Cat Food: The Quest

Housemate went to five different stores yesterday to buy cat food. Up to now, I've been doing all the grocery shopping, and while she's heard my tales of empty shelves and random shortages, she hadn't really taken it on board properly. So she didn't think it was a big deal when I said, Hey, we're opening the last bag of cat food, we should get more now. And now here we are at the end of the last bag, and... yeah, you get to go on an epic quest, because it's no longer something that can be put off.

Apparently Purina is having supply problems. And of course whatever variety we decide is our standard immediately becomes hard to find even when there isn't a pandemic going on, so....

(We aren't hoarding. But I have been making an effort to keep more margin on the necessities, restocking when we're down to one package instead of one item, etc., so that if we can't get something right away we've got some leeway. And now, so is she.)


ETA: I went to another store the next day: Of the size we wanted, their chain (one of the big ones) had only one bag in the entire state (and that about two hours away). And just 57 bags throughout the chain nationwide. Fortunately the cats will eat other things, but sheesh!

Witness the growth of my flamingo army!

Back around the end of March, I decided to cheer things up by putting all of my pink plastic flamingos out in the flower bed by the mailbox. All Lucifer references aside, with all the different sizes I've accumulated over the years, it looked like four generations of flamingo family got together to say hi to passersby.

During the shutdown, one of the big craft stores had large metal flamingos that would have been the perfect addition, sitting right there in their front window. Taunting me! The store was closed, and they weren't available from the website. I waited, and waited, and then one day I saw the store was open, so in I went... and they'd already sold out all 20+ flamingos, with no more to come.

So I went home, thwarted. And then I looked at the old sheet of plywood that I'd been wanting to get out of the garage, and I got out the jigsaw and bought some pink paint, and I made this:

( Click for pink! )

It's nearly eight feet tall!

You can't really see them now that the balloon flowers have taken off, but there are stealth flamingos hidden amongst the greenery, too.