Saturday, April 11, 2020

A Post from Easter Past: It's EASTER! No one is safe from my rant!

Hey all, Sarah here.  Thanks to COVID-19, the most interesting thing that's happened to me in the last four weeks is that yeast infection in my armpits, which, I'm happy to say, will result in a blog later this week. However, it's Easter Saturday and I figured I'd send out rant from the past (5 years ago) just to sort of break the boredom we're all experiencing and remind people that at some point we're going to have to interact with family and people in general again...and we may not like that. LOL

Anyway, here's a blast from the past! Enjoy and Happy Easter all!



Good afternoon all!

So today is the day that Christians get a break from Holy Week. If you are a Christian who doesn't miss church, you know what I mean. We've got Sunday, then Maundy Thursday, then Good Friday, then Easter Sunday and in between all that church is "get ready Saturday."  And if you sing in a church choir, like I do, well, then you're double duty on Good Friday and Easter Sunday.

Yep, I'm giving my Sunday best clothes a work out.

Wait, I don't have Sunday best clothes. I have black pants and whatever top doesn't make my skin burn.  I'm one step away from actually wearing pajamas to church.

Now, if you are celebrating Passover, or something else I'm not aware of, then happy and blessed Passover and any other celebration to you!  I don't want to leave anyone out, but I'm Christian so any sort of religious celebration is going to be that.

Anyway, where was I?  Oh, right.  Get Ready Saturday.

Now, my mother and my grandparents called it Holy Saturday.  Of course, these are modern times, but in deference to them, sometimes I call it, "Holy Crap I have to go back to the store AGAIN" Saturday.

Which brings me to the rant portion of today's blog.

It's not Friday, but I've got five rants, so let's call this the "Holy Crap it's five on Holy Saturday." (And I should mention that as I'm writing this, Hubby just came in and said, 'I have to go to the store for something.'  We just came from there.)

5)  And you don't have peeps why?

You may not like them, but Peeps are THE Easter candy.  At this house, we eat AGED PEEPS which means the Peeps I give the kids tomorrow will sit, in open air, for about 9 months.  (It gets humid here in the summer, so we have to wait for the dry winter air to properly age Peeps.)  Once good and stale, we will chip teeth on them and enjoy.  (The short cut method to this is frozen Peeps.  Almost no wait time needed.)

I bought what I thought would be enough Peeps for the people staying in my house, but them I realized we may have one more person on Easter Sunday, so I happened to be in a store that had nearly a mile long aisle of Easter candy...but no Peeps.  WHAT? WHO DOESN'T HAVE PEEPS?  (here's a warning...Blaine's Farm and Fleet doesn't have Peeps.)
GRRRRRRRRRRR.

4)  And this is why I have moldy strawberries.

I signed up to bring fruit to our church's Easter Breakfast.  I normally sign up for butter or milk or
Wine sampling at Sam's got a little out of hand.
something that's self contained and requires no assembly.  Sometimes I make coffee cake.  But this year I decided on fruit. Why?  No clue.  But okay, as luck would have I was also volunteered to bring fruit to my family Easter Dinner.  (My mother doesn't trust me to cook.   She'd rather we eat her over cooked ham than mine.)  So Hubby and I went to Sam's to get fruit.

Sam's is not a good place to be on a Saturday and when it's Get Ready Saturday, it's worse.  And who decided WINE SAMPLES WAS A GOOD THING AT SAM'S CLUB?  80,000 people with their screaming kids all trying to buy ham and fruit and you're handing out wine samples between those two spots in the store?  STOP IT!

But that's not the rant I have for #4. Nope, my rant is directed at the woman standing in front of the strawberry cooler, taking up all 9 feet of the cooler so no one else could get any strawberries while she was standing there searching for the HOLY FREAKING GRAIL of strawberry packs.  

Hubby brought several packs of berries to our cart.  I pointed out one that had several very moldy berries.  "We'll throw those out," he said.  "I'm not fighting my way back past her."

3) If you're going to bribe your kids, do it better.

We've all done this:  You're in a store, you've got the kids, one of them is howling for whatever reason, so you let them have a small toy. It's why we have over 100 Hot Wheels cars.  Skippy didn't like shopping, but a Hot Wheels or Matchbox car was a cheap fix.  But there was a mother today at Kohl's, of course, why wouldn't a bad shopping experience happen there, who was NOT doing it right.  Junior was SCREAMING. I don't mean the kind of "I want" demand howl most kids put up.  No, this kid sounded like he was one FIRE.  They were in toys, we were in housewares.  He could have been standing next to me.  This was also a prolonged, mom and junior moved from toys to bedding to children's to men's and I could still hear them!

