Overheard in the grocery store this afternoon:

Little girl to her mother, “I’ll be very, very good for the rest of the day if I could just have five notebooks!”

I’d love to know what she needed five notebooks for.   I desperately wanted to stop my grocery cart and ask, but these days talking to children in public is suspect.  New Englanders are a suspicious bunch.  And I don’t blame them.  But this little girl wasn’t old enough to write, so of course I was curious, being a notebook-lover myself.

If you’ve ever had a five-year old plead for notebooks, please share the reason.

I went to five grocery stores today.  Possibly a lifetime record.  In fact, it is a lifetime record.  Maybe I should get myself a bumper sticker.

Anyway, I finished up work today in time to head 17 miles south to Walmart to return a brand-new made in China crock pot that wouldn’t heat.  I also had a list of strange and exotic spices to find, in order to vary the taste of beans, rice, lentils, etc.

Three miles down the highway I missed being hit head-on by a car speeding north along two lanes of southbound highway.  Thank God no one was passing me at the time.  I laid on the horn and the cars behind me slowed down and got out of the way.

Before I could remember how to use my cell phone, I saw police cars.  Yay, police cars!!!!

I now have a new appreciation for pulling safely into the Walmart parking lot.

Two supermarkets, one Chinese grocery store and two health-food stores later, I had my frozen kale and okra and onions and fresh beets and sweet potatoes and mint and parsley and these little buggers:

Mission accomplished.
Recipes to follow.