This, that, and the other.

Ok I've mentioned several times that I have fully retired from the working world. I am a lucky person. The Star Market Company took good care of me. When I joined them they were the Cadillac of supermarkets around here. We were the best paid and had great benefits. I know I mentioned this in an earlier blog but the family who founded Star Market were the people who started the First Night celebration on New Years with Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops back in the '70s that eventually was shown nation wide and spread to other cities. The Mugar family is well known around here. Anyway there were many tough times for the company in the 80's to the present but I always worked and I was able to retire comfortably. However there was one thing I never gave thought to when I retired. I now have to go food shopping. Aside from going food shopping with my parents I never went food shopping in 46 years. I was in a supermarket 5 or 6 days a week. I always picked up what I needed after work so I never had to actually leave the house to shop for food. Now if I want to eat I have to actually leave the house and go to the local Stop and Shop as my old company has no stores locally. Now I'm not going to complain about the prices because they are actually pretty good. They are large company with stores  throughout New England, New York and New Jersey. They even have two stores on Martha's Vineyard which Arlene and I found handy compared to a local chain which I guess wasn't big city enough for us. But I can't stand having to leave the house to go buy food. I find it quite annoying. The store is always busy and is laid out in a manor I don't like. They have the florist over by frozen foods  instead of next to the produce department. That's at one end of the store and if you start at the other end you have the bakery first then you have the produce department. Why would you have soft items such as bread or rolls the first thing to put in your shopping cart? Alright I'm being picky and whiny. I should have bigger problems.

Alrighty then here's a video from the PBS series This Old House that took place in my hometown. The house you see would go for something like $600,000 to $700,00. This is not a complete episode it's just Bob Villa talking a bit of the history around here though he does leave out the writing of Jingle Bells and the invention of the first modern roller skate by James Plimpton. For 3 years, going to high school, I walked by the "Over the river and through the woods..." house always wondering how out of place the house looked in our neighborhood with it's columns. It looked like something you might see down south. I had no idea until just a few years ago that this is where the song was written and the very river I went over on my way to school was the same river as in the song. 

So that's it for now. Tonight Arlene and I are going to yet another new Italian restaurant that opened a few months back. It's called "Real Italian Gusto". It's only a few doors away from another Italian restaurant called "Salvatore's" which is quite good.

Yesterday, the 13th I had jury duty. Now the courthouse is in the next town over to the east. I was not completely sure where the court house was though I was called once before back in the '70s. Arlene, who I will admit is better at directions than I, am tried to explain it to me. I kept trying to explain to her that I hadn't been to Malden since the early '80s because there was a music store that my friends and I used to hang around in from time to time. The only thing I ever bought there were guitar picks. We were no big time spenders. Well she tried to explain how to get there and I had to be at the court house at 8:30 AM. I knew this wasn't going to be easy. Well it wasn't. My portable GPS was empty of maps. It needed to be updated. I set off at 7 AM and I ran into a gigantic traffic mess. People heading in all directions. Not being able to make it through intersections and blocking traffic for people trying to cut across. I couldn't read the street signs because they were on a wire suspended across the street and the sun was in my eyes. If I had stayed on my present course I would have run intro the ocean.  I finally recognized one street because my company had a store on this street and I used to work there, only the store  was at the other end. Good old Broadway, not in New York but in Everett Ma. That was a slog and at the other end was a parkway with two notorious rotary's. Long story short, I made it home before 8:30, went on line hoping that I still had time to request a change. I lucked out and got it postponed until Oct. 30th. Driving south into Boston is much easier the going east or west. As wonderful an area as this is, many of the roads are 300, or close to it, years old and it is very densely populated. As much as I love it here and on the Vineyard there are times when I hear New Hampshire calling me. It's about 25 miles north of here and there are less people in the entire state than there in downtown Boston on a daily basis.    

So that's it for now.
I'm outta here.