No Sugar Tonight

There are days you eat the bear, and days the bear eats you. That's why there's always at least two paper napkins in the right pocket of whatever jacket I'm wearing. I like being prepared. I wasn't a Boy Scout but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night.

Speaking of prepared, our local grocery store is redoing its insides. Moving huge amounts of the store around-really everything between the frozen food and the produce and delicatessen sections (because, I suspect, of all the wiring and plumbing and counter tops needed for those areas). As of last night, the cat food is where the soda used to be and the bread and muffins are in first aisle near the celery and the organic stuff that looks like salsa wallpaper paste in the plastic tub, as opposed to near the bakery, which is where it was for at least a decade.

My wife thinks I'm crazy but I blame it on the cost of fuel. Almost everything in every grocery store is beamed down from the manufacturer by spaceships traveling at light speed. After the merchandise appears in the parking lots of the markets, elfin creatures all with a "K" monogrammed on their sweaters and answering to the name 'Ernie', come out of the hollow tree stumps, unpack the goods and place them on the store shelves before melting away and into the forest. Or not.

Yeah. I'm thinking mostly tractor-trailers, double clutching, eighteen forward gears, refrigeration units set on high and burning through diesel like we had an unlimited supply somewhere in the Texas Panhandle. But we don't and as the cost of fuel continues to sky-rocket, so too, will everything associated with it, to include the food we buy in the store that comes on those trucks (we laid the elves off; they got a decent severance package and a year's worth of health care benefits). It's just a matter of time before we see those higher prices on the shelves so I think as a sleight of hand, my local store is making me relearn its contents. Rather than my picking up a jar of Smart Balance peanut butter and wondering why it's now $3.89 and asking 'Honey, didn't this used to be about $3.50?' I can now wonder about 'wasn't all of this stuff on the shelves opposite the cereal? The grocery equivalent of the School of the Burning House (Buddha as a deli counter worker, not a volunteer fire fighter; that's a discussion for later this week, assuming we can remain civil enough to discuss it).

If this works and I get distracted from the price increases on groceries by issues connected with locating them, will I attend tomorrow night's Norwich City Council meeting where, according to the agenda, the City Manager is presenting the 2008-2009 proposed budget and find all the benches in the Council chamber facing one another instead of the front of the room?
And will some of us be looking for eggs while others are looking for paper towels?
-bill kenny