Yum Yum at the Buffet

Brian enjoyed his first trip for Chinese Buffet dining on cereal, milk and sweet potatoes. I enjoyed a significantly less healthy selection of sweet and sour spare ribs, egg roll, spring roll, noodles, rice, vegetables, lemon chicken, salad and a selection of desserts including a very nice taste of apple pie. I'm back to eating my usual fly-in diet of eggs, milk, frozen vegetables and canned soup. The Northern was looking painfully bare. There was no yogurt, milk or bread and the produce section boasted 3 sad containers of mushrooms, a selection of tiny abused looking green peppers, zuchini which were relatively large, but still sort of abused looking, a bunch of turnips and 2 baskets of onions, some prepackaged greens, some parsnips and a number of bags of carrots, apples of 2 or 3 types, 2 grapefruit, two unknown grapefruit like objects, a number of oranges and some nice pears and a large number of smallish, greenish bananas. There were a few packages of specialty things and possibly some cabbages and likely some other things that I would have overlooked as they were items I don't usually buy. Normally though, I wouldn't be able to recite the entire contents of the produce section. Usually - the selection is not too bad - there might be one or two things that you'd wish for and there is rarely anything that exotic, but it looks as though everyone came back from wherever and stripped the store of the basics. I was lucky enough to get the only 2 L container of milk on the shelf yesterday - so I'm good to go for now and I have a lifetime supply of canned soup and now I have a reason to bake some bread.... mmm bread... and although the shelves were bare - the store was not and I was glad to run into all sorts of people that I haven't seen since I left including no less than 7 students. Its one of the nice things about a small town - you actually recognize people whenever you go somewhere.

The trip back was pretty good. My luggage came with me and that was extra wonderful and I even managed to knit a whole sock and a bit of another. I'm wearing my finished prism socks as I type. My guitar made it in one piece and is happily tuned. I'm still dubious as to whether I think it is a decent guitar - I think I have to admit that aside from not being broken (and thus tunable) - it is not the equal of my old Acoustic although I found my dinosaur print stickers and put one on the front and attached my dubiously rainbow strap. Well, its definately rainbow, but I chose it when I was young and ignorant that rainbow guitar straps might have any other possible meaning than to announce that I'm fond of bright primary and secondary colours - well it looks more like the old one, and hopefully it'll grow on me, but in the mean time it is nice to play around with an acoustic. I've hardly played since my old one broke (the one I bought with my first real paycheck when I was 18 - so I guess I got a good number of years of dragging it back and forth on busses and using it at camp (i.e. evilly damp place likely responsible for the ungluing of the bridge). I'm surprised at what I do remember. I was never particularly talented - pretty much limited to playing camp songs, but I was still able to remember how to play the melody and a decent number of chords - so hopefully with a bit of practice I'll be back to where I was when I left off and maybe start working on getting better. In the meantime, there isn't much more relaxing than leaning on a comfy guitar and playing random strings of chords... well at least for me.