Venturing Out

There was no help for it—we were about to run out of chicken feed and some supplies for the husband, so I made a trip to town yesterday morning.

The farm where we buy 1000-pound totes of pig feed also supplies chicken feed, but we bought chicken feed from them once and all our chickens stopped laying a few weeks later. We don’t know if the protein level in the feed wasn’t high enough or what, but we went back to buying 40-pound bags at the farm store. We can’t keep as much on hand that way, but 4-6 bags will keep us for a couple of weeks.

The farm store, I discovered, has online ordering. Not only does does their website tell me what is in stock and how much of it they have, but it’s quick and easy to use. They were sold out of the feed we usually buy (16% protein) but had a slightly richer formulation in stock (18%), so I ordered four bags of feed and two of scratch grains. The scratch grains are a treat and we don’t go through them as quickly.

Online ordering from the grocery store was a different story. My preferred grocery store is Super 1. There are two in Kalispell. One is the Evergreen store (closest to us on the east side of town) and the other is known as the “downtown” store, a name which makes me laugh. They’ve had online ordering for some months now, so on Wednesday afternoon, I went to their website to see how to access it. I was directed to an another website/app with a list of stores—none of which was either of the Super 1 stores where I shop.

Not an auspicious beginning.

It took me about five minutes of fiddling with the search function to bring up all the Super 1 stores in the Pacific Northwest and then drill down to find ours. Once I was in the correct store, I started searching for what I needed, only to discover that some of the items listed as being on sale in the weekly ad were not on sale in the app.

At that point, I decided it would be faster for me to go into the actual store and find what I need than to spend the time wrestling with the ordering app.

[Some of my Kalispell peeps have since given me tips for using that app and others suggested a different store with a better online ordering program.]

Armed with a bottle of hand sanitizer, some gloves, and a mask, I headed out at 7:30 yesterday morning in an attempt to miss any crowds. The farm store was great. I pulled up at the loading door in back and they wheeled out my order and loaded it into the car for me. Done and done.

I dropped off a batch of masks at the gym near the hospital which has been designated as the collection site.

And I went to the grocery store. It was, thankfully, mostly deserted. They are still out of rice, beans, and toilet paper (none of which I needed) but had plenty of produce and the other stuff on my list. The store has installed Plexiglas barriers between customers and cashiers. I got in and out of there relatively quickly.

The whole trip was rather surreal. Traffic at that time of the morning is usually bumper-to-bumper coming in from the east side of the valley, but not these days. There were very few cars on the road. Restaurants that would normally be doing a brisk breakfast service were closed.

I have lots of thoughts, but I’ll save those for future blog posts.

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On Tuesday afternoon, I opened to door to the porch and heard the telltale buzzing noise that let me know the hummingbirds were back. On Wednesday, I cleaned the feeders, mixed up nectar, and refilled them. On Wednesday night, we got a snowstorm that lasted through much of yesterday (and the high yesterday was 18 degrees). I don’t know how the hummingbirds survive when that happens, but I hope they will be back soon. The snowstorm also blew down the covering on my hoops over the lettuce, so I had to go out and reconstruct that yesterday. In the process, I saw some lettuce seedlings had come up. Yay! They don’t mind a bit of snow on them.

I didn’t get any sewing done yesterday because my morning trip to town pushed transcription work into the afternoon. I did my first “telemedicine” report yesterday—it wasn’t much different than a regular report, but we now have a new template in the software specifically for those reports.

The cowl from the Nancy Raglan pattern looks nice on the Gap knockoff dress.

I did that totally on the fly with no measuring. All that’s left is to mark the bottom and cuff hems and do them on the coverstitch machine. I need a few uninterrupted hours for that, though.