We drove home today after spending five days in Hometown. Had to check up on the cat, we left him at home alone with enough raw food for four days and a clean litter box. I started to worry by the last 20 km that I hadn’t, in fact, checked very carefully before locking up the house that he was free and not accidentally locked in a closet or in the unfinished basement. He was fine, and very happy to see us.
The drive from Hometown, usually a three hour drive at our snails pace, took over five and a half hours today due to a long & rural detour. A friend was attending a weeklong Buddhist meditation getaway (actually he was going to join his wife, who had been there all week). In is in the middle of rural northern Nova Scotia, so we meandered on country backroads in thick fog (snow sublimation – it was 6C today). After dropping him off, we took the road to the nearest town, and while trying to find our way to the highway, we drove past two interesting things: one was a roof-less plywood shack on what was once a gas station site but now just housed the random grey wood structure and a bunch of Red Cross bins. I’ll put up a separate post about that interesting detour. After we were done playing in the shack, we drove past a fisherman selling his live lobster in a store parking lot with his two teenage daughters. In the last few years lobster has been selling for between 7-8$ per cooked pound at the grocery store. Small lobsters are around a pound, and to make a big meal you need two. Eating lobster dinner was a luxury meal, usually associated in my (Acadian) family with a holiday like Christmas or Mothers Day. But lately, the lobsters in store are selling for an unheard of price – around $5 a cooked pound. This means lobster fisherman are getting around $3 a pound for their catch – maybe half of what they used to bring in. Fishing was (and still is) a large part of my maternal family’s way of life, and I have close relatives who tried to make a living by fishing lobster. My uncle eventually gave it up because he couldn’t support his family, and that was half a dozen years ago. All this to say that I can’t imagine how anyone is doing it these days, and why I was compelled to pull over to give this man some of my Christmas cash for live lobster ($5.50 a pound) even though my broader convictions on overfishing might suggest otherwise. Turns out he was Acadian too, and got a hoot out of my man-handling of the lobster (I guess women usually don’t dive into the rubber buckets pulling out squirming lobsters to compare size, etc. When he found out my background, he laughed an understanding laugh). I got a medium sized one (pound and a quarter) while Hubby got a bigger one (2 and a quarter pounds). They were placed in a plastic bag, we paid out $18, chucked them in the trunk, and headed home.
The cat, having been food-scarce for the last week, was obviously envious. No surprise:
After setting the table for a dinner for two (cider, assorted hard smoked cheeses, fresh buns), I turned around to see the cat tucked into the best seat in the house:
The lobster was excellent, really a treat. I’m probably past my monthly quota of seafood though (being a woman of child bearing age.) as I had sushi for lunch today and some sushi a few days ago as well. Which works out well since I’ve blown all my money on meals and beer anyway. This holiday season was very indulgent.
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