OK, guys -- guys -- one thing, hey: Just remember, when you're being inundated with all this Bicentennial brouhaha this summer, don't forget that what you're really celebrating is a bunch of aristocratic slave-owning white males who didn't wanna pay their taxes!

Thing the first: You might be spending a little too much time reading your political tumblrs if you have full-scale Technicolor dreams about Standing with Wendy.

Thing the second: I have started to see my increasingly-frequent trips to the Lucky supermarket in my neighborhood as a form of time travel. This place, y'all -- it's in a shopping strip built in the late '60s or early '70s, it's like ... I don't know, like where the goddamn Brady Bunch would get their 20 pounds of ground chuck. It's HUGE, the aisles are wide enough for three gigantic old-school shopping carts to pass each other with room to say howdy, they have everything (including a florist, a half-acre of breakfast cereal, canning/preserving supplies, buttermilk, Little Debbies, and about a quarter-mile-long wine & liquor aisle), there's a gigantic bakery/deli section with (I think) actual butchers in-house,* the milk is all in the cooler at the back which does not have doors, and I am getting to love this place. It's like I'm Ramona Quimby's mom, doing the marketing.** I buy things that are on special (they have specials!), I compare pasta brands, I order children's birthday cakes ... It is, no kidding around, pretty awesome. And then I go outside, put it all in the back of my hybrid vehicle, and drive back to the twenty-teens, where things are sleeker and better-lit but not necessarily quite as much fun. 

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*I mean, that cut up meats -- cold cuts, chops, ribeyes, what have you -- not kill and render them; most grocery stores these days don't want to pay and train and certify anyone to use the slicers and such, which is why at like Safeway you can't get them to slice you some turkey fresh, you have to take a wad of it from the big pre-sliced pile in the case, which is why I never ever buy cold cuts at Safeway O GOD I MISS NEW YORK SO BAD SOMETIMES. 

**in the second book, written in 1968; y'all ever notice the Ramona books are set in whichever year they were written, that although the family's life progresses normally with aging and whatnot, they don't all stay in the 1950s like when the first book came out? 

     ***OMFG Beverly Cleary is still alive! And she lives about two hours' drive from me! aaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhh! Total Stalkerazzi Time!