Discount Groceries

Saturday, April 7, 2001
One year ago: Evening Drive
Two years ago: Hollywood Style
Three years ago: Quotes

I woke up relatively early with Jack, and we drove to Grocery Discounters. He'd gotten a flyer in the mail for an office chair at a good price, and he wanted to check it out. I'd asked Jack several times over the past few years about this store, but he'd had a bad experience with another in this chain, down in Tacoma, so he hadn't been interested.

We found that the groceries were significantly cheap, and reasonable brands, not just mystery labels from who knows were, though those were on the shelves also. Jack filled the cart with a bunch of stuff, exclaiming several times that he wished he'd visited before. The cereal boxes from PriceCutters had some scary characters on them -- very eerie looking cartoons! Jack was satisfied with the office chair, the original purpose of our visit, so he bought one. When we got back to Jack's place, he fixed a nice bacon and eggs brunch for us all.

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I took off for my place around 1:30. I stopped at the storables store for a shelf for cookbooks, to hook onto the grid system that covers one wall in my kitchen. I'll select those that can fit, then get rid of the rest. I also bought groceries for a stirfry.

I got home, chopped the food and got all prepped. Then it was wait, wait, wait, while Jack was running the vikingcon meeting at his house. He called me at 7 pm for directions to Vonda's house (to give to Bill). He called again at 7:25 to let me know that John A---- would be joining us for dinner; was that ok? Yes, we'd have enough food.

Everyone arrived around eight, so I did the stirfry: pork marinated in soy, sherry, and cornstarch, plus napa cabbage, baby bok choi (they cook down a lot, I could have used more), green onions, grape tomatoes, and a bit of balsamic vinegar and hoisin sauce. It was very tasty, if I do say so myself! We watched Apollo 13 as we ate, and left H---- watching TV at my place.

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We stopped at Safeway on the way to Vanguard, John A---- following us in his car. I bought the latest Martha Stewart Weddings magazine. Jack laughed heartily when he saw me at the magazine stand, but I didn't mind.

Jane has a new couch in the downstairs. Vonda's parents used to have it, I think. It's a curved sectional, snazzy! She's thinking of getting it slipcovered, since it's a dark charcoal grey color. I think having this extra seating made it possible for more folks to sit in that at once; normally this crowd is divided between Jane's parlor and kitchen. So it was extra smoky in there!

Victor was missed -- he is on his TAFF journey to England now. But we had Corflu reports from Andy Hooper and Carrie Root. Carrie told me about a panel she was on, for non-pubbing spouses of faneds (that is, partners of folks who write and edit fanzines, who don't publish on their own). Apparently some panel members did a lot of sharing about their partners that didn't precisely come under the topic of the panel.