Shopping

yesterday because we really did not have much else to do we went to the big city (Dayton, OH) for a shopping trip. We started at Mendelson's one of our favorite places in the gem City. It's a big funky dirty store that sells a wide variety of items from frying pans to computer parts to scanning electron microscopes to jockey shorts to commercial refrigerators. they buy out businesses going under and resell the stuff in their huge building. Shopping there is hit and miss. I always look for plastic produce bags because if they have them they go for a fraction of what they cost "new" and the bags are new and unused. And I did find a roll that had about 75% of itself intact for $3.80. A new roll costs $25 and a case around $50 + shipping. So nice score. Also found cheap jockey shorts (3 for $1), a way cool multi-bladed pair of branch pruners (like a Swiss army knife or Leatherman but instead of a knife blade as the main blade there are pruners plus several other tools including a small knife and a weed popper). I also picked up cheap glue sticks.

The next stop was Belmont Party Supply for brewing items. We were surprised to see they had moved all the brewing supplies out of the beer/liquor store and into its own space next door. They now call themselves Brewtensils. But now they have a lot more room for beer and wine making paraphernalia and I see they are getting into cheese making too and have things like cheese presses for sale. I think I will have to invest a couple hundred dollars in cheese equipment and than start getting more raw milk (i.e. buy another share of the herd) and making cheese. Of course, since I cannot stomach raw milk (I am very, very intolerant to raw milk but can use cooked milk) I will have to pasteurize the milk before making cheese.

At any rate, Eugene bough brewing supplies-various yeasts and hops as well as a nice selection of powdered malts (he wanted liquid but they were out of the 5 gallon containers) plus some no rinse sterilizer for the bottles.

The last place on our itinerary was Harbor Freight the place of cheap crap made in China. I don't like Harbor Freight but they had solar panels on sale for under $150 this week and Eugene has long wanted to get some to start the process of getting us off the grid. So we bought our first solar array. I also saw that next door to Harbor Freight is a huge restaurant discount supply place. Unfortunately, they were locking up for the day when we arrived at the strip mall. So the best I could do was look in the front window and see hundreds of items I want to possess or at least look at and touch (for example, I will not be buying any of the $15K ranges but I will still look at them and ooh and ahh over them). There are few better store in my eyes than a restaurant supply store. The good news is we want to go back to harbor freight to buy a 12' x 10' lexan sheathed green house next week when they go on sale and we can take more than 20% off the normal price. And when we do we will get there long before 5pm so I can check this place out

We drove home while witnessing a spectacular sunset. I was a bit bummed that I did not have my camera with me to document the sunset and put the resulting photos in my Face Book Sunset album. But I was happy that we had such a successful shopping trip