Tuesday, April 03, 2007

Grocery Shopping

Within a short drive from our house, there are quite a few grocery stores. Multiple Safeways, a Lundaris, Mollie Stone's, Whole Foods, two Trader Joe's, an Albertson's...we're not spoiled for choice.

My favorite is Mollie Stone's, which is a local chain. They have a good selection of regular food plus harder-to-find items. It's not usually too crowded. The carts are not huge and don't block the aisles. They usually have lots of sample produce to snack on. And best of all they have a monkey on a bicycle who slowly pedals back and forth, back and forth, all day long. Today the monkey was wearing bunny ears.

Closer to home is Safeway, which I also go to pretty often. I get my prescriptions there and we also drink a lot of the Safeway-brand flavored water.

Also close to home is Lundari's but I don't go there very often because it makes me cranky. There are always people blocking the aisles with their carts and the produce doesn't live up to its reputation. And they always seem to be out of the one staple I'm looking for.

A lot of people like Whole Foods, and I think it's good for specialty items, but I don't like it much for basic weekly shopping. Try and find some regular bread that isn't organic, gluten-free and made by local peasants who get up at the crack of dawn to harvest the grain while singing their traditional peasant songs. I mean sometimes I just want some plain old bread, you know?

Monday, April 02, 2007

Casablanca

I'm famous!

Well, not really, but my question did make it into the "Ask Mick LaSalle" column in this Sunday's San Francisco Chronicle. (Also available on-line.)

Interestingly, it's Chris who loves Casablanca, and he's the one who believes Ilsa no longer loved Rick when she got to Casablanca. I think she was still in love with Rick but went with Victor because she thought it was the right thing to do.