Tempting fate at Sam's Club.

Good afternoon!

Sometimes when I'm out and about I think, "What's going to happen to me today that's going to be blog worthy?"  Admittedly, since I no longer work the Noelle C and Elsie W...I have to look harder for material.  (Although if you want to catch my adventures with Elsie W all in one place, check out "Not While I'm Chewing!")

Most days I don't have to look too hard. Things just happen, as my regular readers all know.  

Take yesterday, for example.  I had to run over to Sam's Club to pick up, what else, a prescription.  That transaction went smoothly. There was no one in my way, no foul ups with the information, and the prescription itself cost $2.00.  

Feeling pretty good about things, I then used the restroom. Normally a place where weird things happen, my experience this time was...completely and utterly un-blog worthy.

I picked up a few items, maybe 15.  More certainly than I wanted to try and push through self check.  (Peaches loves self check. I'm not a huge fan.  I tend to get into an argument with the machine about whether or not all my items are in the bagging area.  It's not pretty.)  So I looked for an open cash register with a person.  Since it was that magical time of day when the lunch crowd is gone and the after work crown hasn't shown up yet, there were only two registers open and both were getting full.  I popped into one line and settled in for a wait.

Had it ended there, there would be no story.

The woman in front of me had a very full cart.  She looked at me and asked if I wanted to jump ahead of her to save time.That's very nice. I do that sometimes, but not generally for someone who has multiple items in a cart.  I thanked her but did not go ahead. There was no rush and thus far everything had been so normal.

Oh if only.

A man walked up behind me holding a couple items. Now, I figure, it's a good idea to be nice to people, especially is someone has already tried being nice to you.  So I told the man he should go ahead of me.  

Pay attention now, because this is where it all starts to unravel.

The man said, "Thank you."

If only he'd left it at that.

But he didn't.

Then he said, "I have two items and I'm paying with cash."

Now, normally I don't pay that close attention to what people around me say, especially since he didn't really seem to be saying it to me so much as making a pronouncement to everyone within a couple of feet of us that he fully expected this treatment as his GOD-GIVEN- RIGHT that he SHOULD go ahead of me because HE only had two things and he was paying with CASH which, as we ALL know is the way people who are always RIGHT should be paying.

Maybe it was his tone of voice. Maybe it was the fact that he underscored how many items he had and that he was paying with cash while the rest of us unwashed were standing there with full carts waiting to pay with debit cards.

Whatever it was, I started timing him.  Because this is how things become funny.

First of all, he did not have two things, he had three things, one of which was the metric ton container of Metamucil.  For which he had a coupon.

But, you may say, Sam's Club does not accept coupons.

Yes, that is correct.  They do not.  Anyone with a membership is fully aware of that fact. 

Except this guy.

Now, had the cashier just said, "We don't accept coupons" and moved on, or had the guy not had his wife with him, this would be the end of the story. But no.

The cashier said, "Do you still want this item?"

This began a discussion between the man and the wife.  Do we really want to buy the bale of Metamucil if we can't save 45 cents?

They decided they wanted the item.

Then the cashier (and note, she's just doing her job) said, "If you spend 20 cents more, you qualify for $20 off your order if you apply for a Sam's club credit card."

This is where I rolled my eyes.  Honey, for 20 cents, don't even mention it.  you have nothing in this building that's under ten bucks and this guy just spent time debating the 45 cent coupon question.

The man's response was somewhat different.  He launched into a mush mouthed rant about how he doesn't have credit cards and he only pays in cash.  

At which point the cashier and I both rolled our eyes.  To each other. It was a great moment.

So she tells him his total, he gives her money, and she has to make change.  Not that she didn't know how to make change, but cashiers today simply don't handle as much cash as I did when I worked the register and therefore they aren't in that smooth money handling rhythm.  the cashier was a little clumsy getting the change out of the drawer and the man was quite clumsy getting it from her.

Total time of this transaction:  5 minutes and 43 seconds.

By this time I'd put my items on the counter, UPC code side up.  I had my debit card at the ready.  We chatted about how great a "free plum day" would be, the cashier, the lady behind me, and I when the bag of plums I bought didn't ring up right away.  She checked my age because two of my items were wine.The cashier loaded my items into a cart, I paid with my card and I was on my way.

Total time of my transaction, with wine and plums that didn't ring up:  2 minutes and 14 seconds.

Yep, the lesson here is that if you are having a smooth shopping experience someplace...don't tempt fate by trying to be nice. Just keep your head down and try to get through it without something blog worthy happening to you.

Never fear, Princess Perfect Hair, I'll protect you!

Good afternoon all!

Aren't I so cute in my new swim wear?

Recently I remembered that I have a gym membership to Xperience Fitness and I also remembered that I invested some serious bucks into new full coverage swim bottoms and caps and that I should probably make use of both.  Thusly I started making an afternoon pool workout part of my day.  Been there twice this week, hope to get there again today. We'll see if this can keep going.

Anyway, to understand my encounter yesterday you must first understand the pool and its unwritten rules.  It's a typical health club pool, not too big and not too deep. Three lanes are marked off with ropes.  Open swim every weekday afternoon from 1-4, although it strikes me as a generally underused pool since there aren't a ton of classes going on. 

