Wednesday

We have a big to-do coming up Friday. Okay, it won't really be all that big, but it's being anticipated and that's reason enough for hyperbole. It'll be the 2007 Annual Miss USA Drinking Game. We've invited a mostly uninitiated group to our tiny unit for the show. Many of these people are recent friends, and I'm pretty sure we've never watched a pageant with any of them. We'll run through all the rules again, of course (synopsized here, anticipate minor adjustments for this different beauty event). I suspect it will be a good time. In anticipation of this, our first to-do at the new place, tonight we went grocery shopping for things like crackers, chips, dips, juices, mixers, and garnish fruits. While abroad, one of the more unexpectedly interesting things to do was going grocery shopping. Grocery stores are certainly mundane, but they loudly convey both the massive and minute differences between cultures. I can spend far too much time wandering aisles of odd labels and exotic (to me) ingredients. Coming home again, I am discovering more and more how habituated to México I became: the grocery stores here look weird to me now, too. Firstly, they are mostly really small. In North Carolina, the local place was a vast Harris Teeter that we nicknamed the "Taj-Mateeter" (and has since been replaced with an even larger "Teeter Dome"), but for the most part, US stores are all smaller than the average monolithic Mexican grocery, which is departmentalized into whole areas for house wares and auto repair things. Of course, those Mexican stores are weighted toward produce where their US cousins tend toward frozen and pre-packaged stuff. Now I find myself wandering the odd selections here (Cotton Candy Shasta?) and marveling at the weirdness of this country, too. [Cavin]