Abraham and Avocados

"With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations."

- Abraham Lincoln

The quote has nothing to do with the topic I intend to write about, at least I don't think it will, since I was going to write about grocery shopping. Actually, it would be quite a feat if I could somehow connect achieving a just and lasting peace with buying avocados, but I don't see that happening. Avocados are wonderful in a good many things, but I doubt that they're a key ingredient for bringing an end to war. At least not yet.

Over the weekend, I managed to recuperate despite some running around. There was the unavoidable dentist appointment on Saturday, but that went by painlessly. There was also the brief visit to the Capitola Mall with the family. While we were wandering, we came across Lex, one of the contestants from the third season of Survivor, coming out of Mervyn's with his wife. He's from Santa Cruz and a very laid back guy in real life. On Sunday, there was another visit to the mall, this time Oakridge in San Jose, but it was also a short stop.

The nose is still troublesome in the mornings, but I'm keeping up with non-coffee liquids (along with coffee) in the hopes that it will clear out the last of the current germs and stave off any new ones seeking residence.

Yesterday, I discovered how pleasant evening grocery shopping could be. I began by buying a latte from the in-store coffee shop and placing it in the handy cup holder that now comes standard in every shopping cart. I'm fully expecting shopping carts of the future to also come with power steering and a flat screen television providing easy-to-follow navigation and highlights from the Martha Stewart show. I then strolled up and down the aisles, discovering sales and placing loads of items into the cart that weren't on my initial shopping list (milk, yogurt and avocados).

Because it was early evening, hardly anybody else around, which meant I sometimes had entire aisles to myself. There may have been an instance when I whispered Mush, mush! to an imaginary pack of huskies pulling my shopping sled through the tundra of frozen dinners and ice cream. Of course, as soon as an all-too-serious mother came around the corner with her child in tow, the dogs disappeared and I had to quickly dismount and pretend to be a responsible adult selectively shopping for Tater Tots.

All that is to say that with fewer shoppers around, finding what I needed became a lot more fun and a lot less stressful. It also meant that the checkout lines were extremely short. I only had to wait for the woman in front of me to finish flirting with the clerk before I was able to pay and find out how much I saved using my club card (27%).

In all, it was one of the most pleasant grocery experiences I've had in a while. I would even go so far as to say it was peaceful, not Abraham-Lincoln-lasting-peace peaceful, but pretty darn close.