Whither the Weather & a $15 Loaf of Bread.

Weird photo for no reason other than – where do you keep your horse and hunting dogs?

2/23/2022

SE Wisconsin was a rainy, sleety, icy mess yesterday. Len was scheduled to do his AARP Tax Aide volunteering all-day gig but it’s a long drive from here so Len didn’t go. I asked if felt like a slacker. He said he felt a bit guilty but not as much as you’d think.

Skipping an activity due to bad weather is weird. It’s a gift to get a day off from the regular responsibilities until one considers Balto the dog who pulled a dogsled a bazillion miles through a subzero Alaskan blizzard. Then again, none of us will ever be as gung-ho and loyal as any average dog.

One of the things I like about “days off” (and remember, the joke here is that I am already retired) is the irrational belief that one day off will allow one to catch up on all the things. Declutter the house, call all the friends, arrange one’s summer vacation, read poetry aloud to the cats, journal one’s feelings about Contemporary Events.

Yeah, whatever.

I took a nap.

…

Putin decided to claim sections of Ukraine. NATO, the US, and other nations are enacting financial and diplomatic sanctions. This is intense and awful.

But there is this which surprises my soul. I have watched my nation go to war and be in wars for most of my life.

This is the first time it doesn’t seem to be completely driven by the western military-industrial complex to get oil to make the rich richer.

War sucks, but here we are, joining others to push back against border creep and a bully invasion.

…

On Sunday we drove to see our Chicago kids. First we visited our 3- and 5-year-old grandkids and their parents. There is a six-foot hill, more of a ridge, in their neighborhood park. You should have heard how hard they laughed when they slid down it on their sleds! Move over, Olympics. Kids and grownups playing hard and trying new tricks and shrieking and being together is so much fun to observe and join. Why do we only watch competitions? Why don’t we watch people simply doing things they like to do?

At naptime we left them to drive into the city to visit our other daughter. For those of you who remember our “pocket child” (she was and still is petite) – she now lives in Lakeview with her two cats, just finished her graduate degree in Data Science, and still watches a LOT of Law and Order. We hung out a while and then we walked around her neighborhood to buy some essentials. Such as two more plants for her apartment. Stan’s donuts. Two $15 loaves of French sourdough bread at Maison Marcel.

Whoa! Fifteen-dollar loaves of bread?

Yup.

I’ve eaten in this place through many of its iterations and I hope this business makes it. Sunny, beautiful, a city place for city people and their folks visiting from out of town. We bought giant loaves of beautiful sourdough bread and gave one to our kid and brought one home.  

Sometimes when I read modern well-off people upset at the rising prices of everything what I think is – this is how much it really costs. This is the true cost to buy helpful, necessary, and wonderful products made by fairly paid people who live close to where we are.

We’ve lived so long with subsidized high fructose corn syrup and overly chemical-ed grains and dairy products that we think food ought to be cheap. Exploited worker wages have ‘subsidized’ most of what we eat. Covid and obnoxious immigrant policies have taken their toll, here we are needing to pay what things are worth - and we are shocked.

Obviously, there’s way more to this than this. No one made us buy that French bakery bread that was delicious, tough, crusty, and there’s one small piece left.

Might have to draw straws for it.