We were in a desperate toothpaste situation, until I found out from Paul you can cut open the tube and scrape the last few uses out. He said his old East
German friend Jörg used to do this. I can't believe I never did it before.

Anyway I went to the coop and the price for the Toms toothpaste was ridiculous, $5. So I looked online and found on online grocery service called Jet. I was able to order it for 3.50 a tube, plus there was a 15% off coupon. I ordered $215 dollars of groceries for $180, including bulk laundry detergent and 30 packs of granola bars. (e:paul) says I'm hurting the local economy but it's way more efficient to have them drop shipped from the manufacturers warehouse instead of ten other warehouses and a big box store. on the downside they used too much packaging. Wtf. who cares if a dishwasher detergent box is dented.

I guess online groceries delivery is exciting for me now.

Yesterday we went to the new food court next to the Market Arcade. The food was pretty good but once again look at this packaging from Sun. I wonder how much gets thrown out.

It's snowed so little this winter it almost made me forget how much I hate the lack of shoveling, monster plows and salt that results from it. I love snow but this transforms me into a get-off-my-lawn type of guy.
I want to make a drone that lets sprays shaming messages on the lawns of people who plow but can't shovel. Some blog shaming is the least I can do. ;)

My dream is to have an website where you can report/document incidents and property owners could be easily fined by the city. It would go along with a program for disabled/elderly homeowners who couldn't afford a service could find shovelers, who would be paid to shovel by the fines. It'd have easy access to location info of users so shovelees could be matched to shovelers, and for reported properties it could pull county tax records to generate fines based on assessed value and frontage.

More than 24 hours after the heavy snow, Sinatra didn't shovel their Franklin Street slum house, but did plow their parking lot and driveway.


Neither did McGuire development, also on Franklin

Just because a building is for lease doesn't mean you don't have to shovel.

Or Elmwood Village Fabrics, although they also managed to plow their driveway.


Cleve Hill Auto piles their lot's snow on the corner of Main, over the fire hydrant and handicapped ramp.

A plow knocked a North Street light off and drives away.

And the stupid Church of the Ascension manages to drive down the sidewalk, heaving the sandstone - and plows our driveway in.

Also the wind blew one of our dormer windows open and split it at the hinges. ;(

On one of the coldest days of the year, of course (e:Paul) and I go to the Botanical Gardens with (e:hodown) and Zoey.

A bunch more desktop style background picture taken. It's so easy to take nice pictures on a sunny day there.

I noticed a bunch of the orchid plants have flowers that look like large insects. I wonder if they were selected for that intentionally by gardeners or of it was natural.

the citrus plants were done fruiting there. They had ponderosa lemons which are huge - Paul wants to buy 20 of them.

Prickly pear cacti remind me of Basra. I wonder how his winter in the desert was.

Last night we went out to Coco with (e:mike), (e:dave), Tony and Maria for Maria's birthday.

There was way too much food to be had. (e:terry) and I split a veggie pizza but I don't think we even dented half of it after the frites.

Then we went back to have coffee and cake. I wanted to make a Chetna-styled sponge with white chocolate, lemon zest and curd with raspberry jam - but after cleaning the house all day, we ran out of time and had to buy a coop cake.

For future reference:


The sponge was dry. The baker would not make it on the bake off.




(e:mike) and (e:paul) got her another set of her favorite dishes as a present.

This was an action packed week in Allentown.

On Monday night, right after we went to bed, an ambulance flipped over at Delaware and North after an SUV ran into it.

They really need to take the rest of Delaware down to three lanes. It's too crazy aggressive on the four lane part.

Then on Wednesday, Bill's Deli on Allen was raided by the police. They found crack and guns by the counter. It always seemed so obvious to me - there's always the same few guys who circulate inside and outside the store all day long, always on cell phones, greeting people who drive up.

(In googling for the article, I found (e:tinypliny)'s review of the store)
(e:tinypliny,39934)
Weirdly enough it's still open. It makes me wonder about the other businesses in the building, like the one selling Nintendo 64 games, $5 hoodies and VHS tapes.

Governor Cuomo came to the medical campus to announce a Buffalo billion pharmacy company subsidy at Conventus. There were black SUV's swarming everywhere that day.


And they are now possibly using an old lab freezer as cadaver storage around the corner from the office of (e:paul) and I. We found that out after some real craziness Wednesday night at the office.