August 19, 2011

• Update on last week’s Anchorage trip and Greyfox’s surgery

  The surgery was successful, and that’s putting it mildly.  My spouse, soulmate and partner in crime, #ArmsMerchant is seeing better than he ever did in his entire life.  He had been legally blind probably from birth and definitely since his first school days, with severe myopia and astigmatism.  He wore strong corrective lenses since childhood, and as the cataracts developed over the past seven years or so, the eyesight he had was diminishing.  Now, the cataracts are gone, replaced by implants that give him near-normal vision for the first time.

  This made the trip worthwhile (more understatement) although an unpleasant hotel stay took some of the luster off the surgical success.  Greyfox already posted about it HERE, so I’ll spare you some of the details.  The only thing I really want to add to what he wrote is that the Hampton Inn fails to live up to its advertising and the general run of its price-range (Yeah, I know: “surprise, surprise” right? :-/ ) in more ways than I can list.  A few:  the “hot breakfast” might satisfy Homer Simpson, but it’s gonna gag any gourmet; the “business center” is a closet containing 2 laptops, a non-functioning printer, and 2 swivel chairs that bang into each other if anybody swivels a few degrees in one; in-room phones malfunction; desk personnel pay lip service to the chain’s “warm and friendly” policy, but dispense misinformation along with key cards that don’t open the room. 

  The warm-and-friendly bullshit was perhaps the worst part of the entire experience.  Individual employees’ interpretations of it ranged from highly inappropriate personal revelations and questions from a female server in the breakfast lobby, to multiple shouted inquiries from various men behind the front desk about what kind of day I was having when all I was doing was minding my own business and going from point a to point b.  Hampton Inn’s pretensions cannot hide the fact that it was constructed on the cheap and is staffed cheaper still.  End of rant.

  Aside from sharing in Greyfox’s life-changing experience, for me personally the best parts of the trip were my visits to New Sagaya and The Natural Pantry.  Both are, generically speaking, grocery stores, but like nothing available to me out here in the Valley, and I’ve missed both businesses ever since I moved from Anchorage in 1983.  Sagaya was an Asian specialty grocery that long ago outgrew it’s original space and expanded its inventory.   Except for the “Asian” part, the same is true for Natural Pantry.  When I first shopped there it was a small and cramped space, but crammed with all sorts of natural and organic foods.  It hasn’t lost that cramped feeling, still has narrow aisles and high shelves, even though it’s now in a big space that once housed a Safeway supermarket.

  My big score from those shopping trips was 100 pounds of gluten free flour: 25 lbs. each, of  brown rice, sorghum, garbanzo, and Bob’s Red Mill All-Purpose Baking Flour.  I had been running low on alternative flour, and was facing the expensive prospect of ordering online and spending more for shipping than I did for the flour.  Buying it there and hauling it home from Anchorage saved me about $200.  The only downside is that now I keep having these head trips about things I can bake, and I’ve got to get the leaky roof fixed before I get involved in any other time-consuming work-intensive projects.

  

  • 9:02 pm
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