Burgerville: Still perfect

We know Burgerville is perfect fast food.  We already said so, remember?      Well guess what?  Now they are even perfecter.

It had been some time since we visited our nearest Burgerville, which sadly, is about 60 miles away in Albany.  There are a few in Portland and the outlying areas, but it's really Washington that's the lucky one.  There are Burgervilles off just about every exit along I-5 from Vancouver to Olympia.

So when we were there today, we wondered if it was still as good as we remembered it.

Yep.  It's even better.

They've always served their drinks with compostable straws but now they come in compostable cups too.  They are serving fried asparagus spears - the nerve!  And there's a new coho salmon sandwich on the menu that's delicious.

But the real piece of perfection is the receipt.  Usually you take the receipt and shove it in your pocket, purse or in some crevice in your car and don't think twice about it.  But for some reason this time we did think twice about it.  We had a closer look and there they were.  Nutrition facts.

But it wasn't just the usual nutrition facts.  It was nutrition facts customized to your order.  So you could tell exactly how many calories, and how much fat, carbs and fiber were in the items you ordered.

For example, we usually ask for no mayo on our orders.  Hey, that knocks 100 calories off your meal.  What if you order mustard?  It'll cost you 20 calories.   And the salmon sandwich?  You knew it had a lot of calories with that lemon aioli on it.  You were right.  That sandwich is 500 calories.  But they are such yummy calories.

The so-called smart receipt is made possible by a company called Nutricate.  What a simple solution to a big problem - how to find out how many calories are in the food you eat in restaurants.

Even with the typical nutrition chart you receive at major restaurants - usually upon request only - there is a certain amount of guess work, particularly if you order something that's not exactly as it appears on the menu.  But the smart receipt takes care of that because it reflects exactly what you ordered.

So as before, the question remains, if Burgerville can do it, why can't the others?

One more thing

About the museum exhibit opening - you saw one teeny tiny photo with yesterday's post.  To see more photos look at Julie and Brinsley's great website.

Julie and Brinsley are GroveAtopia's best photographers.  In fact while you are at their website looking at the museum photos, check out some of their others.  One look and it will be immediately clear you are looking at something beyond the usual.  We are fortunate to have them here in GroveAtopia.

A crowd

Here is a crowd of people.

We have our share of crowd gatherings in GroveAtopia, but what is noteworthy about this crowd is that it is in a place where there hasn't been a crowd for a long, long time.

That's because there has been nothing here for a crowd to gather for in a long, long time.  So what's everyone gathered for?

A few days ago you read our museum, the one that is so full of old stuff that it in essence serves as GroveAtopia's attic, was getting some much needed attention.  A couple of teachers from Dorena school spend the last 9 months laboriously going through items big and small, pristine and rusty, identifiable and unidentifiable and piecing them all together into something most museums have.  It's called an exhibit.

Everyone is gathered here for the opening of that exhibit.  There was even a ribbon cutting, complete with giant scissors.

There were somewhere between 50-75 people at the exhibit opening.  The mayor was there.  A few city councilors were there.  The museum board was there.  So was the Historical Society.  And just regular GroveAtopains were there too.

You see, the museum is smack dab in the middle of GroveAtopia's very first and most historic neighborhood, so its neighbors are the homes of regular GroveAtopians.  Curious about the unusually large gathering in their neighborhood, many of them simply walked over to see what was up.  Plus there was barbecue from Big Stuff.  Even if you hate museums, you'd come for that alone.

Now our museum is really a museum.  It has a real live exhibit, just like the grown-up museums have.  We can now proudly take our place along with other small town museums and you simply must take the time to see it.

Not kaput

Yes.  It has been awhile.  A long while.  But even though nothing has been posted here in quite some time, GroveAtopia continues on.  Like a good book where the characters seem to carry on even when you close the it, GroveAtopia is here whether we read and write about it or not.  It is not kaput.

In fact, the Lovely Season has arrived and once again all is green, fluffy, mild and moist.  The air is soft.  The birds are busy.  And the flowers we somehow manage to forget about every year have returned.

In a way it is a blessing that we forget because then every year we get to be surprised again at how lovely it all is.  If you ever sigh with boredom at the reappearance of the Lovely Season, then something is seriously wrong.  Consider seeing a doctor.

But for now, let's turn our attention to some of the many many many things that have happened while we haven't been writing about them.

One of them is the new exhibit at our museum.

We talked about it when it needed painting, then again when it got painted, and now it's getting a new exhibit.  It's a big deal, because for a very long time the museum was, well, a museum, but not in the best sense of the word.  It was really GroveAtopia's attic, chock full of things that people had left on the doorstep, or that relatives had brought by thinking the museum should have them simply because they were old.

Apparently the museum very rarely said no, and the result was a tremendous mish-mash of old stuff.  There was so much of it, it was stored in the neighboring annex building.  There was so much of it that the annex building was rarely opened.  There was so much of it that no one could make any sense of it without a personal tour.  Even then the stuff in there was, well stuff.  It told snippets of unrelated stories about GroveAtopia's past, but no one had ever put it together into a coherent exhibit that told a coherent story about our town's past.

Until now.  Through a series of fortunate events, two teachers from one of GroveAtopia's small schools were awarded a Teaching American History grant to do just that - teach american history.  They decided to teach GroveAtopia's piece of american history by developing a series of small exhibits that depict life in Cottage Grove as it was in the late 19th and early 20th century.

The exhibit is called "Living Our History" and it opens this weekend.  You can read about it here.

If you are lucky you can come to the opening, enjoy the exhibit and enjoy some food from Big Stuff BBQ. If not, perhaps you can drop by sometime when the museum is open.  And by the way, the museum is open from 1-4, not 10-3 like it says in the newspaper.