Joining The Costco Movement

Two recent discoveries have led us to finally get a Costco membership after years of resisting the urge.

The first was that I've been hearing Costco held up as an example of a big chain store that actually treats its employees half-decently, unlike Walmart (which I've always refused to shop at).  I'd always assumed it was just as lousy an employer as Walmart but apparently it manages to offer discounted prices while still allowing its workers to earn a living wage.  Yay for Costco!

Also, our local 'Great Canadian Superstore' has gone downhill considerably over the past year or two, especially in terms of keeping their shelves well-stocked with the items I'm most likely to buy (bread, wraps, bagels, various brands of frozen foods, etc.).  The joke in our household has become that we'd better not like anything we buy there too much or else they'll soon stop carrying it.  It's gotten to the point where about half the time I go there to get a fresh loaf of bread I come home empty-handed, either because there wasn't any to be found at all or because whatever was there had a Best Before Date that was only a day or two out from the present.  I eat a fair bit of bread but even so, I need it to last for at least a week!

All of which primed me for saying to Vicki this week, "If you're at all interested in getting a Costco membership, it's fine by me..."  Needless to say, it wasn't long at all before she came home with one!  One of her first purchases was a big roll of plastic wrap (like our sister-in-law Meena has!) that will hopefully put an end to me cursing the crappy Glad Wrap that tangles up in my hands and never clings to anything I put it on.  She also bought a whole lot of pork (tenderloin and roasts) that we'll be enjoying all through the summer, based on the size of it.

Next week, I'm going to see if I can find bread at Costco, though Vicki's already warned me that I'll probably have to buy two loaves at a time.  Even so, that'd still be better than not being able to buy any at the so-called Superstore.

Taking A Twitter Break

It might seem I've been taking a blogging break, given the dearth of posts here lately... but really I just haven't had much to say.  Life has been good of late, as it often is, and that makes for boring updates I think.

But the one little kernel of news I thought I should record for posterity is that I closed my Twitter tab in the browser several days ago and haven't yet felt inclined to re-open it.  I'm not a Twitter-hater in general, but it does certainly seem to skew quite heavily to the noise side of the signal-to-noise scale sometimes, and so I'm taking a break from it.  How long it will last, I can't say.  But so far I've been enjoying not knowing what everyone else is talking about, not reading the same tired, old attempts to be topical and cool, and not wasting even a single moment of my day skimming through the cruft, looking for something to reward my attention.

Pool Season 2015 Now Officially Open

With the sudden arrival of summer today (seems like just last week it was winter!), we bit the bullet this morning and began the chore of opening the pool.  As of right now, the winter cover is off, cleaned and ready to be packed away for 4 or 5 months; a lot (but certainly not all) of the algae and worms have been vacuumed off the bottom of the pool; the water that was oily black 8 hours ago is now light blue in the shallow end and nearly-light green in the deep end, thanks to 2 kg of chlorine having been added; and the water temp is up from 55 F to 60 F, courtesy of our 4-year-old heater that started up perfectly on the first try.  Tomorrow we'll do one more vacuum of the deep end and then unleash the robot on it to do numerous passes without any human guidance (we just have to clean out its filter on a regular basis as it gets clogged quickly this time of year).

Optimistically, if all goes well, I could see taking a dip by the weekend.  Of course, where pools are concerned, things rarely go all well.  But a guy can always dream, can't he?