Current events
Sandy Springs is trying to be a real city. The police department will take over on July 1st, which will almost certainly mean a return to police on 400 that care about speeding. I can hardly wait.
The weather’s been pretty nice the past few days, so I finally got around to replacing the rear tube on my bike, which has had a leak next to the valve stem since December. I’ve been thinking lately about switching to MARTA to get to work. Sure, I work outside of rail range, but I think that I could to work in a reasonable amount of time, especially now that buses can drive on the shoulder on 400 when traffic is slow. I might try driving to Medical Center to prevent me from dying, but once there I can take the train to North Springs (arrives every four minutes or so when everything’s working, 5 minutes to North Springs), from there take route 140 to the Mansell Park & Ride (bus departs every 15 minutes, 12 minutes to Mansell), and I can bike the remaining mile or two. This can totally work. Using a gas price of $3/gallon and 27 mi/gallon (probably low, since most of my drive is highway), I’ll only be saving about a buck a month, but I’ll hopefully get in better shape. Monthly passes are tied to a particular month instead of being valid for any 30 days, so I’ll take a shot at this at the beginning of next month, just in time to avoid the Sandy Springs speed traps.
dcantrell wrote a little while ago about Trader Joe’s and the politics of getting non-standard foods. I agree with his frustration, since I occasionally want to eat something goofy, but Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods don’t sell the non-goofy foods that I also want. However, I think that Publix could be the answer for such a store. They can get you Ostrich and Emu if you ask nicely, and they have all the organic hippie food that you’d expect, but what always set Publix apart from other stores in my mind is that, except for a couple of shelves with things like all-natural Cheetos and vegan Mac&Cheese, there is no hippie section: all the organic food is next to the normal food. Their Greenwise brand has done a lot to get me to buy hippie version of some foods. Since it’s a store brand, the prices usually come out to about the same or lower than the brand-name items adjacent.
One thing in particular I noticed on my last trip to Publix was Greenwise milk. Apparently Publix has started selling milk from cows that have not been treated with recombinant bovine somatotropin. I know from Ben & Jerry that those bovine growth hormones are bad news, but it’s a harder sell than kidney beans. Since no one cares if their milk jugs are yellow, the regular Publix brand milk is the big seller, and the extra 50ยข per half-gallon seems like a lot when it’s right there for easy comparison. Interestingly, the Greenwise milk does come in an opaque container.