Well I feel like a dumb-ass. I just paid $3.99 for a bottle of cranberry juice at the Co-Op. OK, cranberry juice blended with some sort of antioxidant tea, but still. Normally I look at prices and all, but .... anyway, I was too flabbergasted and embarrassed by my own lack of financial savvy to tell the cashier that I didn't want her stinkin' $4 beverage.

It was good though. Kinda zingy.

Coming off about 2 weeks of blah-hell. Well, I don't know if I'm coming out of it, but I'm giving it the ol' college try for whatever that's worth.

I just wish the Kings would win a game already. We've got tickets to Sunday nights game and it'd sure be nice if the team showed up to the party.

So, the Fiery Furnaces show. That was my second time seeing them (first time was last February at Bottom of the Hill) and I have to say I was pretty disappointed. I think if I had maybe not seen the band before, I would have been more OK with it. But as it stands, I was supremely bored with all the relentless noodling. Sure, every now and then we were treated to snippets of melody but the rewards were few and far between and, frankly, I just got the vibe that Ms. Eleanor has pretty much become the Hipster-Than-Thou type that sets my nerves on edge. That and Harlow's was just crawling with all those Farrah Fawcett-Majors-haired pale-faced girls who look drugged out and act like snots.

But, whatever.
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I recently finished a great book that I think you should all pick up. Wendy McClure of Poundy fame just published her memoir, I'm Not the New Me. It is part weight-loss journal, part relationship encounters, part life reflections but mostly it is just achingly funny and heartbreakingly melancholy and a very fast, mesmerizing read.

Alrighty, I'm off to LA tomorrow - just for a very quick 24-hour-plus work trip. Until then...

Yeah, I'm still around. I just really wish the month of April was done with and filed away already because, surely, it's got to only get better than this, right? Right?

Oh, and last night's Fiery Furnaces at Harlow's? Feh.

Last week one of my colleagues was awarded the prestious Pulitzer prize. To celebrate, the company hung a ginormous banner across the building, made up signs and reprinted thousands of copies of his award-winning series.

I got an award last week too - the California Bowling Writers award for best bowling coverage. For real. But did I get a banner? A sign? Thousands of reprints?

No. I was robbed of the full glory of the moment.

Someday maybe...

But for now - it's off to Old I for the Baby Grand show where I'll drown my mid-spring malaise in a heady swirl of pop songs and icy rum-infused Diet Cokes.

Mark Morford over at SF Gate wants us all to know that Safeway and the rest of its ilk are sucking your soul dry.

Morford, who does most of his shopping at co-ops, farmer's markets and the like, makes this observation:

... (W)hen you least expect it, you find yourself in some situation or in some town with no other grocery options and you innocently walk back into Safeway to try to buy some organic hormone-free eggs (ha-ha yeah right good luck) - and WHAM. Sensory overload. Low-vibration overload. You get what in meditation circles they would call whacked, slapped upside the spirit by dank, malicious energy. Supermarket Syndrome.

Pork-like sausage in a can. Cool Whip with enough high-fructose corn syrup to caulk your driveway. Creepy chicken-flavored sauce packets, ten to a box. Precut celery. Precut cookie dough. Precut everything because you're too lazy to handle a knife. Nabisco honey-flavored Teddy Grahams shaped like Dora the Explorer. Dawn Wash & Toss. Crustless white bread of sufficient consistency to plug Hoover Dam.

Well yes. And no.

I prefer the Co-Op and Trader Joe's and the farmer's market too but I don't get freaked out by the common grocery store. I mean, after all, these are the places I frequented as a kid. Or rather they're the places where my mother shopped. The Raley's, the H.E.B.'s, the Piggly Wiggly's (no, really), the Safeways and Luckys. And because one can't find everything at the Co-op or Trader Joe's or the farmer's market, I still venture into these flourescent netherworlds.

Today I made a run to the new Safeway and although I'm sticking by my belief that it's just a freaking grocery store, it's certainly no consumer-driven hellhole. It has the nice dim lighting, it has the gleaming hardwood floors, it has the health food section - just a few aisles over from the Pop Tarts and Cap'n'Crunch. (Mmmm, Pop Tarts).

Of course, the new Safeway - in all its shiny, still-clean, organic-offering glory, is the exception and not the rule. Which brings me to this: While I try to be good about what I consume and how I consume it, I found a certain (repulsive) snobbish tone in Morford's column. An elitest attitude if one can be elitist about grocery stores. And I guess, as Morford shows us, one can.

