A Christmas Eve Videocassette

Some videos for the holiday

Only once did I work retail during the holiday season. It was in 1985, and at that time, video store clerk was a typical job for a twenty something. This was the VHS era; DVDs wouldn’t come along for another decade, by which time I was long out of working any retail job. But in December 1985, that was all in the future. Boston was covered with a light layer of snow. The air was crisp. The store was decorated with gold and silver garland, and we were playing Christmas movies on the monitors through the store.

Not that everyone wanted Christmas movies. The store I worked at was notable for a few things. First, it had a fairly extensive collection and rather than compete with the chains that were popping up, went for a broad selection of films, instead of lots of lots of the movie that had been a hit in the theaters six months before. I had been hired for two reasons: for being a science fiction fan who could identify some of the gaps in their science fiction collection, and for being reasonably well versed with computers, since when I was hired the owners were planning on computerizing everything, which they soon did.

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Cheese…and Whine

No, you can't move in.

Sorry, folks, not a typo.

When I was writing about our trip to Citarella, I noted that I was certain there was a better place to buy cheese within a short walk. There was. Admittedly, the logistics of the day really made it much more sensible to buy all our stuff at Citarella, and maybe an opportunity would come to do some more exploring.

The opportunity came. James decided to host a little gathering for his colleagues. We probably had enough cheese (in hindsight, we certainly had enough cheese), but we decided to add to our stock of cheese. It was time for a trip to Murray's Cheese in Greenwhich Village.

Greenwich Village really is a wonderful place to be shopping for food. There's not only a great variety of things available, but you can get things that are of just impeccable quality (I can impeccable quality in the suburbs of Southern California, but the selection is somewhat more limited).

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Who the Hell Needs Mario?

A little home cooking

We have found that when we travel it is very nice to have an apartment instead of a hotel room. Yes, with a hotel room you get someone in daily to do some sort of perfunctory cleaning, fresh towels, and the like. With an apartment you forgo all that for a kitchen and the obligation to clean up after yourself. But when you’re in an area in which you can get just about anything you want (for a price, of course), cooking can be very tempting.

We decided to skip the world of restaurants and cook our own damn dinner. In what follows, I took the role of sous chef. There can only be one person running the show, and we have learned long ago how to coordinate that. With this meal, I was relegated to the secondary role, but I was fine with that.

If you visit New York and you don’t get to shop at Citarella, you’re missing out on the splendid bounty that New York City has to offer. We were debating about what we wanted to do for dinner and our initial idea was “buy fish at Citarella.” We decided this on our way to something else. When the “something else” (a gathering of Esperantists at Union Square Park) was over, we headed back to Citarella. We concluded that buying food there and eating in would be cheaper (marginally) and quicker (ha!) than finding a restaurant. And we could kick back and relax (yeah, we did that).

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You can follow my blog on Twitter (@impofthediverse) or on Facebook. If you like this post, share it with your friends. If you have a comment just for me, e-mail me at impofthediverse@gmail.com.

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