This makes me sad.

Jenny Lee was an institution in Pittsburgh. Even for families where most baked goods were baked at home. There was a store in the Crafton-Ingram Shopping Center when I was growing up. We bought cinnamon bread all the time, and pies on occassion (though my mom's were better), and doughnuts and cookies, and in a pinch, cakes (Karns's on Route 60 was our place for cakes, though. They aren't there anymore, either.).

The Walmartization of the country needs to stop. Big box stores have their place, and Lord knows I love Target and Circuit City. But we are rapidly losing all those little local hardware stores where Bill (they all have a guy named bill) knows exactly what you need even though you are tool-illiterate, and those local bakeries where Teresa (they all have a lady named Teresa) always slips an extra cookie or two into the dozen you just picked up.

Don't get me wrong. I'm a city girl, through and through. But I always loved living in a city that had distinct neighborhoods, with their little shops and real character. Baton Rouge doesn't have any of that (except for Spanish Town, and maybe the Garden District and parts of Mid-City). Everything is just...homogenous. And I could tell during my last visit to Pittsburgh that it is getting like that, too.

I can't tell you how despondent that makes me. Even more than the fact that I feel like I'm back in my junior year of high school with all the talk about icy relationships with Russia again, and the threat of nuclear war being bandied about. I thought we got past that when the Berlin wall came down, and Glastnost reigned during my freshman year of college.

Sigh. Don't mind me. I'm just in a depressed kind of place for no good reason today. I blame hormones.