So if you live in a place where there's no easy-to-get-to Trader Joe's or farmer's market (which are usually cheap) or co-op (or worse, you can't afford the oft-overpriced co-op), well then - you deserve to live in your Red Dye No. 5, sloth-promoting, nitrate-burning wasteland.

Bon appetite!

Random-ness:

• We skipped SF on Saturday (thanks to allergies and other ailments)


• We had dinner at Andy Nguyen's again (consensus vote is that the pronunciation is "Nuh-GOO-yun," but I'm still not sure). The service was once again excruciatingly slow and I think they brought me the wrong claypot dish. Nonetheless it was quite tasty and I know we'll give them another chance. If not many more chances. At least the service is friendly - if not efficient - and they are not in any real danger of becoming the Zelda's of vegan Vietnamese food.


• We did make it to the Radar Bros. show - they weren't as good as I remembered them.* But then again that was 7 years ago and I was, to put it mildly, only in the beginning stages of becoming the person I am today.


• If life is lived in 7-year cycles, where I am going and who have I been and what will I be from this year forward?


• I just finished our taxes and except for the annoying bit about me losing a 1098 form (ugh), all is much better than I thought it was just 2 weeks ago.


• I ran through McKinley Park tonight after work; the sun was still out, the air smelled like camellias and everything seemed lovely.

*I will say this though: The singer from The Radar Bros. had the best line of the night (of the day, of the week, of the ever - at least in regards to chatty show people) when he directed this remark to the noisy crowd at the bar- particularly the girl singing the Bon Jovi song:

Yeah, we can hear you over here - this isn't television.

We were going to go out last night for Brian Machado's birthday jam at Old I, but at the last minute wimped out.

Oh we are getting so old.

Actually we had a household emergency (not even home-owners yet and we're tied to The Man that is the house) and Cory had to be up at 7:45 a.m. this morning to help his boss move. Brutal. I slept in of course. Actually it was the first day of my vactaion that I did sleep in -- and because it's Saturday it doesn't really count as "vacation" per se. I suck at vacations.

Speaking of house angst (see various posts below), I am quite thrilled to see that a house previously listed at $350K - a 2bdr, 900 square feet, chain-link encircled, dubious neighborhood-dwelling house - now reduced to $325K.

Take that greedy realty people.

It especially makes me feel good because one of our realtors (yeah, we're so high maintainence that we have a "team" of realtors) tried to convince me the other day that I need to "get out of this mindset" of worrying about escalating prices, particularly escalating prices in crap neighborhoods. It's just what the market does, he told me.

Ha. Wrong. Perhaps if I complain and whine long enough the entire bubble will burst.

Today = a trip to S.F. -- I hope the sunny weather will hold -- and then, if all goes well, back to Sac Town in time to see The Radar Bros. play at the Blue Lamp. Hopefully there will be more people at the show than the last time they came to town (1997, Press Club, a Sunday night -- I drove home early from NXNW just to see them) and I was the only one at the show not in one of the bands. Yeah, that was kind of weird. But still a good time. I imagine they'll be even better if they have a real audience this time around.

It's official - the Sacramento real estate market? Out of control. I just saw a listing fora 900 square foot, 2 bedroom house that's going for about a half-million dollars. Sure it's in East Sac, but still ...

I mean, Good Lord.

Yesterday I saw a CNN.com story that listed Sacramento as the 9th most-overpriced market in the nation (or something of that nature - we're behind LA and SF, of course) - I'm not sure whether this makes me feel better or worse about the situation. I have this sinking suspicion (wait, can suspicions 'sink'? Maybe I just mean 'feeling') that we're going to buy at the peak of the market and then have to watch as prices - and the value of our new abode - dives.

OK, that's it, done feeling sorry for myself, at least for today.

I have the week off from work and not a moment too soon. Last week was filled with so many ups-and-downs (as those of you whom I regularly see or talk to already know) and then the weekend was spent in recovery --which basically meant doing a lot of acting as un-responsible as possible and involved lots of eating out (pancakes, veggie burgers, quesadillas, etc - no, not all at the same time), going to a King's game with some friends (the team lost, but the time at Arco was still fun and much-needed), movies (a sneak preview of "Fever Pitch"), sleeping (countless naps) and so on and so forth ....

Now, this week is about getting things done. Everyone keeps asking me if I'm going to do anything "fun" during my time off and if by "fun" you mean finish my taxes, clean out my closet, go to hand/wrist therapy, get ready for a seminar in which I have to speak in front of 100 people and catch up on house cleaning and laundry, why then yes, it's a virtual House of Fun over here. Stand back people, we are dizzy with fun.

...and on that note, my To-Do list beckons ...