In light of the Smithfield plant closure in Sioux Falls, I decided to make a pork run yesterday. I mean, we can’t be running out of bacon now, can we?!
Actually, bacon isn’t even the issue. I was looking for pork loin and chops. What can I say? We’re big fans of The Other White Meat™. The selection was decent, so apparently mass pornic (pork panic) hasn’t set in yet. We’ll be enjoying carnitas and mesquite grilled pork chops when the rest of the world is stuck with frozen pizza and Top Ramen!
As an aside, grocery store shopping has gotten really weird lately, huh? Every time you think they can’t possibly make the whole experience any more unpleasant, they manage to make the whole experience more unpleasant. This week, Safeway and Family Fare have added arrows to control the traffic flow, essentially turning aisles into one-way streets. You would think the fact that these arrows are gigantic and bright red would prevent me from going the wrong way, but…nope.
Every. Single. Time.
Drawing the ire of shoppers who are apparently much better at paying attention to these things than I.
Can I just say how thankful I am that my parents so generously bought us a freezer for a housewarming gift last summer? It has come in handy far more than we ever would have anticipated. At the time it seemed like an appliance that would be nice to have for our twice-yearly stocking-up-from-Trader-Joe’s trips to Fort Collins, but now that baby is pretty full. Not just with pork, but lots of other things, too. When we first got the freezer, Tara filled empty containers with water and stuck them in there to keep it cooler and more energy-efficient when the shelves were bare, but I think we’re at the point now where we can get rid of those blocks of ice.
Bomb Shelter or Basement?
One of our house goals this summer is to start a garden. Because winter lasts forever here (seriously: today is the fifth day in a row it has snowed!), planting anything has to wait until mid-May at the earliest. To combat this, Tara ordered what can only be described as a “metric shit ton” of seeds and jury-rigged a rather elaborate grow lab in the utility room of our basement. We’re talking tomatoes, bell peppers, tomatillos, lemon cucumbers, lettuce, snap peas, herbs, flowers, and probably another half-dozen things I am forgetting. All legal, I might add!
The whole thing seems very haphazard and I was skeptical at first; I’ve never had luck with seeds before—my only gardening experience has involved planting vegetable starts—but, I’ll be damned if things aren’t growing like crazy. So much so that she’s going to have to transplant a lot of these starts into bigger containers soon. Like, this weekend.
Considering that the whole contraption looks like something MacGyver would have put together on a wing and a prayer, I’m impressed.
I turn on the lights every morning when I get up and turn them off right before bedtime, so they’re getting about 16 hours of light every day. Tara is watering them and doing whatever else it is she does. I don’t really know; the utility room is mostly her domain. I only ever duck in there to fetch pork from the freezer.
Between the meat-filled freezer and the ramshackle grow lab, our basement is beginning to feel a bit like a fallout shelter.
We’ve also got our well-stocked liquor closet down there, so if push came to shove I’d be perfectly content hanging out down there until the mushroom clouds dissipate or we get a handle on this whole COVID-19 thing.
Whichever comes first.
Mark My Words 
Leave a comment