I'm a curious person.  I had to see just how on fire this kid was.

First of all, kid? Not on fire. Nope.  And not so junior.  Nope.  Junior was probably seven, maybe eight.  Well beyond the age of spontaneous howling in a store.

But the thing that got me was he's walking alone side the cart, yelling and howling and screaming and mom's saying, "No, we are done in toys.  You got your two Lego things.  And the bunny is coming tomorrow!  You've got your toys now and the Easter Bunny is coming tomorrow."

Oh dear.  Mom....if you're going to use a mythical holiday character to shut your kid up, using the reverse works better as in, "If you don't stop screaming right now the Easter Bunny is not only going to not come to our house tonight, he's going to come in your room and take away the toys and candy you already have!"

Telling a kid to stop asking for toys because you're buying him toys and he's getting more toys tomorrow is like telling the kid to keep screaming.

I was shocked when her method didn't work.  


2)  It's not brain surgery, it's scratch offs...oh wait...is that brain surgery to you?

I'm an optimist and as such I buy a lottery ticket now and then.  And when I do buy lottery tickets, I typically get them where I get my gasoline because it's convenient, and it's right there.  I go to Kwik Trip because they are local to Wisconsin mostly and because I know where everything is in a Kwik Trip.  They don't have everything, but if you're making a run for the basics, they have it.  
Which sometimes tempts people to do all their grocery shopping there.  And that's about the time I get behind that person.  

So I went in to buy a lottery ticket.  This is a transaction that should have taken exactly forty-five seconds.  Maybe a full minute if I got behind someone.  Which I did.  A little old lady with one bag of onions.  Easy peasy.

Nope.  Her husband walks up past me to her with an armload of stuff....at the same time the cashier is done ringing up her onions.  And something doesn't have a tag.  And something has to be weighed. And we get all that sorted and then she says, "And I'd like a Power ball for a dollar and a megabucks..."  

Well the clerk had to stop her there because as the lottery ticket buying public knows, Power ball is TWO DOLLARS.  And yes, the clerk explaining that to her wasn't just a one sentence thing either.  So she gets her groceries and she gets her tickets and I'm thinking, okay, we are ready to move up. \

Nope. NOW she had to pick out her scratch off tickets.  And if you've been to a Kwik Trip or pretty much any gas station, you know there are like fifty different scratch off games.  And this woman had to find out, from the clerk, who didn't know, which ones still had the top prize available.  (I don't play scratch offs myself...it's too silly.)  About the time she was pointing to the fifth ticket she wasn't going to buy, I made some sort of noise and a clerk down the line called me over. I told him I wanted a Power ball and I handed him a five dollar bill.  I waited for my ticket and three dollars.  I got a ticker and two dollars.  Now, I know Power ball didn't go up in price because the clerk three feet to my left just said they were two dollars.  So I had to point this out to the clerk.   Who had already closed the cash register.  Who was also a trainee who didn't know how to open the cash register.

Next time, I'll buy my lottery tickets on a Tuesday morning like God intended.

1)  Oh you knew this was going to be number one like you know your own name. 

Remember several weeks ago when I ranted about how sick I was of winter and hey, let's all keep our twinkle lights up until winter goes away?

Yeah, kids, it's APRIL!  TAKE THE FREAKING CHRISTMAS DECORATIONS DOWN!  Take those nasty brown wreathes off your house.  Take your lights down.  Take the SANTA OUT OF YOUR YARD!

At one point today I saw a house that had Christmas decorations AND ST. PATRICK'S DECORATIONS up.  I said to Hubby, "Yep, I may have to egg that house."
If this is still on your house, be prepared.  I'm coming
to mock you HARD.

Hubby thinks I should write holiday greeting cards.  His suggested my first one be:  

TAKE YOUR D*** CHRISTMAS LIGHTS DOWN.

and on the inside it would say:

HAPPY FREAKING EASTER.

Maybe that's the career path I should follow. There's got to be a market for cards like that, right?  I mean, we can't all keep giving each other those "awkward Family photo" cards.


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