Saturday, October 14, 2023

trading an eclipse for a blueberry

There's been a tremendous, and perplexing, amount of fuss about the annular eclipse in the local papers. Perplexing, because it's not a very annular event around here. The eclipse in 2012 I traveled 250 miles to see in its full annular glory; this one I'd have had to travel over 400 miles, so it wouldn't be perceptible this far away except through a telescope or for the shadows.

Except there were no shadows, because it was overcast. I didn't go to any of the municipal gatherings anyway; I had another errand, which was a postmortem on yesterday's grocery pickup. The receipt we normally get was not, and wasn't available on our online account either, so it was impossible to tell whether the items we didn't get were unavailable or if they were just missing from the bags but we were charged for them anyway, which happened last week.

The fellow at the store couldn't answer all the questions, but he could produce the receipt, plus replacement copies of the items that were missing, last week's and this's. But his store didn't have any blueberries. B. likes blueberries to put on her granola. (I don't eat blueberries. They're blue. This creeps me out.) But for some reason blueberries have been virtually unavailable recently.

I went to a store of a different chain. I stared unhappily at the empty shelf when what should appear to my left but a produce worker pushing a cart full of -- packages of blueberries! I grabbed the large size and was happily on my way.

No comments:

Post a Comment