A Change in the Weather
Today my Mom and I went shopping, tough work in a soggy, sultry heat. She was game, though, and shopped ’till she dropped, or at least until time to pick up AdventureMan to head for lunch at the Marina Oyster Barn. We’ve taken Mom there before, and today, that was just where she wanted to eat. Oyster stew. Hush puppies. Grilled tuna sandwiches. A slice of key lime pie to go – oh yummm.
As we entered the Marina Oyster Barn it was 77 degrees F. An hour later, as we left, it was 55 degrees F and it was starting to rain. This was not unexpected, but the sheer drama of the one hour, 22 degree drop made our jaws drop.
We dropped Mom off at home and hurried off to finish some errands before the big storm hit, but we were too late – just as we left the store with the 2 pounds of Jordanian dates for Mom, the squall hit full force, and we were soaked in the ten feet it took us to get to the car.
I’m happy though. I love the cooler temperatures, I love a chance to wear some of my more wintery clothing, and I love love love not having to use the air conditioning. 🙂
Intlxpatr Updates and ReVisits
Oops. I totally forgot. I wanted to show you my Halloween pumpkins.
What? ? ? Really? ? ? Halloween was almost a month ago? ? ? Time just flies these days.
I carved my pumpkins only a day or two before Halloween because with the heat and humidity here – like in Qatar and Kuwait – pumpkins can go moldy and soft if you carve them too soon.
I was OK, except for the ears. The ears – even just in a couple days – got all shriveled, but I kind of liked the effect. These were supposed to be cat pumpkins:
Happy Baby is learning to feed himself. He does great with Cheerios, with rice, with little things he can pick up and put in his mouth. Not so great yet with the spoon, but he is learning to love BBQ:
He thinks the flash on my camera is hilarious. Other than that, he likes me OK, but AdventureMan is his favorite right now.
The Qatteri Cat has a new bed, and oh, he just loves it. It has a tiny heating pad inside and is just warm enough to entice him. He sleeps so happily in his new bed, and he puts his baby in the bed to keep him warm, too, LOL:
We had a wonderful Thanksgiving in Panama City Beach, but my sunset photos are in the other camera and I don’t have the thing to download those photos. You have something to anticipate. 🙂
Great breakfast this morning at Andy’s Flour Power on Panama City Beach, one of our favorite places to go for breakfast:
AdventureMan and my Mom had the Vegetable Fritatta, and I had the Eggs Benedict:
We hope all our friends who celebrated Thanksgiving yesterday will take it easy on the Black Friday shopping, don’t get too excited, don’t fight over those great bargains. Have a great day.
Shop Till You Drop
Running into the Target is so easy – it is one of the nearest stores, and now that Targets also carry essential foods, it makes shopping quick and easy.
For me, anyway. As I was checking out, I saw this adorable little girl. Her grandmother said it was OK to shoot this photo:
Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus at Macys in Philadelphia
What a great way to start my day! Thank you, Momcat, for this wonderful new cultural random happening, this time at a large Macy’s in Philadelphia. Of course, this music is one I put on if I am feeling down; it lifts me right back up. 🙂
“To Serve You More Efficiently”
This is a photo we saw yesterday in the drive-through window at McDonalds. I will add that AdventureMan hates any kind of drive-through because he thinks there is a greater chance of not really getting what you ordered, but I love the convenience, and I was only ordering one simple thing:
Excuse me? If you have four ladies coming back from a shopping trip (say like) and each wants to pay her own order, you can’t do that? To serve us more efficiently, we can only make two orders per car? If I were a fast-food chain which relied on my customer’s good will, I would serve them, period.
Whenever a bank or a store or a fast-food joint start a sentence with “to serve you more efficiently” start looking for CUTS in service – shorter hours, fewer free services, fewer employees, fewer amenities.
