Category: Family

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Tuesday Notebook

Belatedly: Happy birthday, Dad. (And hey, this continues the celebration a day!)

My food bar has a blog: I was looking for low, low prices on Larabars (oops, I forgot the pretentious umlaut thing on the initial A), the very good and very simple and very vegan answer to PowerBar, ClifBar, Odwalla bars, Balance bars, and such. The first listing on Google is for the official and very Flash-y Lara site, and I went there. I noted immediately the presence of a blog; no big surprise there, as blogs have become official marketing tools for many blogs (the one I’d most like to see, if not read: a Preparation H blog (the butt-comfort product does not have a blog, but its site features brief video clips of three demographically representative adults shifting uncomfortably in their seats).

So what do you get on the Larabar blog? Right now, testimonials to the product in video form and tributes to fans of the product. Seeing this made me wonder whether any of the other bars have blogs. The rundown: PowerBar: no. ClifBar: yes. Balance: no. Odwalla: no.

As to the original quest for low-price Larabars. The product is interesting because each bar contains just a few ingredients, all stuff that you could buy at your local grocery (for instance, the ingredients list for the Pecan Pie flavor is dates, pecans, and almonds; no sugar and nothing like “soy protein isolate” or anything else emerging from a food lab somewhere). The drawback is the price: Andronico’s, the small, upscale Bay Area chain that doesn’t blush to put $10 tomato sauce on its shelves, sells Larabars for something like $1.90 to $2 a pop. Ridiculous. Other stores aren’t a lot better. So what kind of prices can you find online?

The Larabar site offers 16-unit boxes for $27 each; that’s about $1.69 each. REI sells Larabars online for $1.80 each, or $28.80 for 16 (REI stores used to give a 20 percent discount when you bought 12 or more food bars, but I think that’s no longer the case). With those numbers for comparison, here’s a non-encyclopedic spot check of online prices found through Google:

Vitacost.com: $18.83

FifFuel.com: $18.95

Drugstore.com: $20.99

Amazon.com: $22.35

Webvitamins: $23.90

VitaminShoppe: $24.95

VeganEssentials: $25.76

EdinaBike: $34.95

And of course: Buying online usually means you have to pay a shipping charge; some sites will charge tax, too.

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Food Moment

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Sunday night at Jan and Christian’s in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York. In our trip across country, Kate and I just once stayed two nights in the same place. So we blew through Jan and Chris’s place, too. But in the afternoon and evening and morning we *were* there, there was lunch at a tacqueria, dessert, a bike ride, a dog walk, a great dinner (above, grilled red onions on a plate with grilled chicken), dessert, a meteor-viewing party (the Perseids, disappointing except for lying down on my back watching the sky, an op-ed published in the Washington Post (Chris’s, on the ongoing threat of lead poisoning), a meeting with a guidance counselor (Jan, at the local high school), breakfast, and that’s about it.

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Wisconsin, Michigan, Ontario, New York

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Here’s one issue in the Great North American Mostly Two-Lane Road Tour of 2007®: We finish our travels so late in the day that I’m kind of bushed by the time it comes to accounting for our whereabouts. To back up from today: We got to Tinley Park, in the Chicago suburbs, on Saturday, and spent the weekend in hometown environs. Then yesterday, Tuesday, we drove up to Milwaukee to meet some Berkeley friends who long ago removed to Ripon, Wisconsin (birthplace of the Republican Party and home of a small liberal arts college). In the evening, Kate and I took the new fast catamaran ferry across Lake Michigan to Muskegon, where we crashed in the decidedly oddball Shoreline Inn downtown. Today, we drove across the Lower Peninsula to Lake Huron, virtually all on state highways and back roads. We crossed the Bluewater Bridge from Port Huron, Michgan, to Sarnia, Ontario, experiencing for the first time a no doubt very mild form of the third-degree that travelers across international borders get in our new world (This from the Canadian immigration officer: “Do you have any weapons at home?”); then we drove across most of southwestern Ontario the same way, discovering a nice county-type road that went on forever and stayed close to the Lake Erie shore almost all the way over to Buffalo. After we recrossed the border there, we passed the minor-league ballpark downtown and decided to turn around and go to the game that appeared to be already in progress; the proceedings, between the Buffalo Bisons and the Ottawa Lynx, were already in the fifth inning when we sat down, but the price was right ($3 parking and $7 a seat) and the weather was perfect for a twilight game. The home side lost, and we headed south out of town on U.S. 219, headed for Salamanca and Allegheny State Park. We wound up in a big new chain motel in Ellicottville; tomorrow we’re headed for Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

