Milk

Hey, remember how I made a post about how each grocery store has a different brand of milk, and nobody talks about it? And how there are usually several brands of soy milk in each market at the same price range as each other, but cow milk at it's standard price only gets one brand per location?

First of all, my aunt Lynna explained in a comment that this is because the each of the large commercial cow milk brands come from the same source, even if they're given a different name store-by-store.

But I also mentioned that the grocery by my student placement has a roster of value brand milks, including one that is different from any I'd seen before; Steen's Dairy.

(Did I use that semicolon correctly? I don't know how to use semicolons)

And on Steen Dairy's milk bag, they have a description of the Steen history:

"During the Great Depression a young hockey player named Fred Steen was asked to play hockey in Erin and found a job at the local creamery. In 1944, he bought the dairy portion of the creamery and moved it to the main street of Erin and Steen's Dairy began."

There's a second section but I won't bother you with it. I'll just mention that they refer to that as the "Fred Steem legacy". Kind of the most boring legacy I've ever heard, but there's something charming about how they so proudly advertise it. Appartently the brand comes from local Ontario farms, which is in keeping with the old-school feel of the market by my placement.

While we're on the topic of milk, I found a bag of milk in my fridge that's been sitting there since last year's roommates. This place has had such a high turnover rate, with three generations of people since I moved in, that it's hard to keep track of what belongs to who. There are a couple of girls using the basement, and there was a guy living in a room over the summer, so our three milk pitchers made sense. But then the girls moved their stuff to the downstairs fridge and there were still three milk pitchers. Then my other roommate moved out, my new roommates moved in, and there were still three milk pitchers. At this point I realized there was a problem.

Turns out, in the most recent generation of roommates, I'me the only milk drinker.

I figured it out fast enough that summer-roommates milk didn't spoil, but it looks like the mysterious third pitcher, and another bag at the back of the fridge, did not belong to either the new roommates or my summer roommates, which means they've been there since the last school year.

I'm the only one keeping track of what belongs to who, it seems. Makes no sense there are five types of jam in the fridge. Who loves jam that much?

I'm back at home right now. Since I celebrated in Kitchener last week, I had a home celebration this week.

The person with the ugly sunflower groomed it, so now there are no petals coming out of it's face.

And the cement pigeon mystery was solved by my mother. I'd been showing Guelph natives going to my campus pictures of the birds and everyone was freaked, not having noticed them before.

Here's a Guelph Mercury article on them:

http://www.guelphtribune.ca/community/four-sculptures-to-land-in-core/

I finished my first paper of the year last week. We all had to write something on an ethical dilemma that we've had to face.

And last week we had to wear a device that gave us auditory hallucinations, to help us empathize with people who hear voices. We had to walk around campus and have normal interactions with people, and we weren't allowed to let people know that we were hearing voices

It was not as overwhelming as I feared, although it was still a powerful experience with surprising influences on my interactions and ability to  manage myself. A lot of other people had more difficulty with it than myself.