Thursday--

Thunderstorms rolled through early this morning--just as we were waking a bit before 5am.  The temperature though is mild in the upper 50s.  The rains and mild temps should speed the thawing of the last patches of frozen soil.  The seedlings are coming along nicely.  I think I saw orach and mizuno popping up.  They are greens I am trying in place of the lettuce and spinach that seems to bolt almost as soon as they come up in my gardens.  I changed out our door wreath yesterday switching the winter wreath for the spring.  Wednesday was wonderfully springlike so we opened both doors and raised the storm windows so we can open the windows when it gets warmer.

Mark Morford has a good piece on Amazon's new "dash buttons."  The wi-fi enabled devices that allow you to reorder your name-brand products directly from Amazon were featured on one or another news story a couple of days ago.  Most of what I thought as I watched was best left unsaid and what I did say was best not repeated.  Objections: a lot of what we buy are not name brand; we haven't bought anything from Amazon in years; we still know how to apply pen to paper to generate a shopping list (archaic, yes, but it serves well); we don't mind a weekly (more or less) shopping trip which gets us out of the house; we actually like schmoozing with our favorite clerks.

So the grocery stores are losing us and are desperately trying to win us back.  Unfortunately nothing the author listed is likely to bring me back.  We broadened our shopping some time ago.  First, we became totally unimpressed with the meats--didn't like the quality, the taste or the additives.  So we found a little local meat market that gets their stock from local sources as much as possible.  Most of those sources supply free range, hormone free and antibiotic free meats.  We haven't had a disappointing cut of meat (you know, the kind that has large amounts of inedible gristle or that cooks tough while losing a lot of water and other filler) since making that switch.  Though their meat is a bit more expensive we find we have less waste so our bill for meat has actually gone down.  We go to Panera for bread--better taste, fewer additives.  We go to the farm market in season for produce and freeze as much as we can for winter use.  Our local grocery has gotten smart and they get as much of their product as they can from local growers.  Restaurants in the store??  Not interested.  Delivery?? Not needed.  Smaller store?? Depends on what they carry not on how big the store is.  If it doesn't have what we want we aren't going.  And the notion of appealing to millennials?  We ain't.