Time Passes

The local Shop'n'Save, where I have bought almost all of my groceries for nigh on twenty-five years, closed its doors yesterday afternoon. Like most SnS stores in the St. Louis metro area, it was bought by the rival chain Schnucks last month. It will reopen as a Schnucks on Sunday. That means there will be two Schnucks within a couple of blocks, which seems odd, but I understand that both stores will be kept open for the time being.

I liked SnS, for the most part; the staff - cashiers, stockers, and supervisors - were usually friendly and helpful. But I've felt the store as store was going downhill for the last several years - the selection of cheeses shrank drastically, they stopped selling whole-bean coffee, and so on. I've occasionally shopped at the old Schnucks, but not often enough to have a feel for their range of goods, so I don't know whether they will be an improvement. I guess I'll begin finding that out on Sunday.

Omen

There's a meme circulating connecting the course of your life to the movie that was #1 on the day you were born.

Mine? "Old Yeller".

:sigh:

Gradient

Since ordering my most recent set of books, I've been busily tearing through the f/sf e-books of the order: in succession, All Those Explosions Were Someone Else's Fault, Kitty Takes a Holiday, Caliban's War, and The Way Into Magic. I didn't plan it that way, but there's a definite gradient of grimth there. ATEWSEF is basically light-hearted; some nasty things happen, but all of the casualties were, to some degree or other, Bad Guys. KTaH had some ugliness, as any story featuring Navajo skin-walkers will, but Kitty and her friends survived mostly unscathed. (Yes, they met with some misfortune at the end, but it was proportionate misfortune.) CW, like the previous Expanse volume, had some genuine horror to it, but the real threat, the thing that's growing on Venus, remains in the background; the human efforts to harness the "protomolecule" are really a sideshow. In TWiM, the Blessing is really the same kind of threat as the protomolecule, but somehow it's more visceral.

After all that, I was relieved to turn to A Gentleman in Moscow, which was recommended to me some time back by Kathy Carrasco. I'm only a few pages in, but - so far - it feels much less dark. (I know that the story will head into the period of the Russian Civil War and - I assume - the age of Stalin. But that's still a human level of nastiness.)

I'll say more about some of these books later, but the gradient struck me as being of interest.