Shopping in Berkeley

We have arrived. We have moved in. A bit. Working on it. I'll update pictures and apartment opinions later when I can actually see the floor.

Our fridge was of course empty on arrival, so we headed off to the Berkeley Bowl, the grocery store we were told in our new-arrivals packet from the Ward is the place to shop. Summation of the experience:

Sticker shock---
Milk: $5 a gallon.
Bread: $4.00 a loaf.
Cereal: at least $4.00 a box. Mostly $5.00 and up.
Individual Yoplait: $1.00 each.
Eggs: $3.50 a dozen, all free-range. (Apparently they don't put chickens in cages in Berkeley.)
Small bottle pasta sauce: $4.00 each.
Ground beef: $4.19 a pound and up.

But ...
Kiwi: $0.25 each, melt-in-your-mouth delicious.
Apples: $0.99 per pound. Totally reasonable.
Green leaf lettuce: $0.79 each.
Canned goods: totally comparable prices.
And the variety ...! Holy cow. We bought three kinds of gnocchi, just because we could. Sweet potato, whole wheat, and potato. There were at least five other kinds. We bought some delicious French cheese and crusty bread to have with our pasta and brussels sprouts for a fancy celebratory dinner. I feel like I could find any ingredient at that store, from quail eggs to animal body parts I would never consume to cheeses to pastas to chocolates to a zillion different fruits and veggies I have never seen before.

My conclusion:
I will shop at Costco for milk, eggs, cereal, and meat.
I will continue to bake my own bread.
I will eat a lot more produce.
I will savor this amazing culinary opportunity while I have the chance.
I will shop alone.
I will stop showering and get a nose ring and disown one of my children and put spiky fruits and huge stalks of brussels sprouts and organic everything in my basket so I can fit in with the crowd.
Just kidding.

Moving drama

This has been the strangest limbo move ever, full of adventures, mishaps, near-death drama, and barfing.

Last Sunday, as we were in the throes of packing the house, Isaac got the stomach flu. I followed soon thereafter, then Spence, then Joe. We were a pretty sorry sight Monday, but we'd generally returned to normal health by Tuesday, which turned into a majorly frantic packing day. Friends came to help us pack the truck and clean on Wednesday. We ate dinner on the floor Wednesday night, and Isaac surprised us, and mostly his Uncle Nate, who was on the receiving end of the explosion, by revealing that he wasn't quite done with the flu. This was worrisome, as we were due to board an airplane first thing the next morning. I brought a dish towel, blankets to spread on our laps, changes of clothing for all of us, and sanitizer on the plane in preparation for another Isaac barfing episode. It's a good thing I did. At least he waited until the plane was coming in for a landing in Sacramento to barf all over himself, me, and the airplane seat.

But my adventures are nothing compared to Joe's and Nate's. Evidently getting barfed on is a good way to catch the flu, because it wasn't long into their drive when Nate realized that Isaac had passed him the virus along with his vomit. So the poor fellow suffered through two days of a rocking, lolling, non-reclining moving truck with a plastic bag in one hand, while Joe did all the driving. And then they reached Parley's Canyon, a very steep descent into the Salt Lake Valley. And the brakes stopped working. On their way down. Luckily they hit a small stretch of flat ground and were able to apply the dying brakes hard enough to bring the truck to a shuddering halt on the edge of the highway. Joe was seriously shaken up. If they'd gone another hundred feet or so, they'd've been on their way down again with overheated, broken brakes. He was contemplating those big piles of sand that truckers use to make emergency stops. Yikes.

Fix-it guys arrived and decided the brakes were fine, just overheated. So they proceeded slowly on their way. The next day, they found themselves literally at the top of the Sierra Nevadas, at Look-out Point, with a broken transmission. I guess when your truck is going downhill, and you're flooring the gas, and the truck is shaking hard and going slower and slower, that's a bad thing. Fix-it guys were called in again. Luckily, Joe was towing our little Toyota truck, so he and Nate hopped in it and drove the rest of the way to Sacramento while Budget towed the moving junk-heap down the mountains.

Now it's sitting in some car garage in Rancho Cordova, full of our stuff, pining away. Budget told us there was nothing wrong with it, and we should just pick it up this morning and continue to Berkeley. But the mechanics called us this morning and said, yes, something is definitely wrong with it (um, duh). So they're working on locating a different truck to transfer our stuff into so that we can finally move into our new home. Maybe tomorrow.

In the meantime, we're having a lovely pre-Christmas vacation with Joe's family here in limbo. Spencer celebrated his birthday on Sunday---four years old! I hope to be able to report tomorrow that we've actually seen and moved into our new apartment, a full week after we set out from Illinois. We shall see.

Stalling

I thought I'd heard just about every excuse in the book from Spencer where sleep-time avoidance is concerned, but he surprised us with a new one today.

Coming down the hallway, ten minutes after he'd been put down for a nap, Spence declared, "But, Mommy, I just realized that I need to shave my legs!"

I burst out laughing and put him back in his bed anyway, telling him, over his many insistences that he'd realized his legs are "furry," that he is a three-year-old boy, for heaven's sake, and I am not going to assist or allow him to shave his legs.

What a kid. :)

California in two days! YIKES!!! Naturally, we all came down with the stomach flu on Sunday and were totally useless and blargy all day yesterday, meaning there are half a million things to be accomplished today and the house is a disaster. Which is naturally why I'm sitting here blogging. Such is life.