Well, that big-eye tuna...

Well, that big-eye tuna ... was every bit as wonderful as we'd anticipated, in the poke we had on Thursday.  That poke had a bit more avocado than usual, because our grocery store had them for less than half the usual price – and they were big, luscious, and I found five perfectly ripe ones.  That was one delicious bowl of poke...

Yesterday we had a bit of rain, and I ended up working in my office most of today.  We're expecting even more rain today.  Debbie wanted to go to The Grille in Tremonton for lunch, so round about 2 pm we headed out that way.  I had their clam chowder as an appetizer, and I'm sorry to say that I regretted it.  I had two main problems with it.  First, it was (as is all too typical in American restaurants) way too salty.  Second, the broth was (as is, sadly, nearly universal these days) a cornstarch-thickened, sad imitation of what the milky broth of a good clam chowder should be.  Oh, well.  That failing, however, was more than made up for by the excellence of our other selections.  Debbie had a pulled pork salad, made of very fresh, crisp lettuce, the usual veggies, and a generous portion of cold pulled pork on top.  Watching Debbie pour the homemade ranch dressing on makes me suspect she thinks of the salad as primarily a substrate for the dressing. :)  She also had a side of sweet potato fries, which we've had before, and which have been outstanding each time.  I ordered the baby-back pork ribs – smoked and barbecued.   They were tender and full of flavor, the barbecue sauce was mildly spicy and (thankfully!) not overly sweet, and the combination was ... delicious.   Now I'm going to have trouble ordering anything else when I go there, because it was so good that my brain will be screaming at me to order it whenever I have the menu in my hands. :)

On the way home we stopped at Walmart to pick up a few things.  On the way out of the store we witnessed something that drove home just how much differently people here behave, in general, than what we were used to back in San Diego.  We saw something that wouldn't have raised an eyebrow back in San Diego – but which here is so unusual that we were quite shocked.  As we were pushing our cart full of stuff out of the store, we saw a woman with two toddlers running out of the store, weaving around us.  Her cart was full of various things, none of them in bags – when I first saw her, I immediately suspected she'd bypassed the registers.  Then as she went through the door, we heard the shoplifting alarm go off.  She kept running.  Nobody came out of the store after her.  As we proceeded to our car, we saw her running through the parking lot, hollering at her kids to hurry up, going in the general direction of our car.  Turns out she was parked three cars away from us, in an old beater of a sedan, full of rust, holes, and junk inside.  She hurriedly dumped her purchases in the car, threw the kids in (hollering at them the entire time).  We arrived at our car just then, and I started to unload our cart.  Next thing I know, that woman's shopping cart was rolling through the parking lot behind me, where cars turned into parking spaces – the woman had simply pushed the cart away from her and let it roll!  It was headed directly into a car behind us, so I ran over and captured it, and pushed it into the little enclosure where you're supposed to put your carts.  As I turned around after that, this woman backed at reckless speed out of her space, then screeched in a tight turn to head out of the parking lot, right past me.  I watched her, astonished, as she sped by – cigarette dangling from her lips, still hollering at her kids, and cackling madly with apparent delight (I'm guessing because it looked like she'd gotten clean away).  I didn't have the presence of mind to look at her plates, much less take a photo of her car.  Nobody from the store came out to investigate.

As I mentioned earlier, such behavior in, say, the El Cajon Walmart wouldn't have seemed unusual at all (though I suspect the store employees might have been a bit more on the ball than they seemed to be here).  Here, however, that sort of thing is most unusual.  It's not that there's no shoplifting problem here – I know from talking with store personnel that the big-box retailers here all have problems with shoplifting.  No, the part that's unusual is the blatantly criminal behavior – someone doing this without apparent shame, and without concern about being observed.  That's the part that reminded us of California...