grocery store thrills

I'm posting tonight instead of tomorrow even though it's actually a Tuesday, November 6th Blathering as an experiment because tomorrow's a novel-writing day, and I plan to get an early start instead of Blathering first, and plan to spend some solid time OFFLINE in the morning. Hope this change in schedule doesn't explode any of your brains. Hope the lack of morning online time doesn't explode mine.


So Shane's girlfriend gave me permission to reprint her letter here. Subject line was: "Cute Weta Guy".

Dear Debbie,


He is cute, isn't he?! He's been cute for the last seven years or so!


Not that I want to dash Rosie's romantic hopes or aspirations to

get close to someone actually involved with LOTR, BUT HE'S MINE!


No, it's a great strip and we've really been enjoying it! The Cute

Weta Guy is getting a bit of a hard time at work and I'm giving him

a hard time about his legions of female admirers, but he's thrilled

with the attention all the same!


Anyway keep up the good work... we'll be off to the "wrap" party

tonight...


Cute Weta Guy's Main Squeeze


Jill

Jill (who happens to be an atmospheric scientist with a Ph.D.) and I have actually been e-mailing back and forth a bit...she's very nice and isn't at all annoyed that I've been turning Shane into one of my comic character's main romantic interests. Apparently Shane's been undergoing a lot of friendly ribbing at work as a result of my comic strip.


In fact, Jill delivered an anonymous bunch of flowers to Weta Digital yesterday. They were addressed to the "Cute Weta Guy", and Jill convinced the receptionist to send an e-mail to all employees at Weta asking for the mysterious "Cute Weta Guy" to come and collect his flowers from "Rosie". :-)


HA! HA! I love this.


(For those who have no idea what I'm talking about, please do check out my Waiting For Frodo comic!)


Some mindless October stats...


Hey, Jeff just told me that about 900 people read my main Blatherings page a day (what you're reading right now). Wow, that was somewhat of a surprise, considering how few of them do the online poll. He also said that over 120,000 pages from "Waiting For Frodo" were viewed last month (about 4,000 a day).


In October, the average user visited 3.6 pages per visit and spent 8.1 minutes on my site. I got an average of 1,464 unique visitors per day, 45,359 unique visitors in the month of October, 75 countries. Nearly 60% use Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.x. The most popular search phrase used to find my site was "waiting for frodo", followed by "ovff", followed by "dandelion".


But I digress...mustn't keep those 900 from reading about today's exciting main topic.....


GROCERY STORES!


Today's Blatherpics were all taken on my last day with Andrea, when we went to her local grocery store and did some food shopping. As I've mentioned before, I have a fascination with grocery stores in other countries. And why not? Your local grocery store may seem dull to you, but to me it's packed with all kinds of weird and interesting stuff that I can't find in mine. I love that.


For example...Cottage Butt! I can't think of any packaged food item in Ontario with the word "butt" featured so prominently on the label.





I thought the concept of dilled Brussel Sprouts was gross, so was horrified when Andrea actually BOUGHT A JAR AND TOOK IT HOME. When she put some out on a plate and brought it that night as we sipped hot chocolate (just the thing to go with dilled brussel sprouts, you know) and gabbed, I figured I'd maybe try one and spit it out, preferably not directly back on the plate. Before I knew it, however, I had hoovered down most of the contents of the plate, and Andrea was putting out more. YUM!!! Between the two of us, we finished off half a jar within the hour. Go figure.





The product below IS disgusting. MEAT STICKS FOR TODDLERS?!





Ditto for the stuff below, though I secretly admit I'm curious about trying it sometime. I want a can of this for my Gross Packaged Food Collection (which I plan to donate to Interfilk someday, unless I grow too fond of it myself).





Individually-wrapped corn isn't gross, it's just weird. :-)





And finally, I had to take a picture of this aisle sign just because it reminded me so much of the old Sesame Street "One Of These Things Does Not Belong" game. :-)





Ooo, that reminds me...I still haven't posted my grocery store pictures from when I visited Maya and Jeff out in California! Must do that soon....


Today's Poll: (Suggest a poll question)

If I came to visit you, would you actually -want- to take me to your local grocery store, or would your tendency be to keep me away from it? YES for taking me, NO for keeping me away.