goes double for hardware stores. For one thing, I had various dealings with both Arthur Blank and Bernie Marcus when we lived in Atlanta, and there is no way in the world I'm shopping at Home Despot.

Lowe's, too, got no love from me, but the final straw at OSH (when a 17-year-old cretin kept screwing up the keys he was duplicating for me and then insisted that he was supposed to charge me for all his fuck-ups -- $17's worth) drove me through their big blue doors.

And OMG, it's a paradise by comparison. I don't know how they manage it, but every employee seems to know both the name and location of every tiny frob and widget in the whole hangar. Whereas an assistant manager at OSH had never heard of crown molding and didn't know where picture-hanging equipment was, K. walked up to a young employee at Lowe's in the barbecue grill section, held up a broken piece of plastic from our sprinkler system, and was told "Aisle 4, on the right, about 10 feet down." Another time, a Lowe's worker assured me that I didn't need a new tool and that our superbar would work just fine (and he was right).

All of which is to say, C&E Lumber on Towne is a pretty cool place, but they've got some stiff competition.