I know I had several things to mention. At the moment, I can only remember two. We'll see what happens by the end.

Eating dinner last night, I managed to figure out exactly why the combination of a well balanced fork and plates is important. For whatever reason, the fork tended to be heavy, and balanced towards the handle. Not normally a problem, however the plate formed a bad combination. It had a sharp edge, more of a modern look, and I kept balancing the fork on it between bites, at which point the fork would flip back onto the table, and almost into my lap. I will take some fault for doing this about 3 times, but clearly I had previously understimated the interaction between fork and plate. Fortunately I never launched any food in the process, but it was a bit disconcerting to have my fork flying when I didn't even touch it, it was all gravity's fault.

The second item, is only at Sam's Club could they decide that the newly popular small watermelons are best sold in bags of 2. Of course they must realize the whole point of a small watermelon is to avoid having to get a large one and deal with it. I guess they just figure bulk is good for everyone. Or maybe you have lots of picnics with 4 people. So you would buy 2 and use one on saturday and one sunday. Must make sense to someone.

Umm, its the time to think of the third thing, and I can't remember it, so I give up. I'll try and think of it later and post it quicker so I don't forget.

so its raining a lot, but i talked about the weather last time, and I don't think it went over very well. THough maybe it went over better then the nothing I said after it before this. I guess that's an option.

Went to Sushi tonight, worked out well, except that I thought it was funny Sapporo beer is labelled in like 10 places saying its imported. I figured that was to avoid confusion with the "American" Japanese beers, like Kirin. (Which is also actually pretty good, so I'm not knocking it). Of course hidden in the edge of the Label is that Sapporo is imported. From Canada. Guelph Ontario to be exact. Oooh, exotic. Stupid marketing. Can't you just admit your beer was from 7 hours away (3 if you managed to fly it over the lake) and not try and make it sound more exotic then your 'competition' from LA? Or whatever other Japanese beers hang out in more mainstream locations. I can't think of any at the moment. I'm sure Chris will chide me for that. The moral is, can't our beer all just get along?

Ok. Enough excitement. Well ok, except for that the last time we went out for vietnamese food (Pho specifically, but I'm too lazy to put the correct letter, so we'll just call it soup). We had a 10 minute discussion on the subtlties of using chopsticks, from a woman who was waiting for takeout. I'm not really sure what the whole point was, but she was very adament about a whole pile of things that we being done wrong. Some which made sense. Otherwise, which don't. The best part, was when she left, the chef and waitress came out and pointed out how weird she was. Regardless, the sushi wasn't a bad time to attempt the new and updated chopsticking technique. I'm not sure it was any better or worse, I think I was just more self conscious. Oh well, maybe that was her goal. She succeeded then. Not to mention succeeding at being weird and not taking hints that utensil advice was not actually wanted or expected.

Its my latest activity, talking about the weather when I have nothing else interesting to say. Its hot. Its supposed to cool off on tuesday, but its been above 90 every day for the past 3 days. Not exactly fun.

I know I've mentioned this before, but I miss R-12 air conditioning. Even though it killed the ozone and a pile of other bad things, it was just so much colder. The jetta would put out air at 32 degrees. I think all new cars with their fancy R-134a don't get anywhere near as cold, but I should measure it sometime. (I know the temp because a mechanic measured it on the jetta once when I get the a/c fixed). A quick search didn't yield anyone verifying the temperature difference, but my seat of the pants test and discussion with people verifies it. And now its on the web, so it must be true.

In other news, I'd like to remind those of you that are married, engaged, or generally not single, to appreciate the small things. Like hershey bars after dinner. And clean pants. I think it works out better that way. At least then you get more clean pants. If you eat too many hershey bars I think you go blind, there must be something unhealthy in them that is offset by melting marshmallow onto them though, so it works out. But one bar is definetly good and worth thanking for.

Umm, its too hot to think about anything else. I'm moving to air conditioning. But the R-22 room air kind. That's too much chemistry about refridgeration for one entry. I'm quitting while I've only lost half of the readers.

You may recall from entry 968, that I mentioned how it seemed likely tops would leave the area.

Aparently, I call them well, though really, it wasn't like I either had inside information, or this was a close call, because. If you read that article, it pretty clearly shows how this area was Tops' worst area, and the reason they had performance issues. Anyway, so they're selling. (That was the 2 second summary of that really short article anyway).

I think its funny how they blame it on 'discount' groceries. As far as I know, the only new discount grocery stores are Walmart, which still only has a very few superstores around here, (vs the 46 or so tops') and trader joes, which sells way different stuff then Tops. (And there's only 2 Trader Joe's here anyway). The other discounters, Marc's, Aldi and Dave's all have been here for a really long time.

Nothing like marketing spin, of course I'm sure it has nothing to do with Giant Eagle's fuelperks program, which gives you $.10 off each gallon of gas you buy at their stations for every $50 you spend (i.e. if you spend $400 a month, you can 'cash in' at the end of the month and get $.80 off up to 30 gallons at one fillup). Really, no reason at all people would pick the store where you can save money on the thing people like to complain about the price of the most.

Anyway, onto the speculating of who will buy the stores. I think its likely one of the closer regional chains will buy some of them, maybe Kroger, or Acme. I might think Meijers would buy some, but doesn't Meijers always only have the superstore thing with clothing and groceries? So they'd have to expand the stores, or change their schtick, neither of which would make tons of sense. I also expect some of them to close, which is kinda sad, since competition is a good thing, and it seems like there are plenty of locations where there are 3 stores across from each other, but others with only 1 tops, and you know it will be the 1 single store that closes, because it doesn't attract enough business to be profitable, and no other company would buy it.

Anyway, this is really long, to not say much about anything, but you know, you need to keep up with the grocery store gossip. I'll have to see how my predictions go I think.

So after a relatively relaxing long weekend, I'm back to my regularly scheduled slacking. Well not really, I think I'm still overdue to be calling it regular.

Anyway, so I was reading the latest Wegmans expansion is into Philly. I'm grumpy about that, but since I think that Tops is likely to leave the Cleveland market, since they're doing really poorly (something like the only location they're losing money in) maybe that will bode well for the future westward expansion. I think I'm being optimistic though, maybe I should just suck it up and hope for a super target, and then when Whole Foods opens in March I'll be happy. I don't really need that many grocery stores. Besides, its incentive to visit people if I get to go to other ones, so that's overall a good thing.

I would comment on the Indians/Yankees game, but I know everyone has sides, so I'll just leave it at that.

I'm tired, I think all of this summer sun, besides giving me a tan, is affecting my sleep patterns, I don't want to go to bed at midnight, but I keep doing stuff until the sun goes down, then have other things to do, then it ends up being late, its all quite annoying. Maybe I should live near the equator, that would cut down on all the differing light things. Or maybe I should talk about something more interesting.

What is the point of multi-megabit cable modems if I am busy downloading a pdf map at 33k/sec? Besides that I think the tiers of cable modem are like 100k or 4 megs (to attempt to work against those $13 dsl folks) so its not like I'm paying extra for the speed, clearly there is some sort of limiting factor on the greater interweb that is annoying. I would like to register my complaint, but I'm too lazy to dig into it anymore to see what is really wrong, I'd just rather complain, its like backseat driving.

Anyway, so that's about it.

Does anyone have any plans for interesting summer stuff? I figure it couldn't hurt to connect with the occasional people that try to IM me, and then I'm not around, at least this stays for the moment. But really, I don't try to get kicked off aim, it just happens, like snow, of sorts. Don't take it personally.

Ok. enough fun stuff, I'm just counting down the days to the weekend. Amazing how those 3 days work well for such stuff.