Month: January 2015

Great Grocery Store – Market Basket

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So the Market Basket store in South Attleboro finally opened a few weeks ago. And we’ve hit it since it’s second week in business. It’s an easier ride to South Attleboro than Coventry for Wally World.

And the fresh stuff they have in the store is pretty damned good. We mostly get the salads and soups they have. But today we picked up some sushi and I have to say it, for supermarket sushi it’s pretty damned tasty!

And the selection of merchandise – it’s a normal supermarket yes, but they have items that are things you won’t find in normal supermarkets in the area. One item we picked up was Jackfruit. Never seen it before in all the supermarkets we’ve been to so we picked up a small bit of it. Also got some nice russet potatoes and a big bottle of white vinegar. Yeah, found a recipe on YouTube for microwave salt and vinegar chips – I’m going to make those!

Price wise it’s not a discount chain per se, but some things are less expensive there. The soups for instance are considerably less expensive than those at Target and Trader Joe’s. But very tasty.

And if you’ve been following the story on Market Basket – you’ll find that there was a family struggle for control ultimately won by the companies well loved leader.

And from what I’ve read their employees are both well compensated and management actually treats them well. That’s a good reason to shop as any. But like I said – some really tasty stuff there.

How you can tell it’s SuperBowl weekend

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Traffic in Rhode Island gets nuts. Seriously – traffic gets really dense and stores get mobbed.

And yours truly – couldn’t give a rats posterior about football. It’s like watching paint dry.

In fact sports in general I see as a huge time suck. And I can think of more entertaining and educational ways to spend my time.

Ok – so it got better in Providence

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Other than the fact that 311 Broadway and 289 Broadway have sidewalks that aren’t cleared, and I notified my city councilor of that, the sidewalks are in fairly good shape. Amazing.

But the big offender – the City of Providence. I did see that the sidewalks around Waterplace park on Francis street and Finance Way are all cleared. So apparently my email to Councilman Hassett didn’t fall on deaf ears. Good!

And the overpass of Broadway over I-95  – sidewalks are cleared and salted. Imagine. I’ve got city councilors well trained.

But I did see this:

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As you can see all the islands and medians are completely buried. So I posted these photos on Facebook too and I tagged my city councilor plus shared the pix on his page. Let’s see what the result is tomorrow.

The City of Providence still doesn’t get it regarding snow removal from sidewalks

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I say this because I work in Cambridge, MA. My walk from the T-stop to the office takes me down Mass Ave. to Brookline St. and finally to my office.

Here’s what it looked like:

20150128_082306[1] 20150128_081746[1] 20150128_081735[1]Now I’ll upload pictures of what the sidewalks on main roads in Providence look like. It’s a horror show. I’m going to lean very heavily on my City Councilor to get DPW, Police etc. out there to cite owners of properties that don’t clear the walkways. And the city owned properties, those have to be cleared too.

This is the difference between Providence, RI and Cambridge, MA. The latter clears everything to pavement for the most part. The former is hit or miss, or half ass if you prefer. It’s annoying and it needs to change.

On Virgin Birth

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Now if you read this blog you know that I’m not religious at all – in fact I call myself a nihilistic atheist.

But I was thinking about something – the muse was the new show “Jane the Virgin”. About a woman who undergoes artificial insemination and how she then meets the donor aka father. Typical sitcom.

But that got the mind going. You do realize that in the modern world you do in fact have virgin births. Back a couple thousand years ago you didn’t. So what this tells me is that the story of the conception of the Jesus character, let’s just say that Mary was knocked up by something other than a manifestation of a god.

I can just see how it went – the venerated Mary goes for a little hanky-panky in the desert. Comes back and discovers she’s pregnant. And then young Joseph, he wore his horns well and married Mary.

Not looking forward to two feet of snow

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Gad I hate the stuff. Actually if it just dumped two feet of it on the ground I’d be ok with it. But this one is allegedly a blizzard which means attendant high winds.

