Miss Redmer Goes Shopping

It turned out to be a good thing I'd planned on that excursion to Bed, Bath, and Beyond with Rose today. The high in South Jersey was 20, too cold to be running anywhere on bikes. She also had to go to Wegman's (a fancy, high-end grocery store in Cherry Hill) and to her vet's, so we went to the Bed, Bath that was there instead of the one in Deptford after I quickly picked up my paycheck from work.

Bed, Bath, and Beyond was our first stop after the vet's. I did get a new 1-quart saucepan. I made sure it was a good non-stick brand this time, so there would be no repeats of the incident with the caked-on grits that lead to breaking the handle on my old one. Rose bought a new rug for her entryway so she, her boyfriend Craig, and their dogs don't track mud into their apartment.

We were in and out of Best Buy next. Rose had mentioned that three Disney animated movies, Sleeping Beauty, The Jungle Book, 101 Dalmatians, and the direct-to-video sequels for the latter two, are going out of print tomorrow. She wanted to get Jungle Book for her new baby before it goes "back in the vaults," but Best Buy didn't have it. I already have it myself; maybe I'll check FYE for her next time I'm there.

It took a while for us to get around in the shopping center. The shopping area where these stores are is one of those fancy new "lifestyle center" things that has lots of stores and condos in one place. While I can certainly understand wanting to live behind a Best Buy, the whole things seems A) a noisy place to live, and B) in the middle of nowhere. Yeah, while it's nice to have a grocery store and 800 restaurants literally at your front door...what about other services, like fire stations and libraries and police stations and city halls? It feels...cold. Not at all like a real community. Even the Lumberyard is more integrated into Collingswood.

(In fact, that's what I don't like about Cherry Hill. Most of it is on major highways. While I appreciate the historic significance of the Cherry Hill Mall, it's not only far from my favorite mall, but there doesn't seem to be much else in Cherry Hill besides malls and highways. It's not a pedestrian-oriented area.)

Wegman's is the local version of Lauren's Price Chopper in New England, the South Jersey area's premiere huge, fancy, has-everything grocery store. I wasn't surprised it was very busy today. Like Price Chopper, Wegman's has a huge deli-cafe area, a giant seasonal section, and a huge section dedicated to organic foods. Truth be told, while some of their prices were good and they carried some items that the Acme doesn't (like the Kashi Pumpkin Pie and Raspberry Chocolate granola bars - yum!), other prices (especially for meat) weren't that impressive. And they didn't have the Smart Balance 50/50 Stick Butter I like, a bit of a surprise since they seemed to have every other Smart Balance butter/spread product.

I was even less impressed with the cashier. The elderly woman took forever bagging and didn't load the bags the way Rose wanted them. (I bought cloth bags and bagged my own order.) Not to mention, I had to tell her some of the fruit codes, and she still got the codes for my apples wrong.

We went out to lunch at one of those 800 chain restaurants in the shopping center area after finally squeezing out of the busy Wegman's. Rose had a hankering for Chinese, so we ended up at Pei Wei's Chinese Cafe, a small, swanky chain Chinese eatery. It was busy, but the line moved fast and we ate faster. I had my favorite spring rolls and my go-to Oriental dish, Teriyaki (in this case, a shrimp Teriyaki brown rice bowl). Rose had a spicy chicken-broccoli dish with brown rice and lettuce wraps.

Rose had to go home and walk her puppies, so she drove me back to my place after lunch. I quickly put my groceries away, then went for a short walk to the bank to deposit what was left of my paycheck after today's shopping. It was windy and the cold was bracing, but the walk felt nice after stuffing myself at Pei Wei.

Spent the rest of the afternoon at the apartment, doing exactly what I did yesterday - crocheting, baking, and watching movies (after briefly looking up the weather online...and it doesn't look like we'll be getting any of that snow coming up from the south). I finished Lawrence of Arabia and watched Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and Yolanda and the Thief while my Whole Wheat-Oat-Molasses Bread was rising and baking.

Mr. Deeds is the charming tale of a simple but sensible man who inherits a fortune from his playboy uncle. He comes to New York to talk to his uncle's lawyers, but his plain-talking common sense makes him a target for every con-artist and scammer in town. The lawyers were scamming his uncle and would like to go on doing so. A newspaper picks up the story, too, sending its best female reporter out to find out about the crazy doings of this simple man. The reporter at first tries to make him sound foolish...until she not only falls hard for him, but begins to understand why he kicks an opera company out of his home and feeds donuts to street horses. When he decides to give his money to the homeless Depression masses, the lawyers try to have him declared insane. But who's really insane here, the man who is trying to do something good...or the people who can't understand that being different makes us special, not crazy?

This is a definitely a Frank Capra film of the 30s, from its sensible everyman hero to the theme of a common man who wants to help those in need, but is rebuffed by supposedly intelligent people who turn out to be just snobby. It also reminds me a great deal of Miracle On 34th Street, with it's discussions of the things that make us individuals vs. other people's conceptions of normal.