Saturday, September 27
Sep. 28th, 2025 01:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gottawonderToday I am grateful for:
Good sleep.
My Sweetie went to the optometrist's, which I know he really needed to do. He picked up more building materials while he was there.
He got home about when I woke up, and we had planned to see a metalworker's craft sale at a wonderful museum (sort of a history of machines. Bikes, cars, farm equipment, airplanes, mostly).
So we did chores and got ready, and headed there.
I clarified with my husband not to interfere if I wanted to buy something, and he didn't, but I chose not to buy anything.
I did try to buy one hand made knife, but oddly the man said he only accepted cash...well, if you're selling one of a kind hand made knives and charging accordingly, you might want to reconsider that.
There were some nice wire-wrapped semi precious stone pendants, but I do own some, and I don't wear them a lot.
The knives were beautiful, but I wondered if I would really use them. They're too big to carry in your purse, and I have a nice little folding knife for that. They would end up being a display piece, and I wasn't sure that I loved any of them enough for that, at those prices.
My husband bought a nice poker for our wood stove.
So it was a funny day for me. I'm okay with just looking, but you always hope to find something that calls out to you when you go to a craft sale.
We drove back a different way so that we went through another town, and grabbed a burrito. Then we ended up somehow in what I call the "ghetto grocery store", though it isn't really ghetto. It's sort of a restaurant supply store in a very bare bones warehouse looking building, where you can buy magnificently weird things to see in person, like a two gallon pail of mayonnaise or a giant bucket of margarine, enormous jars of pickled eggs. It also has normal portioned food, mostly canned or dry goods. There are many recognizable brands, but a lot of unusual brands or even flavors of familiar brands that I haven't seen before.
I don't know how or why they have these foods. Like, some brand of soup I've never heard of before in nice glass jars that looked really good. Candy that is maybe from the U.K? Stuff that I thought no one made anymore, like those weird licorice pipes. It's not even necessarily cheap, just a lot of different things.
I was amazed to find a 1.5 liter jar of garlic stuffed olives for $12. I thought maybe they were crap, but I'll try them once for that price because the President's Choice brand is now $8 for a TINY jar (375 ml). I tried them when I got home, and they taste pretty good! I was really happy about that, though I don't know if I can finish that jar before they go off. I wonder if I can freeze them? I hadn't even been buying olives anymore because of how much they've gone up, and I don't bother buying the cheaper olives at Superstore because they don't taste that good. These are GOOD, and CHEAP!
I also bought a jar of grain based instant coffee substitute, just to see..and that was pretty good too.
We bought a few other things too. It's kind of fun buying mystery food. We're not going out of our way to buy things we think we WON'T like, we try to stick to things that we think we will eat.
We did go for a nice walk in town after shopping. We walked near the big man made lake, where they have the community gardens. The ones that you can buy for the season. It was fun to see what others planted, how they used their space, and see the flowers that were still blooming in many of them.
Then we came home. That's when I tried the olives and the coffee substitute.
I spent some time sucking up fruit flies with the vacuum cleaner, because we've had a population surge. Probably because I've had some cut flowers (they always show up from cut flowers, something about the standing water) as well as lots of produce on the counters.
It works surprisingly well. I put out some apple cider vinegar to draw them to one area, and kept sucking them up, then giving it a few minutes to let the ones I missed some back. I got most of them.
Good sleep.
My Sweetie went to the optometrist's, which I know he really needed to do. He picked up more building materials while he was there.
He got home about when I woke up, and we had planned to see a metalworker's craft sale at a wonderful museum (sort of a history of machines. Bikes, cars, farm equipment, airplanes, mostly).
So we did chores and got ready, and headed there.
I clarified with my husband not to interfere if I wanted to buy something, and he didn't, but I chose not to buy anything.
I did try to buy one hand made knife, but oddly the man said he only accepted cash...well, if you're selling one of a kind hand made knives and charging accordingly, you might want to reconsider that.
There were some nice wire-wrapped semi precious stone pendants, but I do own some, and I don't wear them a lot.
The knives were beautiful, but I wondered if I would really use them. They're too big to carry in your purse, and I have a nice little folding knife for that. They would end up being a display piece, and I wasn't sure that I loved any of them enough for that, at those prices.
My husband bought a nice poker for our wood stove.
So it was a funny day for me. I'm okay with just looking, but you always hope to find something that calls out to you when you go to a craft sale.
We drove back a different way so that we went through another town, and grabbed a burrito. Then we ended up somehow in what I call the "ghetto grocery store", though it isn't really ghetto. It's sort of a restaurant supply store in a very bare bones warehouse looking building, where you can buy magnificently weird things to see in person, like a two gallon pail of mayonnaise or a giant bucket of margarine, enormous jars of pickled eggs. It also has normal portioned food, mostly canned or dry goods. There are many recognizable brands, but a lot of unusual brands or even flavors of familiar brands that I haven't seen before.
I don't know how or why they have these foods. Like, some brand of soup I've never heard of before in nice glass jars that looked really good. Candy that is maybe from the U.K? Stuff that I thought no one made anymore, like those weird licorice pipes. It's not even necessarily cheap, just a lot of different things.
I was amazed to find a 1.5 liter jar of garlic stuffed olives for $12. I thought maybe they were crap, but I'll try them once for that price because the President's Choice brand is now $8 for a TINY jar (375 ml). I tried them when I got home, and they taste pretty good! I was really happy about that, though I don't know if I can finish that jar before they go off. I wonder if I can freeze them? I hadn't even been buying olives anymore because of how much they've gone up, and I don't bother buying the cheaper olives at Superstore because they don't taste that good. These are GOOD, and CHEAP!
I also bought a jar of grain based instant coffee substitute, just to see..and that was pretty good too.
We bought a few other things too. It's kind of fun buying mystery food. We're not going out of our way to buy things we think we WON'T like, we try to stick to things that we think we will eat.
We did go for a nice walk in town after shopping. We walked near the big man made lake, where they have the community gardens. The ones that you can buy for the season. It was fun to see what others planted, how they used their space, and see the flowers that were still blooming in many of them.
Then we came home. That's when I tried the olives and the coffee substitute.
I spent some time sucking up fruit flies with the vacuum cleaner, because we've had a population surge. Probably because I've had some cut flowers (they always show up from cut flowers, something about the standing water) as well as lots of produce on the counters.
It works surprisingly well. I put out some apple cider vinegar to draw them to one area, and kept sucking them up, then giving it a few minutes to let the ones I missed some back. I got most of them.
