Odds and Ends

We're staying in the city this weekend. Although I absolutely love being at the house, this somehow feels like a holiday. But it reminds me there were some anecdotes from last weekend I'd meant to post.

The first: as we drove across the river to the house at the end of a rather long journey up, I became conscious of a sort of high pitched wheezing which I realized had been going on in the background on and off since we left the city.

'What's that noise?" I aksed the hubby.

"Oh, that's the gaffer tape I stuck over the hole in the engine," he replied in an offhand way, like he mended car engines with tape every day of the week.

"What, so our car really is stuck together with sticky tape?" I replied. How very Blue Peter. I'd only thought it felt like it was.

Then there was the trip to Pecks, the local supermarket, where as usual I was forced to eat humble pie. As I was trying to fit far too much stuff into the one reusable bag I'd brought with me while wrestling the credit card from Dot, who was lording it over the supermarket from the vantage point of her first ever go in the child seat of a trolley (in our poncey Brooklyn supermarket she sits right in the basket on one of those mini-basket-trolley things), the cashier said, "Oh, hold on, I need to take some off because you brought a bag."

This was new. "Really, how much do I get back?" I asked, thrilled.

"Three cents," she said. Well, ok then.

As I was manoevring Dot's chariot out the door I noticed a pile of red cloth bags with a 'Shop Rite reusable bags' sign next to them. I think they cost 10 cents or something. How brilliant is that?

Next time I'm going to spy on the other shoppers to see if the plastic bag message is doing any better there than it is in Manhattan. Here I keep seeing people on the subway, an Anya Hindmarch 'I'm not a plastic bag' in one hand and...a plastic bag in the other.

I think I also meant to tell you how unbelievable the selection is at River Brook Farm at the moment. I go to the UK for 2 weeks and they go harvest festival-tastic. Quite unbelievable - garlic, (pink) potatoes, watermelons, squash, spinach, basil, (purple) carrots, aubergines, peppers, broccoli, dill, fennel, salad, (green, purple) tomatoes and so on and so on - and there are only three of them doing the whole thing. Incredible. We also got the most delicious white peaches, blackberries and plums from the Callicoon farmers market. Good times for farm market geeks like me.

I think there was more to tell but it eludes me and I better get to bed. The hubby's sighing and yawning in a way that suggests he's trying to get my attention.