And that translates to power outages lasting days. I swear – I’ve had more power outages where we live now than when we lived on other parts of Federal Hill. But then it hits me – the power in those other parts was underground. Where I am now is all aerial electric plant.

Meanwhile National Grid has been tacking on distro charges and getting double digit rate increases more times in the past few years that I’d like to count. As such I think the RI Public Utilities Commission and the RI Legislature need to get in on the act and say that National Grid has bury as much as they can.

Reading: Attack of the Theater People

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So a recommendation had come from bosguy about Marc Acito’s “How I Paid for College”. Loved it so much that I read it in a day.

So I went on Amazon and looked up the author and lo and behold it’s not just one book but a series of books. So I bought Attack of the Theater People. It’s another funny read – and I have to say I’d love to have a friend like Nathan. In fact I’m a little bit like Nathan myself – sort of an opportunist. Why the hell not?

Ben Carson needs to be clocked upside the head

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The latest – Carson jokes about poisoning wedding cakes for gay couples. That he thought it was alright to even joke about that is hideous. I’d like to clock a certain neurosurgeon upside the head for that little remark.

Or better yet, poison Carson’s drink of choice – something that drops him immediately with no chance of resuscitation but just leaves him dead. That would work for me.

Of course Carson is a doctor and as I’ve noted before they either go one of two paths. One is that they get a god complex or the other is they become jesus jumpers. Carson is in the latter camp – that’s pretty obvious. It’s all because medicine is one part art, one part science. That leaves wide latitude for whack-a-doodle religious nuttery in certain individuals of the medical camp.

The weather outside is frightful

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Yeah – we had our first official snow yesterday. All the others were simply dustings of snow that evaporated/sublimated within a day.

And yours truly cannot be stopped by a little snow. I was out driving around in it. You haven’t experience sheer terror and/or fun until you hydroplane on slush at speed! Whee!

Or getting behind a nervous nelly whose speed on the highways ranges from 35MPH to 65MPH in the space of a mile or two. Or coming down I-95 to find a mattress and box spring strewn across the majority of lanes on the highway.

Here’s the thing – the highways were in fact down to pavement and had the shit salted out of them. Saw many a RIDOT truck out doing their thing too. And the state troopers were all busy with extracting cars out of the right shoulder ditch on both the northbound and southbound spans in Warwick/Coventry.

But it was wet – to the point where windshield wipers are pretty useless. It’s 2015 – you’re telling me running a squeegee across a piece of glass is the state of the art? How about glass that just makes water bead off. Or forced air, or some such. Sheesh!

Did make a point of going out during the earlier part of the day and later around 6:30PM you know, when temperatures started to drop and everything started to ice up.

And this morning I was awoken by the sounds of an idiot neighbor  vigorously scraping ice off their car. If it didn’t take so long to boil some oil I would have thrown some on them. Or maybe a laser – yeah something over 150W – just cuts through the ice and human tissue too. It’s a twofer.

And that makes Ten

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Ten years that is. Ten years that I’ve been blogging. I started in 2005 – on blogger of all places. Moved over here to WordPress when blogger started getting stupid. Blogspot actually suspended me for posting true information when someone bitched and poof – account suspended. Even wordpress succumbed to that once until I educated them on how not to be stupid. Plus I went preemptive on WP’s ass – I replicated the blog to another site on WP.

But now we’re on an even keel – they didn’t even suspend my account when I posted the names and photographs of the RI Representatives and Senators that opposed marriage equality and voted against it. And I know some of those folks still refer to the port – I see it in the blog stats. It’s pretty funny.

I’m told by certain people that I’m vicious in the way I go about things – I go directly for the jugular. I also acknowledge that I have a skill for pissing on people’s corn flakes. Can’t help myself – it is what it is.

The muse to blog is a little more fickle these days. Now that the marriage equality fight is nearing a close the blog has turned more personal. Which I guess is a good thing.

So here we are, the blog and I both ten years older and probably a lot wiser.