Monday.

I love days when I read something and say "I didn't know that."  This article is one of those somethings.  It makes sense that some of the channel islands would have once spoke French but that they managed to not only retain the French but have their own dialect of French is fascinating.

We did our weekly errands this morning and were surprised to see empty shelves where a some items we wanted normally are.  We don't often see that because we don't go in for fancy or highly processed foods.  But both grocery chains were out of the brand of yogurt we buy and the brand of butter they advertised on sale had already sold out.  The dairy manager told us their supplier failed to deliver their full order of the butter--to any of the local stores.  We have remarked fairly often over the last year and a bit that the stores have fewer items and/or more empty spots on their shelves.  Makes me wonder what is going on.

Tuesday.

I had a couple of odd thoughts on this story.  It is a shame that the children were subjected to such rude treatment.  However, I wonder if the fault isn't with the higher management of the company and not with the individual managers.  For this kind of incident to happen in two geographically separated stores makes me think that the store managers and their staffs are subjected to considerable pressure from the top to maintain both sales and sales per customer levels.  That thought makes be wonder exactly how good sales have been and how good they expect them to be.  Indications are: not very.

Wednesday.

Only in the mid 20s this morning and the weather people say the cold weather, which feels more like early January, for the next two weeks.  We had rain as the snow stayed well north of us.  They predict flurries for Sunday.

So far we are very happy with our new TV arrangement.  When we didn't find an antenna that gave us acceptable reception we cut our cable back to very basic.  The hardest part was convincing Comcast that we really did want less service--they kept trying to move us into a bigger package for a nice low, introductory price.  What it was about paying too much and getting too little didn't register we don't know.  Finally, they did what we wanted.  So we get our local channels and a couple of the shopping channels which we would gladly do without.  We signed up for Netflix.  Now we listen to Pandora during the afternoon, watch Jeopardy and news on cable, and then go to Netflix in the evening.  We especially enjoy the lack of commercials--and look forward to reducing our overall bill by about a third.