Our housemate's bacon on an IGA multigrain bagel, with coffee.

Our housemate is in austerity mode, so the bacon is very cheap and fatty, so what I wind up with is a big bready ring, encrusted with various kinds of seeds, with a thin line of bacon curled around the hole.

Not bad.

They don't really understand bagels here, at least not at the IGA or the local bakery which supplies the other IGA (McKernan IGA, slightly farther away). A bagel is not an Italian roll with a hole in it. It's boiled, do you hear me? Not baked.

The IGA is an interesting concept, too. Originally it was the Independent Grocers' Association -- they all banded together to resist the evil multinational grocery store, Safeway. Now they're basically just another chain. They don't have IGA's in California, but they do out east. Or they did, twenty years ago: after visiting Canada a few times I was surprised to find a bottle of IGA brand vanilla extract in my mom's cupboard -- bought, surely, when my family lived in Ohio or New Jersey.

Light posting ahead (what, lighter than it's been?), since in order to reach our hour target for the month we need to work 12 hours each day. That means, according to my wife's impeccable logic, that we need to get up and be working before noon each day. Yuck.

Got caught out in freezing rain last night as we were going to dinner at our in-laws. It's a physically unpleasant experience, not exactly painful and certainly not as bad as hail. But today the sidewalks are covered with ice, where yesterday they'd been shoveled clean.