I go to the supermarket for a very small number of items now, and getting smaller.

Will the number ever reach zero? Probably not, because frozen organic four-berries and chilled organic cream don’t ship well. Avocados are best tested with a live thumb. And while their meat is mostly trash, it is mostly cheap and convenient to varying degrees, and it may be quite some time before I am bow-hunting jackrabbits.

The main reason to not-go there, beyond the introverted obvious things, is that the managers are almost exclusively female, surly, and butch.

If one of them is running a checkout line I will go stand in a longer queue, to avoid the ugliness of interacting with one of them. They don’t like me, and they have very little interest in filtering that dislike away in the holy name of customer service.

On the bright side I do sometimes see other customers that I know from the old professor days, and I get along with all of them fine. I saw the Dean there only once, and that was one deeply satisfying opportunity to be surly myself, upon the bloated visage of that two-faced cow.

In between deans and other fucked-up middle managers on the one hand, and former students and co-workers smiling on the other, there is the no-man’s land of the run-of-the-mill grocery employees, some of whom have been there for twenty years.

Generally speaking these lifers tolerate me, as they must endlessly tolerate everything else about their underpaid and nowhere-man employee environment and existences.

I get along best with the new hires, mainly because they haven’t completely died inside yet, and would have zero interest in Succeeding into the Management ranks even if there wasn’t some kind of weird lesbian mafia in their way. Because …

They’ll be on their way from this rut, eventually, one way or another.

On today’s visit (still no cream, so just $15 for 3 pounds of butchercow), I ran into Mags. She’s a hiking girl and she knows I’m one too, or would be if they let hiking girls be this tall and have facial hair. She engaged enthusiastically on the topic of THIS WIND and how it made it less appealing to walk.

Two more days of it, we agreed.

And then comes the Spring?

The nighttime lows crawling back above freezing.

And a high, at three o’clock in the afternoon nine days from now, cracking 80, eighty! motherlovin’ degrees.

Mirabile dictu.

And god bless us every one.

***

Late breaking news.

Some months ago I paused/killed my Starlink connection because I could not rationalize spending $150 a month on an internet connection under the present economic circumstance.

I got a barely-enough deal with a local ISP for a fraction of that price and the Star dish has been rotting up on the roof all this fall and winter past.

Tonight the Elonistas wrote to say that they had a new option. Ten gigs of connectivity, which is two or three days worth for me, from anywhere on earth as per usual, for just $10 a month.

I signed up on the spot and I am nothing short of thrilled–inspired, even.

I can stay home now and burn video, upload or download, as I’ve been doing in the cold.

But as Spring happens, I will also be able to head deep into the outback, beyond the reach of spotty cell data towers, and still be equipped to put up a post or two like this one should the need arise.

All for just shy of $50 a month total with taxes and everything.

Maybe the blessing worked on a backfire; whatever. How am I? Yeah real good ty in this a fleeting moment in spacetime.