Joe Patti’s Fresh Seafood
We have died and gone to heaven. At a time in our life when fish is a very good thing, we have come to another place where seafood is plentiful and delicious. (Kuwait and Qatar were also fish heavens 🙂 )
We have often eaten at Joey Patti’s, but had only glimpsed the Joe Patti outlet next door. Oh WOW. While I will still be buying at Maria’s because it is so close to where I live, Joe Patti’s is what Michelin calls “worth a trip.” They have wild salmon, cut into steaks, my all-time favorite. Good salmon, seared, cooked just through, has a moist, buttery taste I crave, with none of the high-cholesterol drawbacks of butter. 🙂
Joe Patti’s is HUGE, and full of seafood. Not just seafood, but anything associated with seafood, like spices, like prepared seafood salads, like condiments, and cooking equipment. Even some great palate-cleansing gelato. 🙂
Here is how you get there:
Food Shortages?
My friends in Kuwait are complaining about the price of tomatoes. The price of tomatoes in Kuwait?? Can a Kuwaiti cook without tomatoes?? 😉
I remember when suddenly, rice, a reliable cheap staple, suddenly went through the roof, and then, disappeared from the shelves when India announced a shortage and refused to export Indian rice. Kuwait, and other Gulf countries, announced they were buying unused farmland in other countries to insure their food supplies. But tomatoes? I thought everyone in Kuwait grew tomatoes, at least in winter.
And then, today, I saw this article on creeping food shortages:
Another lackluster monthly jobs report took center stage Friday. Stocks rallied, and government bond yields remained at rock-bottom levels as investors anticipate more action soon by the Federal Reserve to drive down interest rates even further.
Reports about how much slack the U.S. economy still needs to work through — like unemployment — understandably get the spotlight. But investors may be overlooking an even bigger story as the developing world stages a sharp rebound: Shortages of items like food and commodities are once again becoming a major concern.
Prices for agricultural commodities spiked so much on Oct. 8 that they triggered daily movement limits on the Chicago exchange. Options markets saw prices for commodities like corn soar more than 13% during the day following reports of supply shortages around the world.
Commodity-oriented exchange-traded funds like the PowerShares DB Agriculture (DBA) leaped as well. The ETF surged almost 10% over the previous week, with more than 6% of the gains registered on Friday alone.
Supply and Demand Discrepancies
A sharp shortfall in the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s corn production forecast, due to poor weather patterns, also helped set prices soaring around the world. U.S. corn crop yields would come in 4% short of prior estimates and drop to their lowest levels in 14 years, the Agriculture Department said.
Fears of commodity shortages in the face of surging global demand are leading to export-slashing. Ukraine announced a sharp cutback in the amount of commodities like wheat and barley it would allow to be shipped out of the country. The likelihood of a major discrepancy between supply and demand have led to surging prices worldwide. European wheat prices rallied 10%, with other commodities, such as soybeans and cotton, climbing as well.
Still, investors should be cautious because commodity prices are known to be extremely volatile and difficult to put a price on.
Fundamental Forces
Nevertheless, rising prices are creating alarm about humanitarian concerns. Morgan Stanley (MS) and the U.N. have warned about the prospects of a rerun of the 2007 food crisis that slammed the developing world.
See full article from DailyFinance: http://www.dailyfinance.com/story/poor-crops-soaring-demand-currency-wars-a-recipe-for-food-sho/19667693/?icid=sphere_copyright
As we drove across the United States this summer, we saw acres and acres of US farmland, unworked, for sale. Farming is a tough life, and fewer and fewer families are still farming. It’s scary and sad.
Super Target Colorado Springs
With some time on my own in Colorado Springs, I wanted to see what a Super Target looked like, and when I found it, it was with two other stores I really enjoy, one of which was TJMaxx Home. The Target was a target; you can always find what you need at a Target store, but different locations have slightly different merchandise.
One time, I wanted to buy some really cute paper plates, but I was on my way to Seattle and thought I could buy them there. When I got to Seattle, I searched every Target I could find, but they just didn’t carry those paper plates. Location, location . . .
