We’re back home after a medium-length evening of mostly uneventful travel. The hour isn’t yet late, but it feels like it somehow. The sun went down in the three minutes from the curb to going inside the airport, and somehow that long exposure to darkness brought along a great deal of melatonin and it makes you a bit tired beyond the hour.
Life is tough, I know.
Actually, there was a bit of turbulence I could have done without. I’m refining my taste on bumpy air. The top to bottom stuff I can handle. The chop that shakes the jet from side to side? You can keep it.
Anyway, we are home. But before we got home, we went to Stew Leonard’s:
They’ve been telling me about this place for years. And earlier this year I finally got to sample the cookies, which I’ve also heard about for years. Today I got to walk around inside the place. (We went for more cookies.)
The lights and the colors make for a very rustic, retro feel. The absence of aisles — it is more of a maze than anything — makes it feel very large. And it is something of an event. I could see shopping here. I could see it being amazing to little kids. I could see getting so annoyed with the place I swore it off forever. I can see me shooting a video here on our next visit.
They call themselves the world’s largest dairy store. Their website boasts of a 1992 entry into The Guinness Book of World Records for having “the greatest sales per unit area of any single food store in the United States.”
They focus almost exclusively on perishable items, leaving things like napkins and paper plates to the big chains. They’ve been refining this model from years, perhaps since they opened in 1969.
In the early 1990s Stew Leonard Sr. was convicted of tax fraud. He fell on his sword to keep his son in the business, but there was something like $17 million in cash register receipts moved through their registers illegally. Another son, meanwhile, had his own tax troubles.
There are some great sites to be seen there. The Leonard operation includes its own dairy farms, so they’re bring the milk straight to the store and bottling it there. There is fresh squeezed orange juice. You can have rice cakes spat at you from their machines. There animatronics playing shows every three minutes.
We saw two uniformed security guards. I am not sure why.
How cute is she?
That’s at the Sesame Place Theme Park in Pennsylvania, when The Yankee was four. I enjoy her childhood pictures. There’s always a great expression, and any where she might have even thought about pouting about picture time have long since been removed.
She confessed to putting specific pictures together in the photo albums. There’s a picture of her sitting with her mother on the piano bench, overlapped with another of her, same outfit, standing nearby with her father.
“That was my ‘I want to be a twin’ phase.”
Her mother, who was looking through the pictures with us, was unaware of this phase. But there it was, every few pages, another scene in the yard, or by the Christmas tree, where she was pretending to be a twin in photographs.
You can’t do that in Flickr.
But you could clone it in Photoshop.
This is Maria:
She runs Tutti’s Ristorante and Pizzeria. I’ve had better Italian, but I had to go to Italy to get it. Her daughter is an aspiring model. Her son is a professional soccer player (though his site seems a bit out of date). He’s now in Serie B in Italy after playing the States, Finland’s Premier Division and Iceland. She’s a proud mom.
This is Chef Pasquale Funicello, a master chef from Sorrento, Italy.
This might be the most dramatic picture I’ve ever managed to take with my phone. Nice little depth of field in the Photoshop app. The light was good, he was leaning in just right and I shot it blind, from the tabletop.
The man makes an incredible marsala.
Anyway, we are home. Allie, the cat, is frantic. I am unpacked. My holiday travels were great, as I hope yours were. Being back in my own kitchen, on my own sofa and looking forward to my own pillow, those are treats too.
