Happy [Noble Sacrificial Death Holiday] from The Noble Penny Cooper (and me)

 

Noble-minded Penny Cooper loves to ride in a tumbrel to the guillotine every Easter, declaiming, "It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done" (Tale of Two Cities, you know.)

The Mars Explorer is keen, but Bunny looks dubious:
"She has mixed up her sacrificial deaths."

(The backdrop is silk I harvested from an Italian tie. I never can bring myself to construct a guillotine, though I'm sure Penny Cooper would love it. 

"You could put my head back on," she says.
True, but... I just can't do it.)

Here is Penny Cooper in a Tumbrel, Easter 2019

Gosh, I have lots of good Easter posts! I didn't realize this holiday inspires me so much...

Upside-Down

I'm doing a thing you're not supposed to do:
making an untried recipe for a party.

I said I'd make a pineapple upside-down cake for BJ's Easter dinner.  BJ's the one with lung cancer. Two of her foster-sisters are in town to see her, and they're making dinner. Lunch, actually.

I've always used
my mother's pineapple upside-down recipe, (right, in her handwriting)
but instead decided to try
one with sour cream
that I found online.

(Partly because I have free sour cream from the thrift store--leftover from our weekly food give-aways.)

...and Sideways

Hey, ya'll, have you noticed? groceries have really gone up in price?
I scrounge so much free food from my workplace, and pick up oddments here and there, and I eat out a lot, so I don't often do a big grocery shop.

The other day I went to a big grocery chain store and ... toothpaste was five dollars?!?
When did that happen?
AND the shelves were not overflowing, which I've noticed before, of course--stores have never fully recovered from the Great Toilet Paper Shortage of the first Covid wave.
 

Is this all supply-chain stuff?
Looked it up, and yeah--that and labor, etc.
More of the slippage and slideage of the era.

I was thinking I should make a list of little changes I notice. Some of it good, or, who knows?

Let's see...

Somali Women Bus Drivers

While there's an uproar about racial divisions in the US, and rightfully, so, I also see a ton of people... um, just rubbing along together.

I saw my first woman bus driver wearing a hijab this winter. No one batted an eye. I first saw a woman wearing hijab about twenty years ago? When refugees from Somalia started to arrive. 

The other day, I met my first family from Afghanistan--refugees from the end of the latest iteration (the US version, 2001--2021) of that ongoing ... what do you even call it, "struggles in the region"?  (BBC overview)

My coworkers are from Eritrea, Mexico, Hungary, the Deep South, and small-towns and big cities of the Midwest. Hardly anyone grew up in this city.
Customers are from all over.
NOT that everyone gets along all the time, but

Decentralized digital currency

The grocery store where toothpaste costs $5 also had an ATM or some sort of electronic kiosk to handle Bitcoin (or other cryptocurrencies? I didn't look closely). Housemate has bought some, because her son is really into it, so I've been hearing about it.

Yikes--so much more, but I have to get going... In between writing this, I made the cake and set up Penny Cooper's Easter Tableaux.

Happy Easter, or whichever tale of redemption you subscribe to!