Amazing Produce at Food 4 Less

Can you guess what this is? Here's a hint; it's in the produce department, and you use it in cooking and especially in salads.

Give up?

It's celery! What makes it hard to recognize is that you are looking at the bottoms and the tops of the celery bunches, neatly arrayed in precise verticle rows. Not quite the way I'm used to seeing celery in the store!

This is the Food 4 Less store in Vallejo, CA. Mike and I like to shop here because they have good prices, awesome selection, and we can find stuff we can't find at Raley's or Safeway like cotijo cheese and Campbell's Bean with Bacon and Tomato Bisque soups. We stopped here last week to pick up a few things. It was shortly after the store opened for the day and when we walked into the produce department I just stared.

All the produce was lined up perfectly, piled in meticulous pyramids, or stacked tightly in vertical cubicles. It was so amazing that we went back today, camera in hand, to take photos.

I have never seen produce arranged this way before. I don't know if this is something new that Food 4 Less is doing, or perhaps I'd never shopped there first thing in the morning, before hordes of shoppers had made a shambles out of the painstakingly organized fruits and veggies.

Following are some of the photos we took this morning:

Carrots, cabbages, and celery.

A pile of cauliflower surrounded by carrots, radishes and lettuces, amongst other stuff. Note how vertically, and tightly, the vegetables are stacked!

Broccoli, loose carrots (64 cents/lb!), and several types of lettuce.

Squashes, purple eggplant, artichokes, beets and asparagus.

Artichokes, close-up, all neatly facing the consumer.

These tangerines almost look messy! Next to them is a bin of plums, in neat lines.

Pineapples presenting their bottom-sides. Such an interesting way to display them.

Lovely oranges.

Carrots flanked by broccoli and spinach.

A close-up of the carrots. How long does it take to stack loose carrots this way??

Several types of lettuce bunches.

Orange and yellow bell peppers, mushrooms. The colors are amazing!

A long view of potatoes, peppers, mushrooms, and tomatoes.

The white sections are the bottoms of green onions; in the middle are green onions again, this time with their tops facing forwards. Radishes and cilantro fill the bins on either side.

It was really a feast for the eyes and definitely a novel (to me) way to arrange produce!

One final photo: we also stopped at Wal-Mart which has a McDonald's inside. Ronald McDonald was there, just waiting for someone to sit down and have a little chat with him, so I did! (I think he likes me.)

Springtime on I-5

Anyone who says California doesn't have distinct seasons just isn't paying attention.

It's Spring in Cali.

And if you've ever driven Interstate-5 between Sacramento and Los Angeles you know it's one of the most boring routes in California. Except right now! The mustard grass is blooming and it has transformed boring into breathtaking. Look at all the fields covered in yellow mustard grass! In just a few short weeks these fields will be brown and dry. Summer follows Spring very quickly in California and the bright green and yellow will be gone as the long summer, and very dry, days arrive. But for now -- enjoy these pictures and, if you need to drive I-5 between Sacramento and L.A. anytime soon, please share any photos you take. An old red barn behind a swath of blooming mustard grass. Mustard grass has nearly overgrown this wire fence; only the fencepost is still visible.Windmills on the Altamont Pass - seen from I-5 looking west.

Awesome!

Enjoying Laundry

The weather has been so beautiful that I have stopped using my clothes-dryer and yesterday I hung out 2008's first load of wash on the clothesline. After hunting around for clothesline kits at Home Depot, Target, Wal-Mart, etc., with no results, I finally went on line and found dozens of websites for small businesses, often family-run (my favorite kind!) that make all kinds of clothes lines. I settled on The Clothesline Shop LLC which had the exact style I was looking for at a good price. (They also sell snowplow-resistant mailboxes which I'm very grateful to say I have no use for)!

I wanted a clothesline just like the one my mom hung our family's clothes on when I was growing up in southern California. I have fond memories of the comfort and well-cared-for feeling I always got when I saw our clean clothes swaying gently in the breeze. Often the lines were hung with dozens of cloth diapers in those days before Pampers, and while our family was growing. On hot summer days my brothers and I used to play among the damp, cool sheets, imagining them to be ghosts or a fort where we hid from Indians.

My friend Judy's mom hung her family's clothes on the line, too, and she had an apron with a big pocket in the front where she kept her clothespins handy. I thought it so clever. I coveted that apron! When I hung my clothes out yesterday I thought about that apron and how both clotheslines and aprons are making a comeback.

I think line-drying clothes is yet one more way for us to slow down a little, enjoy the fresh air, flowers, and birds in our backyards, and more keenly appreciate each individual day of our lives.