I don't eat tongue

Grocery shopping here has gotten much easier over the past three years. When we first arrived, every trip to the supermarket was a small nightmare - aisle after aisle of stuff all tagged with incomprehensible French names (When you can't read the text at all, it's amazing how much drain cleaner looks like window washer looks like dishwash detergent). The organization here still seems bizarre to me but we've gotten used to it, and just accept odd things like putting half the chips on one side of the store with the nuts, and the other half on the opposite side in their own rack. It turns out that our local SuperU does carry popcorn after all (caramel popcorn, though.. all we ever seem to find here are sweetened forms of popcorn, never the buttery salty stuff) BUT the popcorn is logically placed in the vegetables area. With another selection of nuts, which for some unknown reason are not allowed to associate with all the nuts in the other aisle on the opposite side of the store. Ah well... But I digress. For the longest time, I was nearly totally incapable of shopping. I could find the colas and the beers and the chips and the frozen food area, but anything specific was a no-go - I'll leave it to Emily to describe my facial expression when asked if I could run to SuperU to pick up some hand cream, some fresh shrimp, and some veggies. I thought I'd grown past this, and begun to learn my way around, but Saturday I found I was still unsafe to shop. A quick run to Netto for chips and "something inexpensive and canned" brought me to some handsome cans of "Langue de boeuf" in various tasty looking sauces. I know now that boeuf = beef and the can picture showed nice thick slices of meat slathered in thick sauce, so I thought, "Excellent, looks delish and maybe I've found a new cheap food".... only to come home with two test cans and be met with a wide-eyed expression of fright from my wife. It turns out "langues", which I'd assumed just meant "slices" or something, actually means "tongues". I'd brought home two cans of sliced tongue. To quote Buffy the vampire slayer, "There's just not enough Yuck in the world". I was prepared to toss the stuff, but Emily, who has never wasted the last drop of sauce in the bottle in her life, determinedly cooked them up and ate them for lunch the next day. Her report? Tasty, excellent sauce.......and a very disturbing texture........

Speaking of disturbing things, our October movie of the day is Arachnophobia, a slick little B movie from 1990 about mutant spiders invading a small town. Definitely a movie to give one the itchies. John Goodman chews scenery like mad as the town exterminator, a character who brought back many fond (?) memories of the various HVAC contractors I worked with back in the days of having a "real" job.