The Super Target was pretty cool, but it has serious competition from Whole Foods, just down the road. When I saw these, however, I just had to laugh. I’ve been giving these as little gifts for years, never never thought I would see them at the Target:
Red Hot and Blue in Colorado Springs
No, No, I didn’t take any photos of my shopping trip yesterday; we don’t have a Macy’s in Pensacola, so I spent some time having fun in one of my favorite stores. It was a great day. I also found Ruth’s Stitchery and spent a lot of time looking at new quilting fabrics and patterns. The problem with Ruth’s is that they also have fabulous cross-stitching materials and patterns, and I am SO tempted to buy them, even though I don’t really cross stitch any more; unless you have really really good light, stitching on linen, which is what I like to do, is a lot more difficult than it used to be.
I picked up AdventureMan and as a special treat to me he took me to Red Hot and Blue, my favorite restaurant in Colorado Springs. He said ‘have you noticed how many of your reviews are BBQ restaurants?” LLOOOLLL! Yes! It’s true! We love BBQ. We do go to other restaurants, but most of the Pensacola restaurants we hang out in I have already reviewed at least once! Out of town, we often explore new BBQ. 🙂
We started with hushpuppies, and these were small, but good:
We tested all the sauces – the hot ones were really HOT!
We couldn’t possibly eat all this food, but we tried it all, and enjoyed it so much there was no room left for dessert:
Red Hot and Blue Chili
Their tangy cole slaw
My pulled chicken and potato salad
AdventureMan’s pulled pork and beans
Wyoming to Colorado Springs
We are eager to get going, but oh, we are shivering, and happy we brought a little fleece with us:
It is a glorious morning, bright sunshine, clear air, a day when we are glad to be alive and on the road.
Across South Dakota and Montana, we saw the huge round rolls of hay that we saw in France and Germany, but across Wyoming, most of the bales are the old fashioned square ones. We are thinking square is easier to store, but there must be some advantage, also, to the round ones, as they seem to be the latest invention. Anyone know why?
We find a rest stop so we can change drivers, and there is a set of sculptures there called The Greeting and the Gift, just as you are exiting Wyoming and entering Colorado:
I love this one. It looks noble. The First Nation (Native American) is offering a pipe of water. When I was a kid, I would have thought it was a peace pipe, but the explanation says otherwise. The Greeting statue I don’t like as much for two reasons – his hands seem out-of-scale large to me, and the hair does not look like a mountain man or explorer (to me) but looks sort of Hellenic. What do you think?
At the end of a very short drive is a city I love, Colorado Springs. I love it because (most of the time) the air seems clear and clean to me. I love it in the winter, when it is cold, and in the summer, when it is hot, it is dry heat, like Kuwait, but not so hot, so it doesn’t bother me. There are a million quilt shops here, all of which I intend to hit today while AdventureMan does some consulting and I drive the gypsy-mobile. There are also Macy’s department stores, which Pensacola doesn’t have, and Sephora, which Pensacola may be getting soon but did not have when I left.
We went to see George Clooney’s new film, The American, which gave us hours of conversation, and on our way to our Marriott home picked up a feast from Whole Foods – all vegetable! Balsamic grilled brussel sprouts, marinated grilled beets, a vegetarian meatloaf that really tasted like meat (!), guacomole, a pico de gallo with some bite, pita bread, sauteed garlic spinach, and some wonderfully tasty olives. AdventureMan picked up a really good bottle of Colorado merlot (yes, it exists, and is called Two Rivers: Chateau Deux Fleuves Vineyards.
Crowning our day was a sunset over Pike’s Peak. I don’t like a lot of drama in my life, but I love a lot of drama in a sunset. I loved this one so much that I am going to show you three different shots, because I can’t choose the one I like the best.
Recent Comments
Kitchen on Isiais: Winding Down intlxpatr on Shampoo Ginger tigerbutterya0c5ff1d… on Shampoo Ginger intlxpatr on British Soldier Kidnapped, Esc… John on British Soldier Kidnapped, Esc… Wikipedia Donate Button
Amazina
Early Voting in Florida
