Despite my best efforts on Tuesday to ensure that I have everything I’m likely to need between getting off work yesterday and the day after Christmas when I went shopping so that I wouldn’t have to venture out into a world full of down to the wire Christmas shoppers, there were a few things left that I needed to pick up.
Which meant going out into a world full of down to the wire Christmas shoppers.
All things considered, it wasn’t quite so bad as it might have been, but I suspect that’s mostly because I was sticking to the grocery side of things.
When I did go out to do my stock-up shopping last Tuesday I discovered that I’ve become less keenly-attuned to the warning signs that the universe is preparing to fuck with me.
I was buying enough stuff that I didn’t want to go through the self-checkout, as I wanted to leave the bagging up to someone else. So I got in the long line for the only open register and prepared to wait, but then saw someone waving me over to a register that she was opening up. So that was lucky, which should have been the first sign.
The second sign would have been the fact that I got over there before the person whom I’d come to think of as my nemesis during my shopping, as he very effectively blocked me at pretty much every turn, making the whole shopping process take much longer than it really ought to have. He frequently mirrored my every move so as to keep me from getting to where I was going. It really was rather uncanny. I’d back up to try to get around him and he’d back up and block me. I’d surge forward, he’d surge forward.
And all the while he made it look as though it wasn’t being done on purpose. I will concede that the odds are that it was not on purpose, but whether he was willing or no, the universe was clearly using him to serve as a foil to me in my shopping efforts, so obviously I should have known something was up when I managed to get in line ahead of him.
Still, I was oblivious to what was coming even as the cashier commented several times about how she had to double-bag everything because the sides of the bags kept ripping open whenever she put something into them. Like the patsy that I was I just grinned stupidly in sympathy for her plight, not realizing what was ahead of me.
And of course, what was ahead of me was all of the items ripping through the second bag as easily as the first, leading them to be strewn all over the parking lot as soon as I got home and started to haul the bags out of the car.
Of course, the universe wasn’t finished with me yet.
After gathering everything up and transferring it all from parking lot to condo, swearing under my breath all the while, I put most of the items away and turned my attention to the bag of oranges I’d bought, discovering that somewhere along the line one of the oranges had gotten squished, covering all of the other oranges in sticky juice and pulp.
I opened the bag and put all of the oranges in the sink and threw away the casualty.
Not wanting to have to get my hands sticky every time I grabbed an orange, I then proceeded to rinse them off before putting them in a bowl. While doing this, one perfectly-sized orange rolled toward the garbage disposal drain and wedged itself in quite forcefully.
After patting the others dry and putting them in the bowl I decided to attend to the stuck orange. My efforts to dislodge it were a s success, inasmuch as it was no longer stuck part of the way in and part of the way out of the drain. Now it was all the way in.
Several minutes later, through painful contortions and scrapings of my fingers and wrist, I managed to get the now-pulped orange out of the garbage disposal. No longer suitable of any use other than juicing – I don’t have a juicer – yet another orange fell victim to the senseless war between me and the forces of the universe.
Yesterday morning my boss came over to me and asked if I’d be willing to go out to get donuts. I said that I was, but with the caveat that I really don’t know where the donut place is.
I’ve been working in Reston for over four years now and yet there are only about six places, other than work, that I know how to get to with enough certainty that I won’t make a wrong turn and end up in Maryland or something, and I only know that many because they’re all in roughly the same place just a little bit down the road from work.
Unless it’s an extremely simple route I have to drive someplace many, many times before I can fully commit the route to memory.
I’ve only been to the donut place one time, back when Kathleen was still working on the desk, which puts it at well over a year and a half since I was there, so I decided that I would draft Brian to go with me, which meant that Brian would actually be driving since I know he’d rather be in his Explorer than my Rio.
Turns out that he knew how to get there about as well as I did, and so we soon resorted to using his GPS.
Brian had made some comment about seeing a cop car earlier and that we should have followed that. When we got there, there actually was a cop at the donut place.
Add in a street urchin selling newspapers by yelling “Extra! Extra! Read all about it! Clichés come to life!” and it would have been the perfect scene.
For most of the trip we were serenaded by some of Brian’s “gangsta” music, but for some reason I had Weird Al’s “White and Nerdy” playing in my head the whole time.
I did, suggest that rappers would do well to find another adjective to use besides mutha fuckin’ if for no other reason than that it might open up more possibilities for rhymes.
In any case, that was the extent of the excitement in what was a very long weekend at work.
Because they didn’t manage to get out of Dodge for Christmas thanks to the weather, Scott and Stacy have invited me over for dinner tonight.
As for tomorrow, I do actually have a present to open (from my sister Kristy), but beyond that and calling my sister Kim to see how Christmas morning went with the kids, I’ll probably do some laundry, and my Christmas dinner will most likely be the ring bologna that came with my package o’ meat from my mom.
Honestly, that will be something of a Christmas treat, as you just can’t find ring bologna around here.
In any case, that will do it for this Christmas Eve entry.
Try not to get carried away with all of the wassailing out there.
No comments:
Post a Comment