Interviewing Skillz

I don't often watch TV in the mornings. I may have mentioned this before, but I am really not a morning person. I prefer to stay under the nice warm covers as long as possible. In fact, there are times when I stay under the covers longer than is really advisable, since I am a lily-livered fool who finds it difficult to appreciate the action-consequence connection before coffee and at least a half hour of being both conscious and upright simultaneously. But springtime is unpredictable, weatherwise, in this neck of the woods, so I find that, even if I checked the weather the day before, it's often advisable to flip on the Weather Channel and wait for the Local on the 8s to come along.

As it happens, the next channel up from the Weather Channel rebroadcasts the local morning news, and the next channel up from that is CNN. So, some mornings, when I'm waiting for the weather to come along, I flip between these three channels, watching a few minutes of this, a few seconds of that, until I find out what direction my wardrobe should go. So this morning, I witnessed this little gem of a human interest-y story, about a baker somewhere-- California? Oregon? I missed the introduction to the story, so I'm not sure-- who has decided to try and grow his own wheat in an effort to cut his costs, in light of the rapid rise in flour prices over the past year.

At the moment that I joined the story, the interviewer asked the baker what the tipping point was for him, what made him decide to do this. The baker said something to the effect of Well, the price we've paid for flour has increase threefold over the past year-- TRIPLED!-- and we'd been talking about this for a while anyway. As you know, we're an organic bakery... hard to find the flour to begin with... etc, etc. Seems like a possible solution, and we're very attracted to the community aspect of the project, too. (Apparently some of their customers/ friends/ neighbors are going to help by planting some plots of wheat on their own land, which is kind of cool.) The interviewer was kind of going "uh huh, uh huh" while he was talking, and when he came to the end of his thought, she kind of looked down at her desk, as though she'd gotten caught not paying attention in class and was hoping to find the answer to the question the professor just asked magically written there...

and said "So, your costs doubled, then?"

The baker fixed her with a beady eye and said "No. They tripled." He didn't actually say "Jackass", but the tone of his voice definitely implied it.