Venturing out soon

I think it is probably too late for the early bird but the roads are mostly dry now so I'm going to the store.  Milk and eggs and kleenex.  And a couple of meals for the refrigerator.  

We actually have last week's Home Chef and this week's meals, totaling 8 meals on the way.  I contacted Home Chef and told them that I'd likely have to toss the perishables of last week's food when it gets here and they immediately gave us credit.  So we'll actually come out well on the deal with some of the food still usable and money towards the next week.

From what I hear we'll need the savings to pay for electricity.  We are a coop here.  Fortunately a pretty big one and, I think, well run.  But someone is going to pay for the work and what I suspect will be the system upgrades.  I'm sure there is a fund in the coop for this and maybe some insurance and maybe disaster funds but I've got to believe there is a bill coming.  Fortunately I have a fund for that and will be building it up more maybe skipping that kitchen exhaust hood improvement project for a while and some other stuff.   We're so much better off than most with reserves in the bank.  I'm grateful.

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Report of the outside world

Mixed results.  My first store was a Randalls since they typically don't have as many customers.  It is not as nice a store as HEB in almost every way but my thought is it might be better as a result of being less crowded.  It was not.  No meat.  No milk.  No eggs.  That was my first three things to get.  I did find some frozen food that Dana wanted I stocked up on long shelf life almond and oat milk.  And it was not crowded.  But I'd promised steak so

On to HEB.  Which was absolutely packed.  But they were restocking as fast as they could and, as I said yesterday, the butchers worked overtime to get meat on the shelves and I got some lovely steak that will match with the potatoes for a nice meal later today.  And they had milk and eggs.  I think they have learned from the previous outages and stocked what people want first.

I think this entire shelf was dumped with the electric outage and is on a delay for restocking

They had some empty shelves such as the above but the essentials were available.  Another amazing win for the leadership of the Texas HEB chain.

The roads went from dry to icy.  My experience from living up north came in handy approaching overpasses.  They were treacherous.  The smart car did fine.  Dana said I should take her Rav4 but I know the smart car better, know how it feels, how it drives and it was not iced up since I have it in the garage.  It did fine.  I lost focus approaching one bridge and did a little wiggle on the ice but not any worse than in any other car and with less mass I think the correction was easier.

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