So, that picture up there: Approaching the hamlet of Selford, Ontario, we passed a sign promising a historical marker related to the evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson. I might not have given it a second thought except that Dad has told me that during the year or so he lived with his parents in Pasadena, they took him to see Sister Aimee preach in her Los Angeles temple. She was born in Selford in 1890 and was enough of a personage that her native province saw fit to commemorate her origins. We found two markers, actually: one was a plaque on a flagstone marker in front of the town school; the one above was hidden in some roadside trees; a local saw us wandering around and told us where to look — nice gesture.

In a way, the McPherson sighting was the second related to Dad and his parents today; I remembered as we drove out of Muskegon that they lived there nearly 100 years ago — Sjur Brekke was a Lutheran minister and had a parish somewhere in town sometime around 1910. I’ll get corrected on that if I’m wrong.

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Dunes

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Thom, airborne near Florence, Oregon. Kate and The Dog and I drove up to Eugene for the weekend, and with Thom we drove out to the coast — 60 miles from Eugene to Florence — for the afternoon. We wound up out at Heceta Beach, just north of Florence.

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Good Friday to You, Too

There was once a lad growing up in a godless university city much like the one in which I reside. His parents denied him the spiritual benefits of Bible tales, Original Sin coloring books, scary Satan stories, and other fundamental instruction in the local religion. Nonetheless, he picked up on one of the religion’s major symbols: the cross.

He wanted a cross himself, so his mom helped him build one. It was made of some left over pieces of cabinet molding. When it was done, He carried it over his shoulder up and down the block. Eventually, one of the neighbors said, “Hey, that’s a nice cross you’ve got there.”

“Thank you,” the boy said. “Now all I need is a little guy to hang on it.”

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Personal Day

The proprietor will be back tomorrow, one way or the other.

In the meantime, contemplate:

Moths in Berkeley. Along with the usual bats in the belfry.

Global warming could speed up Earth’s rotation. By .12 milliseconds in the next two centuries. We’ll have that much less time every day for “Seinfeld” reruns.

Born on this date: Dabbs Greer, actor. “He played the first person saved by Superman in the very first episode. …”

Also: Emile Zola, writer: “If I cannot overwhelm with my quality, I will overwhelm with my quantity.”

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Random Xmas Moment

Overhead:

Voice A, reading aloud from a recently unwrapped book: “…’When people speak of ideas that revolutionize society, they do but express the fact, that within the old society, the elements of a new one have been created, and that the dissolution of the old ideas keeps even pace with the dissolution of the old conditions of existence.’

[Pause]

True dat.”

Voice B: “True dat, Karl.”

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Tinley Park

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Tinley Park, Illinois, a brand-new tract of homes, five days before the first big snow of the season. The Bears were losing inside. Outside: Sunset and contrails and warm enough to punt back and forth across the back yard (thanks Max and Liam) until it was just about dark. It was Mom’s 77th birthday.

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Haymarket Memorial

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In Chicago post-Thanksgiving. Friday, as part of a ruse to keep my brother Chris out of the house while his surprise 50th birthday was in preparation, we wound up in Forest Home Cemetery just west of the city to visit the Haymarket memorial. More on that later–about Emma Goldman’s grave nearby and the ongoing interest in the site. For now, just the picture.