Wednesday, December 14, 2011

Inadvertent outdoorsiness

I'm going to take the opportunity to brag-complain (bragplain?) about having biked to Wegman's over the weekend, which is to say very far from where I live, to a shopping center that is definitively intended for cars, a shopping center where if you arrive in a regular car and not an SUV, you're already an eccentric. (The only others who'd arrived via bike were my husband, whom I'd biked with, and a colleague of his we ran into at the nearby Target.)

Wegman's is at least not across Route 1, but that's like saying that California's totally bikeable because at least I wouldn't have to cross an ocean to get there. We took the lovely canal path, which meant not risking getting run over for most of the trip, but also very nearly swerving in mud or gravel and into the canal. That much was averted, but I'm still not sure how to get the mud off my coat (specifically, the... seat of my coat, it isn't pretty), because it's one of those coats that doesn't go in the wash, but isn't dressy enough to dry-clean, and there's be no way to get it to a dry-cleaners' without getting yet another coat muddy in just the same way. (Seinfeldians, this is a "the very pants I was returning" situation.)

Then, because this wasn't inefficient enough, and nor was spending three hours on Wednesday afternoon getting groceries at Whole Foods via shuttle, I went allll the way into New York and somehow ended up not with a haircut, as I'd imagined I might, but with a bag full of Zabarsness (they have Camembert that tastes like the real deal in France, for less than $7 a container! I had to stock up! and Amora mustard! I'm starting to wonder about my sanity! or was, when I arrived at Penn Station at 5:18 for the 5:17 train...).

Yes, yes, a car, I am aware, I'm on the case, or as much as I can be without yet being able to drive one unaccompanied. A car would not turn Princeton into Tokyo (and I've never been to Tokyo, but merely imagine it as the anti-Princeton, at least the anti-woods-outside-Princeton, thus the many Japanese tourists taking pictures of exotic Nassau Street), but it would solve the dilemma that is grocery shopping. Lucky, lucky Bisou, content with cans and kibble.

2 comments:

Flavia said...

Re: mud on the coat: assuming that it's cloth of some sort, let it dry and then use a very stiff-bristled brush? (I have one that looks like a fingernail brush, except the bristles are wire--forget where I got it, but they sell similar ones at shoe stores for cleaning bucks and suede shoes.)

Phoebe Maltz Bovy said...

Thanks for the suggestion - if the paper-towel method I had planned doesn't work, I may give that a go!