If you're a bird watcher...

If you're a bird watcher ... and you're older than about 45 or so, you almost certainly know this book.  Peterson's book used to have roughly the same standing as Sibley's books do today.  This particular copy was printed in 1958, when I was but 6 years old.  My mother bought it new, and I remember that for years she kept the slip cover on it, to use as a bookmark.  I spent many hours at the big “picture window” in our living room, often with her, watching the birds that we fed in our back yard.  We'd look up birds in Peterson's book, and she showed me how to use the identifying features that Peterson marked, and how to look up the text on each bird.  Refilling those feeders was often my job, and in my teenage years so was repair and construction of the platform feeders (my dad wasn't very good at this sort of thing).  This poor, worn volume lived through most of that period.  Before she bought this then-new volume, my mom had an older edition, purchased used, and very beat up.  I remember that she gave that older edition away, but I can't remember to whom.  When my parents moved to southern New Jersey, she fed the birds there, too – and this little book, her birding bible, went with her.  It went with her when my parents later moved to Virginia, where again she fed the birds.  Finally, when she moved to Utah she hoped to feed the birds here as well, though she never did, and she brought this little book with her.

Now I have it.  There are better references available today, and I mainly rely (like the younger bird watchers) on Sibley's excellent books.  But I keep this volume on my office bookshelf as a piece of memorabilia.  This morning I picked it up and paged through it.  It fell open naturally on certain well-used pages, and on one of those (page 214 and the facing plate) are the “Winter Finches”, including the Eastern Cardinal – the female of which species was perhaps the bird my mom thought most beautiful.  I was surprised that I remembered that plate.  I went to it many times as a kid, but I haven't looked at Peterson's book for probably 50 years – and yet that plate was still quite familiar.  Paging through, I found a few other plates that were similarly familiar – especially the plates with chickadees and wrens.  Funny how memory works.  I'd never have suspected that I'd still remember individual pages in this book...

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...