Monday afternoon random

* I am gearing up to make salmon loaf for dinner tonight. This is as close as I can get (without really advance planning) to the traditional July 4 dinner of salmon fillets. Apparently this is a New England thing, based on what I've read: Salmon, often with a hard-boiled-egg sauce (and that is better than that NYT article makes it out to be: the traditional accompaniment to salmon cakes in my family was a white sauce with chopped up hard boiled eggs in it). And new potatoes, and peas. Well, I don't care for peas, and I'm putting mashed potato IN the loaf as a binder, so....

Apparently a few New England traditions did hang on in my mom's family (Her mother's mother's family came from Massachusetts; I think my mom still has records of an ancestor's Civil War service in a Massachusetts regiment. And I remember when I was about 10 we took a family trip that included Stockbridge so she could try to track down some relatives. She wasn't successful but it was still an interesting trip...)

If I had really been ambitious (and planned ahead), I could have made either Anadama bread or "thirded bread" (which is similar but still New England) to go with it. Oh well.

* I had to get scallions for the salmon loaf so I quickly ran to the little Green Spray. They now carry the Fairlife milk product (I am going to think of it as that, seeing as it is filtered milk with some stuff removed). They also have shelf-tags (but none in stock yet) for the organic milk I typically buy.

Except, it's 75 cents more than at the wal-mart.

And now I am wrestling with two opposing ideas: save the little bit of money, or support a small local business a little bit more. And anyway: that 75 cents could be a "I don't have to deal with wal-mart" tax.

But, if I look at it a bit differently, perhaps a bit snootily: my time is probably worth more than that. It takes perhaps 10 minutes longer to drive to the wal-mart and back than it does to go to the Green Spray. And the wal-mart is inconveniently enough laid out it will take me at least 5 more minutes in there just to get my stuff. And waiting on a checker can take anywhere from 5 minutes to 10 minutes more than the Green Spray (they almost never seem to have a shortage of checkers, whereas the wal-mart usually does, unless you use one of the infernal self-check-outs, which often hang up on me, and then I have to wait for someone to come and fix whatever problem - usually because I have scanned too fast for the thing's brain, apparently)

And, if I were doing consulting work? I could charge $125 an hour. Well, no, not HERE. But somewhere where people had the money and the desire to hire an ecological consultant....so 75 cents is what, 0.6% of that? For saving maybe 20 minutes of time and untold frustration? (I hate the wal-mart, especially when it's busy). (And based on my typical rate-per-hour for teaching? It's still a small enough percent that it would probably be worth it, at least on a day when I know going to the wal-mart would be aggravating)

Oh, I probably won't ALWAYS do that, but you can guar-an-darn-tee if there's some afternoon when I'm running short on milk, and the choice is braving the wal-mart right after everyone's picked up their cranky kids from day care or paying the premium at the Green Spray, I'll pay the premium and be grateful I can afford to.

Though honestly, I slightly prefer the Kroger house brand organic milk, but that requires a trip to Kroger's, which is a much longer drive. (And theirs is a bit cheaper, and I don't pay sales tax on groceries bought in Texas...)

* I wound up coming home to work at lunchtime because shortly after 11 I started getting the typical "asthma pain" in my chest - contracting muscles, lungs feeling like they were clamping down. They have the airconditioning cranked up to a warmer temperature over there (tomorrow the university is closed, so they probably just shut it down Thursday afternoon and didn't bring it back up - I remember times when I was teaching where it would shut down at noon on Thursday, meaning I got to teach a four hour lab in a room that was becoming progressively warmer and more humid). And also the heavy rain probably made the leaks happen again (I did not go and look) and the building was humid, and also probably it washed a lot of mold into the air....so I came home and had a cup of strong hot tea and sat in my more-heavily-airconditioned house and I felt better.

But yeah. Apparently this is my life now, with greatly reduced tolerance for I don't know what - heat, humidity, mold, sitting in a position that can cause muscle cramps, I don't know.

I did get a few articles read here at home and might go back to it after finishing my piano practice....

* Oh, and the trash pickup guys managed to deal with my neighbors' downed cans and got nearly all the loose trash up. I don't feel quite so bad now. (Our trash guys are city employees and I understand they are paid decently well).

we might get more storms tonight. This is unusual for July.