… Albertsons. It actually wasn’t that hard.
Ever since I moved to California and tried lamb, I’ve really liked it. I had never had it before when I was still living in the Chicagoland suburbs, and I thought the flavor of the meat and fat was interesting. The lean meat itself wasn’t too noticeably distinctly different, but mixed in with a bit of lamb fat, it had a very unique flavor.
In an attempt to eat more lamb, I searched a bunch of different areas, and ended up getting lamb at a few different restaurants. But, lamb (possibly due to the fact that it isn’t often ordered) was noticeably more expensive than any other meat, and seeing as I cook pretty often at home, I wanted to find some raw lamb that I could just throw into a frying pan and prepare on my own.
I looked at a few grocery stores at which I often shop, and none of them had it … but then I realized I forgot one of the most obvious locations – Albertsons – and found it pretty quickly in their “unique meats” area. This is a small section in their regular meat area where they stock lamb, veal, grass-fed angus beef, and other meats that are a bit different than the normal beef, pork, chicken, and fish.
It actually wasn’t substantially more expensive either, so I guess that means I’ll be able to eat lamb a lot more often now.
Unfortunately, no first class upgrade this time, but it didn’t really matter – I’m thin and flexible enough that I can actually get decently comfortable in regular economy seating. But, what else was unfortunate that didn’t quite fall under the “didn’t really matter” category was the fact that we couldn’t fly through the storms in Illinois.
One amazing thing about me living in California now is that there are barely any poor weather conditions. Now, of course, when it does end up raining, everyone drives at 50% of the speed limit because apparently they’re terrified that their cars’ anti-lock braking systems will all fail, but that happens very rarely. Illinois, on the other hand, has storms all the time.
Our pilot wanted to avoid going through high winds, so we ended up going around the storm.
Literally.
Notice how I was flying from Los Angeles International Airport, which is in southern California, but somehow approached Chicago from Wisconsin … yes, we literally had to go that far out of our way to avoid storms. 
