Asian Adventures

The local Asian store is a place of mystery and great produce, much of which is unfamiliar. It's an adventure to shop there, since the clerks speak almost no English, so they can't explain how to prepare and eat these interesting items. The adventure starts before you even get into the store.



Art in the parking lot. These truck makes the run into and out of New York City daily, as the graffiti probably indicates. I love graffiti, and you will notice that the artist respectfully avoided decorating the place where the store name is showing.

So indoors, you run across items like giant papayas




And then on to



Taro root, fortunately labeled in recognizable terms, and you can find out how to proceed with this.



And there's, not a hallstand with walking canes, but a bunch of sugar cane.



And there are the special wrapped pears. Astute observers will note that one of these wrappers turned up as a Dolliver hat some time ago.

But from there, you're on your own. But we've had the best salads in the world since I started cruising the greens aisles.

A small hitch on the way to these pix. I had taken a nice pic of the wrapped pear things, and my camera showed me "out of memory." Now a swift thinker would have realized that this meant no memory. A swift thinker would not have figured that I needed to get home and charge the battery. And find the same "out of memory" happened as soon as I reloaded. And wondered if the camera was losing its essential way in life. Now, I happen to have a backup camera, which I bought second hand via Amazon, for when my frontup camera might bite the dust. The seller generously put a 2G memory card in the new one, and the battery and all.

So I faffed and footled about changing and swapping batteries, charging, testing, and the batteries worked just fine in the new camera, and not at all in the old one. After about an hour of eliminating all possibilities, switching batteries, charging either or both, scientific approach this, to discover why the weird message kept coming up, I got desperate. And found the book of instructions. And looked up the meaning of "out of memory." Or, as HS said when I recounted this pantomime to him "got desperate, huh, Mom? as in reading the freaking instructions?"

Doh. The memory card. Full. Couple of thousand images on it. Poor little camera had been insisting I READ THE MESSAGE and I'd been failing to read for comprehension, until forced to. Entirely possible I should be in a slower camera operators' group. I inserted the lovely empty memory card from the new camera into the old one. Amazing. Worked perfectly. How ABOUT that.

Now, in the interests of keeping the universe in balance, I must note here that my incompitude is more than balanced by the feat of my congressman, Rush Holt, the only member of Congress who really is a rocket scientist. He competed last week in a Jeopardy round with Watson, the computer. Result: Congressman one, Computer nil. Done in the interests of encouraging science education in our schools.

So I more or less balanced out the giftedness of the general region. I bet Rush knows when his memory card needs to be replaced, too. I wonder if he gives classes.