My Retail Experience

Story likes to sneak things like toothpaste and expensive face masks into the bath with him to squirt out, all of which, in addition to my hair that falls out like crazy, have pretty much cemented the drain closed. It takes about eight hours for a good tub full of bath water to drain anymore, but as long is last night's bath water is out of there by the current night I don't see the need to do anything about it. I'm thinking I'm going to have to make the call tomorrow though because tonight, since I've put up anything that he could possibly squeeze into the bath, he went for the toilet paper. That stuff dissolves pretty quickly and I'm pretty sure that in addition to the toothpaste, charcoal-activated face mask, and hair my drain is less "drain" and more "part of the bathtub" now. But I'll worry about that tomorrow. Tonight my concern was the fact that, although I usually keep a pretty close eye on the toilet paper inventory, I had allowed myself to get down to one roll. My thinking was that I always have a lot of toilet paper and that any reasonable person should have plenty of time between starting the last roll and needing a new one to go buy toilet paper, and that I was going to quit "over thinking" everything, after all it's ridiculous to stress over such small things and I should apply this new attitude to my whole life starting with the toilet paper issue. So, tonight because of that attempt to correct some perceived character flaw I had to load Story up and go to Walmart at 7:30 - which is late for me to be outside of the house and right at his bedtime. I say I try to avoid Walmart but anyone who knows me and has gotten an angry text from me on a Friday night screaming (all caps) about standing in line at the Walmart checkout would argue that. I really do try to stay away but the ability to buy underwear, cable wires, and 100% juice for $1.50 keeps bringing me back.

Tonight my list was short, I had to get toilet paper, but while I was there I figured I should go ahead and get onions and juice. After all, I don't want to have to go back. What I left with is toilet paper, onions, juice, ziplock bags, little oranges, toothpaste, air freshener, 15 calorie packages of cheese, and oven bags. I did better than I usually do, but as always I left feeling like a total sucker. Marketing people dream of me when they fall asleep. The ziplock bags I got to freeze some bananas that were going bad. I can't stand to throw them away. I ended up throwing them away anyway when I got home because I decided that even if I did freeze them my mind could never really overcome the idea that they were about to go bad, and they would just sit in my freezer until I threw them away at some future date. The little oranges were a good deal. I got like 25 of them for about $3. Toothpaste, I needed that because all of mine is in the bathtub. Air freshener? I love air freshener, especially during the holidays when they have all the "tree" and "apple" scents. I'm a little pissed about the 15 calorie packages of cheese. I've never in my life paid attention to calories. I'll sit down and eat a brick of cheese if I want to. But now I've got a package of five, FIVE, smaller packages of cheese bits that look like they were just scraped up off the factory floor from the shavings of other higher calorie cheese cubes in order to squeeze every dime out of frazzled mothers grabbing at the most appealing packaging they can find. And who am I kidding with the oven bags? I guess I had the idea, standing there in front of the display, that the one thing preventing me from cooking myself an entire turkey was the fact that I don't have any oven bags. Now that I'm in the sanity of my own home I realize that I don't want a turkey, don't know how to cook a turkey (aside from the knowledge that it's easier to do, allegedly, with oven bags), and don't actually have a working oven with which to use the oven bags. Totally inexplicable.

Then on the way out I had to give Story a dollar to give the bell-ringing Salvation Army guy who gave him a tiny candy cane on the way in so I didn't feel like a white trash mother who accepts candy for her two-year-old at 8:00 PM and then doesn't even bother to make a donation. Way to go Walmart, you've done it again. I'll be in a better mood about the whole thing tomorrow. Lucky, that, because I'll probably have to go back for something.