My grocery store is moving

My nearest real grocery store is about five blocks away, which is convenient. When I was here in November, I noticed the building across the street had the same name on it and wondered what was up and now that I am back, I have discovered it’s because the store is moving in April.

By “across the street,” I don’t mean a major highway, or even a minor highway. It’s barely a two-lane road; it’s really more like an alley. It can’t possibly be that different than it is now. Maybe they’re getting better rent – who knows?

They’ll have to move everything, I suppose, but honestly, they could form a human chain with the existing employees. The new place is that close to the existing one.

When I ran to the store last week for a couple things, I saw that they had all the frozen food on sale in preparation for the move. My guess is they can move the perishables but they can’t risk perishables. Since I’d come from class and only had a backpack, I couldn’t get much, but I returned on Wednesday with my carry-on to load up.

They’d had 12-packs of Coke for B2G2, but when I went that day, it looked like there’d been a fire sale. There wasn’t a single 12-pack left, and even the display had gone. However, I got some smaller ones and then hit the frozen foods, which had been 25 percent off. When I discovered they were now 50 percent off, I totally loaded up. Seriously, I may not have to buy frozen veggies before I leave. Not much variety, but broccoli is broccoli.

Knowing that they will be moving next week, I went again today, armed with my reuseable bags. I even redid the Tetris game that is my freezer so I could fit a few more bags of whatever in there.

But when I went in, there was barely anything in the frozen food section. And by “barely anything,” I mean four aisles of completely empty (but cooled and lit) displays. There was one small section and I could buy all the Cool Whip I wanted. They had that, two things of ice cream (never heard of the brand, but I’d bought some on the previous run so I was OK), two frozen pizza crusts and possibly some frozen bread. That was it.

The rest of the store also looked like it’d been ransacked, but ransacked in an orderly fashion. Everything was consolidated and neat, but there wasn’t much of it. I went to grab some brownie mix, 2 for $4, and didn’t immediately see Box. No. 2. There were literally only two of them left, and I had to reach all the way back to find the second one. I got it, though – just to make the trip worth my while.

All I really needed was grits and carrots, so even though I didn’t need all the bags I’d brought, it worked. I’d spent $50 before (on $90 worth of food) so today was gravy. Except they were out of gravy.

Fortunately, since I am so stocked, I won’t need to go to the new store until it’s been broken in. Until then, I’ll be eating down my freezer.

Although this seems like a boring subject to discuss, it’s taken my mind off French for a hot minute. Holy cow, learning a language is hard. This isn’t “let’s take a language class once a week at the rec center” or even a high-school type class. This is all day, every day, and then I come home and basically redo the class, do an increasingly large amount of homework, review some YouTube videos of French lessons and watch a TV show in French. I’ve had dream about French (not in French) since week one, and they are getting more intense.

This is not my wheelhouse but I am trying. Three of the four people in my class are on about the same level, though I think we all have different strengths and weaknesses in learning. I was talking to one of them and she said maybe when we rotate (in about 3-4 weeks), we will wind up in the “dumb” class. Trust me, there’s no offense taken – we are both struggling. But she freely acknowledged that she doesn’t spend a whole lot of time on the homework and I do. She’s successfully gone through another language course at the school and this is my first one. (And only, God willing.) I keep hoping that it will click but so far there’s been no such luck.