Tag: grocery shopping

Saturday

(I’ve decided to share about Class 101: the laughing out loud class, instead of 100, so that’ll come next week.)

I went to the workout this morning, and it was rather uneventful but that my friend and I finished second in the workout, and there were a lot of people there today… we just found a beautiful way to get through the push-ups, and it worked perfectly – when other people seemed to take forever on the push-ups, we slammed through them quite quickly.

After the workout, I practiced and improved my double-under jump roping, and was glad for it.

I then went home and made a spice cake from the grain-free/flour-free zucchini brownie recipe I’ve been using, but this time used cinnamon, nutmeg, clove, and ginger instead of cocoa powder… and it was delicious.

I discovered that I have no interest in going to Minute Maid Park, due to their security requirements that prevent me from having any form of protection, as well as a reusable water bottle (even empty)…, and so I did not go to the Astros game to which I had been just invited.

I did go to a house party – not the jammin’, drug kind, but the friends hanging out together kind – instead, and it was wonderful.

However, on the way to the party, on my way to stop at the new grocer to pick up plates that were requested for the party, I found myself at a stoplight next to car crammed with young guys (adults, but still younger than I am) who clearly had just played a soccer game together – the matching jerseys and sweaty hair kind of gave that one away.

As I turned and saw the front seat guys looking my way, the back window rolled down, and three faces looked out at me, smiling.

“I like you’re scooter.”

Ha…, “Thanks.”

“Does it go fast?”

I shrug, knowing fully that their borderline joking comment is about to choke them, “I’ve gone eighty on it,” I say, quite casually.

Their eyes pop open wider than one could have imagined, and their mouths opened wide, ready to catch some flies…

“Eighty?!”

“Mmhmm… It’s a big scooter, 300ccs,” I add quickly, smiling, before driving off, for the light has turned to green.

At the next stoplight, the car pulls next to me again, the back window still down, the boys smiling bigger than ever.

“Long time no see,” they laugh together.

I laugh and smile broadly.

“Do y’all know where the HEB is?” I ask, having just been wanting to be able to ask someone (which was why I had even looked over to their car in the first place).

“Yeah! It’s on this street,” one says, pointing forward and to the right side a bit, confirming my thoughts.

“Okay, thanks!”

“Are you going grocery shopping?”

“Can you put your groceries on there?”

“Are you going to carry groceries on that?”

“Do you need help?”

The sudden rapid fire of their near-simultaneous questions knocks me back a tad, and makes me smile and chuckle even more than I already had been doing.

“Yes, I can carry groceries, yes, I’m going to the store now,” – “Really?” – “and no, I don’t need help.”

I then drive off again at the newly green light, and see them take off not far behind me.

As I slow and pull into the HEB parking lot, I both see and hear them passing me one final time, saying a few more positive comments that make me laugh (though I do not at present remember what exactly they were – I was focused on the turn and figuring out the parking lot and watching out for stupid people in cars in the lot, but I remember that they were pleasant comments of well-wishing).

I enter the garage fully chuckling fro the hearty spot on my belly, lips super wide on their glorious, teeth-filled grin position – I just had my first fanboys, I think to myself, and smile all over again.

Post-a-day 2019

Milk-buying debacle

I was thinking the other night about buying milk in Japan.

It wasn’t an easy task initially – I looked up the right words to find and everything, because nothing was super obviously milk in the store, and because I had been told that there were various types of cow milk sold in Japan.

And so, having looked up my info, I went to the grocer with my words to recognize real ‘milk’, and I was confident in my chances of finding milk.

You see, I thought this one section was the milk.

And I was right… mostly… it was the milk section.

But it was also the section for many other beverages of various similarities and differences to and from milk.

I don’t drink milk, you see, so I had always just bought the almond milk, which was easy for me to figure out.

But, when I was making pralines as a gift for my weekend host family, I needed milk, so I went and bought one that was ‘100% natural’ (or something much like that), because that was what I had learned as the differentiating factor in the weird milks versus the good/real milks).

The pralines were good, but a little sweeter, thinner than I’d expected – it was my first time making them myself, though, so it was easily a possibility that they were just always like that for the recipe I was using.

A week or so (or less) later, a friend was over, and I offered her the carton of the remaining milk (which was kind of a lot), and she accepted (remember that I don’t drink milk).

Somehow, it comes out – I think she might have poured herself some milk or sniffed it and then poured it to check or something – that the milk is really off… the color is totally wrong, and it is definitely not milk.

(Actually, I think it was more than a week later, and so we’d figured the milk was bad, and she was pouring it out in the sink… or maybe that wasn’t how it happened… I’ll have to check to see if she remembers…)

Turns out, it is juice – 100% natural juice suddenly makes much more sense to me than ‘100% natural’ milk – and it makes perfect sense about the pralines having been a little off.

I was actually surprised the pralines were any good at all, let alone quite delicious, seeing as how I had filled them with some juice mixture instead of milk!

We had a good laugh over our sudden discovery.

I was sure, therefore, to look up the specifics of milk cartons when I was making pralines a second time, this time for a goodbye present for all my local friends and my coworkers.

Fortunately, it worked out properly this time around, and the pralines were even more delicious, and they totally blew people’s minds (because pralines are definitely not a thing in Japan).

Post-a-day 2018