Protein Restock!

 
A common meal for us is a good sized bowl of fruit and vegetable salad and a slice or two of a hearty bread, (Real bread, not the tasteless fluffy bleached glue that must be so popular given how much shelf space it gets in the store.) and, almost as a side dish, we often split a 4 - 6 oz boneless/skinless chicken breast, or for a special treat, the same sized steak.

Finding good quality meats packaged for our type of consumption in the grocery has become - well let's say difficult. So instead of paying average market price for - at best - marginally average quality meat, for many years now we've been paying a premium for what we feel has been high quality goods individually packaged in meal-sized portions from Omaha Steaks.

This time of year, while it's supposed to be cool, (Didn't work out that way this year as we have hit 80 for the past couple days.) we place a three-cooler order which will carry us through to fall, when we place a 1.5 or 2 cooler order.

This order is the only thing we ever have shipped right to our door (Gate actually.) because the post office (Located in one county and run by one of those stick-up-the-ass postmasters.) refuses to recognize our physical address because after three tries the county (A different county where nepotism trumps ability to actually do the job.) has never managed to assign us an address in sequence with those around us.

The coolers after stripping off the shrink-wrap and checking the contents against our list

With only one exception that I'm aware of, the many online mapping programs tend to place us a mile or so north of where we actually are, which makes no sense since if you were to go by numbering sequence we should show up in a pasture about that far south instead. But UPS, and for a while there the one Schwans driver, (After he left the replacement drivers couldn't seem to find us anymore so we gave up.) seems to be able to get the big shrink-wrapped coolers to our gate. But it's always a bit of a crap-shoot as you never know when a new driver might be stumbling around the area.

Enough steaks

and chicken to last us until September

Plugging our handy tracking number into the UPS tracker we can see our delivery leave the city, a hundred miles away, around 4 in the morning on delivery day, but after that all we get is 'out for delivery' and it's usually around 9 that night before the driver (Presumably a different driver than the one that left the city.) gets to us.

The coolers after using a hot-wire to cut them into a manageable stack

But 9 came and went last night with no delivery.

At 10, and again at 11, just in case I had gone deaf and missed hearing the truck work it's way up the hill on the county road and clatter to a stop at our gate and, simultaneously, the driver's on-board tracking system failed and couldn't update the status, I made the winding quarter mile trek through the woods and up the hill, but there were no coolers waiting at the gate either time.

Around midnight when I checked before making one more last ditch trek up to the gate, the tracking status had changed to 'Rescheduled' and when the sun came up it still said Rescheduled but around 2AM Omaha Steaks had sent me an email saying our order had been delivered and we should get it into the freezer soon.

Happiness is a freezer full of protein and other goodies!!!

 I don't know what happened that would cause a driver to make a residential delivery at 1 or 2 AM and I just now checked (At 4 PM) and the status on our delivery still says Rescheduled, (I hope the driver doesn't show up tonight only to discover there's nothing on the truck to leave us!) but at any rate we have about 7 months worth of protein, and a few extra goodies that were on special such as a chocolate/chocolate cake, a couple individual sized cheese cakes and a few packages of chipotle sweet-potato fries, in the freezer now and all is well. . .