Ronni Bennett has a piece titled "Small Pleasures." Amen to almost all of it. Cat watching is particularly fun with two new young cats. A good book is always a pleasure but I think I am getting very picky nowadays. Too many fall into the "Not that again" file. Ice cream--of course!! I am not crazy about snow though. I don't have to go out driving in it but I do need to shovel it and clear off the car. One thing Ronni didn't mention: if we don't want to do something we generally don't have to do it.

We decided to check out a "natural foods" store we hadn't been in for a long time since our favorite had closed in December. We had a couple of very nice surprises: they instituted a loyalty program with discounts, they gave us a discount for using our own bags, and they are going bagless in next month. I would like to see this kind of packaging added to all our stores. And no we don't live in the Netherlands so that isn't our store.

Now for something a bit on the weird side. A plant that doesn't have chlorophyll and doesn't perform photosynthesis. It is mostly subterranean and only emerges for a short time to flower. The flower looks almost like a spider or insect.

Many years ago I was listening to the radio on a long drive and I heard the host of the show (sorry I have forgotten his name) talk about an old man in Australia who was one of the last two speakers of his aboriginal language. Though he longed to speak it with someone else he couldn't have spoken with the other surviving speaker who live in a nearby town. She was his sister and the taboos of his people prohibited direct communication between siblings of opposite sexes.  I thought it sad. I wonder how long before that story might be repeated in other places. Or how often it has been repeated since the original story.

I am used to seeing pictures like these and stories of fighting over what little is left over here but in the U.K.!!! I can't remember ever being so concerned about a storm that I rushed out to the supermarket to engage in guerrilla ops to get anything. Over the last few years we take mental not of what we have on hand and realize we don't have to worry. We either have what we need or work-arounds for whatever might run out. This op-ed deals with the fall out from the shortage of chicken that closed a lot of KFC shops across Britain recently.

Sporadic stories about the saline bag shortage most often attributed to the destruction of the production plant in Puerto Rico during the hurricane. This story from Naked Capitalism indicates the situation has been on-going for at least the last 4 years and is more the result of corporate greed in a part of the industry dominated by only three major players. And anyone who thinks this is an unusual situation is smoking something that is very bad for their brain.