I went down to Callahan's general store today, to gather Tex-arcana and various other booty for Christmas gifts. That place is a trip. At first it seemed kind of small, compared to a Farm -n- Fleet I used to frequent in Central Illinois, but they have a good selection of weird stuff. All the Lodge cast iron cookware, Japanese spiral cutters for vegetables, welding equipment, ah - and the familiar row of small fasteners, just like my favorite old hardware place, Nena's. Places like Lowes and Home Depot have mostly run these small places out of business, and although you can buy 2x4's and microwaves, they universally have a paultry selection of hardware odds and ends. I always check to see if they have Woodruff keys, and sure enough, Callahan's had sizes 1-13 and A-E, which is pretty good. Anything bigger than E you'd make yourself from barstock anyway. A bell went off as another box filled in my mental checklist. I'm uneasy unless I know a local place to get good hardware, and this place fits the bill for me.
The other interesting thing to me was how different this place was to an Illinois feed store. I overhead part of a conversation "... it's 4ppm of copper. If it don't hurt goats, it won't hurt a llama." At the other end of the store, there was a black guy in a cowboy hat ordering some complicated-sounding feed cropI didn't recongnize. A mexican family looked at birdhouses. There was a incubating room where they had baby chicks for sale. They had 8 kinds of leather horse saddles. It seemed like a lot of the customers were here buying feed for livestock, which seemed odd to me. In Illinois, if you have livestock, you pretty much grow your own feed - but I guess that's tough here on a ranch with poor caliche soil and low rain levels. The chicks reminded me of feeder goldfish at a pet store. I immediately thought -"what the hell is on a farm that needs to eat that many chicks?" - before making the leap that they were for people to eat.
