You all know Sweatiepy fairly well by now…you are aware of his wit and “charm” and his non-photographic abilities. I’m also here to tell you that he is one pretty great dad. Of course, I am more than just a little bit biased so that has to be taken into consideration, but I was really touched when he took a few days of vacation off so that he’d have a longer weekend to do some fun things with the kiddos before they get ready to head on back to school.
The lake where we go swimming almost daily is part of a campground and one of his promised activities with the kids was a night spent camping out there. Sunday afternoon, they packed up the van with all the necessities: a tent, hot dogs, buns, first aid kit, snacks, campfire stuff, towels, extra clothes, bikes. Way too much stuff in Sweatiepy’s opinion…not enough stuff in mom’s opinion (especially when they came home covered in mosquito bites and I realized that they hadn’t taken any bug spray with them.)
I had to go to church on Sunday night to play piano and then I made a quick stop out at the campground to see how things were going. It is at this point in time that I must stop and say a quick THANK YOU GOD! that my hubby does not care if I camp out with them or not. I am not a big fan of camping out…I much prefer my comfortable home which has my soft bed, wonderful air conditioning, my computer, electricity, cold Diet Cokes and a complete lack of biting bugs.
After checking in on them I stopped at my sister’s house so that we could go on our joint grocery shopping trip that has become a tradition among “the sisters” (Drew, Janine and myself.) Every two or three weeks we will all meet at a central location, drive to Applebee’s to enjoy a kid-free dinner together and then make our big, midnight run to WalMart to buy more than enough groceries to feed a small country. I’m pretty sure that we singlehandedly keep this WalMart open just from the amount of money that we three sisters spend there. We’ll then pack everything in the van, drive back to the central location to separate our bags into the different vehicles and then head on home to unpack everything at 2:00 in the morning. Usually all three of us try to go together, but since Drew out-of-town for her vacation last week, Janine and I made the trip by ourselves this time.
I hate grocery shopping. I hate spending money on things that I know aren’t going to last any longer than a week at the most. Meeting with my sisters to do the hated activity as a group has made it a lot more fun and enjoyable though and we truly look forward to spending our shopping time together.
The absolute worst part of shopping for me is the check-out lane. It never fails that I will get into the lane and set up all my groceries and right after the check-out lady starts scanning my groceries, some middle-aged man will get in the lane right behind me and he will be holding just one item. Just one blasted item.
If he would have gotten into the lane before the lady started scanning my groceries, I would have been thrilled to let him go ahead of me so he could scoot on out of there. But, no. That dude always has to get in line behind me right after my groceries start going past the scanner. And now I’m stuck…and it’s a personal nightmare for me.
And so then begins the routine of throwing your groceries up on the moving table thing, squishing them all together so that you can try to get them all up there somehow, so that you can then begin throwing bags of groceries into your cart as fast as possible, so that you can pay as quickly as you can, so that you can get the heck out of there, so that the middle-age man doesn’t get mad at you for taking too much time.
And he never, ever leaves to go to another lane. He just stands there impatiently, throwing his one item from hand to hand, shuffling his feet back-and-forth, sighing loudly, craning his head to see if any other lane is shorter (and they never are), staring holes through the back of my head…and all of this completely stresses me out. And makes me very sweaty and flushed…and not in a good way.
On Sunday night, Janine’s check-out lady was much faster than mine (darn it!) and so she wheeled her very full cart over to my lane and waited for me to finish up. I caught her eye and whispered frantically “I think that dude is getting really ticked off at me!” She peeked back at him and nodded an emphatic “yes…he is definitely mad.” My check-out lady finally finishes up and we begin walking out together and Janine turned to me and said “it probably didn’t help that his one item he was buying was a tube of Preparation H.”
At which point, my stress completely dissipated and I actually got quite giggly. I can just imagine his conversation with his wife when he got home:
Angry Man’s Wife: What in the world took so long for you to get one tube of Preparation H?
Angry Man: You wouldn’t believe what I had to go through at WalMart tonight! I got stuck in one of only three check-out lanes that were open and they refused to open any other lanes even though the idiot girl in front of me literally has the entire store in her cart and I had to wait three hours while the slowest check-out lady in the history of the world tried to ring up all of the idiot girl’s stupid groceries. I don’t even want to talk about it…I’m going to the bathroom now.
Angry Man’s Wife: Whatever.
I have to say that I actually feel a little sorry for him now that I know what he was in line for. {hee-hee} Just another “happy” shopping night with my sister.
