Oh, Brave New World

Today at one of our many Point Roberts’ gas stations, the price was up to $4.08 per gallon. The stations sell the gas by the liter and advertise its price in U.S. dollars per Canadian liter normally. The reasons for this are a great puzzle to me: it is as if the owners think that it might be too hard for the Canadians to figure out how to convert gallons to liters and the price thereby, when in fact it is for the Americans that it is too hard to figure out how to convert liters to gallons and the price thus and thereby, or maybe it is just too hard for me. The fact that there are more Canadian purchasers than American ones may be the real source of the problem, though. I generally look to see what the price is in U.S. dollars/liter and then multiply by four, which gives me a figure that is too high, but I rarely bother to remember just how much too high it is. Or maybe it is low. Oh, well. I can do Imperial Measures or I can do U.S. dollars but I can’t really do them simultaneously.

So, the station today was also posting the price per U.S. gallon in U.S. dollars, too, but, alas, the letter set didn’t seem to have enough of the 4’s to fill up the $4 for the three various grades of gas. Or maybe it’s psychological because the 4’s in the $4+ prices were little tiny fours, whereas the numbers for the cents part of the price were full size. Perhaps it’s a comment on the weak U.S. dollar and they are simply reminding us that we may pay for this gas only in the little tiny dollars that the U.S. government has on offer.

Then on to the grocery store where the price of wheat is bringing us new confusions. Canada is a big wheat producing country. The U.S. is a big wheat producing country. So, how come there’s a shortage of wheat in the U.S. and Canada? The answer to this question is neither obvious nor agreed upon, just as the answer to the question ‘Why does gas cost $4+/gallon?’ is neither obvious nor agreed upon. Oh, brave new world, that has such puzzles in it and that nobody in the larger, more official world can seem to explain in any consistent way.

Last week, I went to the Canadian grocery store to buy Canadian flour, which I prefer for breadmaking because it has a higher percentage of durum wheat content and it does not contain barley flour, which—as far as I have been able to determine by personally checking—contaminates all American supermarket flours for unknown reasons. It is said that it makes the resulting baked product ‘softer’—Is this softer as in Wonderbread? Why would one want this? I don’t, so I buy Canadian flour. Usually, I buy it on sale, where it is typically $7.99 for 10 kilos (which is to say 22 pounds); not on sale, maybe $10.99. Last week, it was $19.99. That’s a pretty big jump over the maybe 6 weeks since I last bought flour. That might go some way (although not all the way) toward explaining how fancy artisan bakery breads that were $4 a loaf a couple of months ago are now $6. I can hardly type a sentence that contains the phrase $6 for a loaf of bread.

Today, I checked out U.S. flours at the supermarket where they were between $5-$6 for ten pounds, and around $3 for five pounds of flour, which makes them a real bargain compared to Canadian flour, though rather more expensive than they were six weeks ago. Now, of course, the Canadians can come down to Point Roberts for gas, dairy products, chicken, and flour, all of which are considerably cheaper in the U.S.

My Queen Anne cherry tree came into bloom this week, as you can see in the picture; It’s a very old and very big tree. Maybe I should start thinking about cutting it down and planting wheat?