Monday night

Update on the present situation: I ordered something for M's sister, so now we just need the mom and dad. Still no firm ideas on what we're sending them, but I appreciate the ideas for those who volunteered them. We've decided to send them all together after all, which means his mom's present will be late, but she said that we didn't need to send anything, so we think that late will be okay. :)

I spent the day doing icky stuff, for the most part. I went in to the store just before lunch and then started in on the stupid cabinets around two. There's a kitchen in the back room, and so we've been trying to get all the cabinets cleaned out and shelfpaper put down. This really sucked. I said this approximately fifty times while doing it, just in case anyone forgot that I thought so. :) I didn't mind the shelf-paper all that much, though. And we finally got it done, at least.

Actually, to tell the truth, I'm somewhat of a Contact-paper fanatic. I actually wallpapered my kitchen in it. ;) This does not appear even slightly as tacky as it sounds. See, we have an old trailer, with dark panelling on the two main walls. The third wall had this icky crackled yellow horrible.. I don't even know the word for it. It looked awful, in any case, so I covered it with ivy contact paper before we even moved in. (There isn't a wall on the fourth wall, by the way. Just a sink and counter.) (See a picture here and ignore the junk on the fridge. Magnus likes to put things there for some reason. The stuff I covered up was also in the bathroom, and you can see that here.. this has also been covered (with actual wallpaper this time..this was taken just before we put it up, hence the open sockets and missing towel rack and stuff) and the light fixture replaced, of course.) I've done other interesting things with Contact paper, too. I covered three built-in kitchen shelf-type things and the medicine cabinet in the bathroom (twice, but I'm not happy with the second implementation, though I doubt I'll get around to fixing it.. the thing needs replaced, really.) And there's even one ceiling cabinet that's covered in dark green paper. It's handy stuff. I have a roll on my desk right now, as a matter of fact.

All this talk about home improvements reminds me of how much work we've actually put into this place and how sentimentally attached I am to it. We've made a few incredibly weird cheap fixes that are highly on the tacky side (if you've ever decorated with sheets or cardboard, you might be a redneck..) but now it looks pretty good inside, if I do say so myself. Well, when it's clean and if you don't look at the carpet. ;) And luckily for us, we could care less what the outside looks like. ;) If we were the outdoorsy sort, we'd be freaking out by now. I'm just so uninterested in grass and flowers and stuff.

Then again, sentimentality is nice and all, but man, am I looking forward to moving outta here! I want a house! I could learn to like grass and flowers! Really! Just give me a chance!

As The Fruit Turns

All is well in the land of the produce. I didn't work today but I did go down and visit for an hour or two. I picked up bread, a tomato and a banana pepper. I do love banana peppers, though I don't eat them raw like my uncle does. Hmm. I didn't eat my fruit today, though. I've had a cantaloupe (no, not the whole thing!), an apple, a pear and an orange, which is kinda neat because I don't typically eat a lot of fruit even though I rather like it. The orange was seriously excellent. The pear, too. All but the orange were from the back in the pile of "things that don't look good enough to sell but are still somewhat salvagable to varying degrees" pile.

I've learned such weird and interesting things in the last four days. For example, and this might be an obvious statement, but it's worthy of mentioning: produce goes bad. A lot of produce goes bad. For the love of Pete, go buy some produce RIGHT NOW before it rots!! I've also learned that fruits and vegetables are cheap. You can walk out of a produce market with a serious amount of food without spending all that much money. And it's also been confirmed for me that people are odd. If you have a box of oranges that aren't as nice as the regular oranges (which are 3/$1) priced at 4/$1, they won't sell, but if you bag up those same oranges in a bag of eight and mark them for $1.99, they're gone in a heartbeat. The most important thing that I've learned, though, is "Do not drop rotten fruit." Believe me when I say that this is important!

In general, running a produce market is more work than you would think. Not only are there customers to be taken care of, there's also this eternal dance with the food. Some of it has to be refridgerated overnight, some boxes get carried outside in the morning and back in at night. The cabbage needs a layer peeled off each morning. The carrots need inspected for black spots, the tomatoes have to be watched extremely carefully. The green onions need the ugly edges trimmed off, the extra leaf lettuce needs bagged up and refridgerated, the green peppers need to either stay green or be removed from the pile.... Meanwhile, someone has to drive an hour and a half to pick up fresh stuff a few times a week, and someone needs to make deliveries to the local businesses.

I think it's the sheer amounts of the stuff that gets you. There's always at least one large box filled with questionable stuff sitting on the table in the back to be sorted. Some of it gets eaten or given away. Mom has been peeling and slicing the good parts of the damaged apples for freezing (my grandfather adores fried apples for breakfast. This is possibly a somewhat local delicacy.).. Saturday she did seven quarts. She was working on it again today when I left, and I'd say she'll have just as many again. I wonder how many quarts she'll have before she gets bored with trying to save it all? Tomatoes also pile up quickly, and mostly, they still look wonderful when they get thrown into the box except for one little black spot or something. And no one wants to buy something with a black spot! It's perfectly logical for a customer to only pick out the best-looking stuff, but man, does the rotten (or even just funny-looking) stuff pile up quickly!

I'm planning homemade salsas and pasta sauces, salads and casseroles. I'm officially in the market for great vegetable recipes. Magnus and I once toyed with the idea (over a chicken sandwich) of becoming partially vegetarian--well, just on the weekdays or something like that. I guess this is our chance.