I digress.

The afternoon open swim, and I've been there several times now over the last year, is not so much a swim as it is a gathering of old fluffy people who have been instructed to get more exercise, but who do not like to jar their joints in any way at all.  (More attractive people would say something like, "One wishes they'd be more protective of other people's eyes rather than their own joints" but I'm not that person because I'm right there with the rest of the aging fluffies.) It's a genteel group, and often numbers more than three, so lane sharing is expected, and not a big deal since most of us just walk or stretch or trot or whatever.  We certainly don't, you know, swim.

Occasionally an actual person who actually wants to swim actual laps shows up.  It's rare.  But we, the water walkers, let them swim laps and we just crowd the other lanes with more walkers.

Personally I don't care for this much contact while I'm swimming/walking/being in public in my swim wear.  But it is what it is.  So I share lanes if I must and I live my life.

Yesterday I got to the pool around 1:20, same time as usual, and there was no one in the pool. No one!  It was lovely. Smooth water, no echoing voices, no lane sharing, just me, a pool, and my thoughts.

That ended about fifteen minutes later when three people showed

You may be in the pool, but only if you do not
get water near my hair.

up.  The first two were ladies, one I'd never seen before and one I'd seen many times. This woman I'll all Princess Perfect Hair.  PPH is one of those older women who thinks the pool is hers and she makes the rules. She's there all the time. When she came back from her month long vacation in Florida she was super tan (read here, "leathery") and all a flutter about how she and her friends went to this place and that.  (She talks to everyone very loudly.  People who converse while working out bother me.)  She wears jewelry in the pool, lots of gold chains and whatnot and she never, NEVER gets her hair wet.  She doesn't wear a cap like I do (sometimes) because that would make her hair less than perfect.

Now I never really gave her much mind since she's usually there before I get there and she seems nice to everyone and everyone seems to love her.  She always takes the lane with the stairs, because then she can just stride into the pool like Cleopatra or something.  She shares lanes if she must, but she's fairly picky. You must only walk in her lane.  You mustn't swim or use floaties or jog. (She and I shared a lane once.)

So I was in the far right lane, where there was a ladder but no stairs. New lady was in the middle, and PPH was in the far left, gliding majestically down the steps into the water.

As for the third person who showed up, well, it was a guy.  And I could tell immediately that this was going to be a problem because the guy had goggles, which meant he wanted to swim laps.  He made the hand gestures to the woman in the middle lane and she nodded, indicating they would share.

But PPH had something to say about that.

"Oh are you swimming?"

"Yes," says he.

"Can you by any chance swim in the far lane?  I don't want to be splashed."

He sort of looks at me and I shrug and say, "No biggie, I'll go in the middle lane and give you more room."

Which I do and he does and that puts him as far away as possible from PPH.

Oh, and then another lane swimmer showed up, but he must have understood the rules because he just went in the far lane and left PPH a full, unshared, unsplashed space to herself.

I mean...she's in the pool.  And she's worried about the splash from someone swimming...in the pool.

Well never fear there PPH....I absorbed the bulk of the splash (there was none) and you, in turn, made the blog.  So we both win.

Fluffy Girl Burned Her WHAT?

I was feeling really lousy, flu- like last night, so I did not eat much for dinner.  (And I cooked a killer meal, too.  Slow cooked bbq pork roast, mashed taters, beans.  All good stuff.)  So by 11 Pm I was sort of hungry and feeling a little better in the tummy.  Peaches had made a batch of popcorn which smelled really good, but there were no leftovers.  So I decided to make a small batch on my own.

We have one of those stir crazy poppers.  (Well, we currently have an Orville Reddenbacher popper, such as you see to your right.  I got it at Kohls...not that I blame then for what happened.) You put the oil in, put the popcorn in, the arm stirs it while it pops, then you flip the whole thing over and the top acts as a bowl.  We've been using stir crazy poppers for a long time.  It's not like this was a new piece of equipment for me. In fact, next to the microwave, I'd say the popcorn popper is the kitchen machine I use most.

Last night I put the oil in, and put in about half the normal amount of kernels I use.  It popped and when it stopped making noise, I unplugged it (safety first) grasped the handles and flipped it over.

What I did not do is account for the fact that fewer kernels meant less oil was needed and that since I'd popped a much smaller batch, there was actually oil, hot oil, standing in the bottom of the popper, which then, while I was flipping the thing upside down, shot out at me from the gap between the top and the bottom.

I was wearing my jammies, like most people my age do at 11 PM.  And my t-shirt was no match for the super heated oil drops that fired at me.  I'd say about a tablespoon hit me square in the middle of my shirt, seeping through to the belly skin beneath it.

Which means, yes, my friends, I managed to burn the OUTSIDE of my gut on popcorn oil.

This was not my first burn. Please, I was in 4-H cooking. I burned myself all the time.  But hands, fingers, wrists ( a work related burn thanks to my waitressing days at Big Boy)  and one very weird time, my armpit (also Big Boy) but NEVER my belly.  

And guess what?  It's actually two big burns. My stomach sort of looks like I have some kind of tribal art on it.  So sexy.

And the nausea came back and didn't leave.  SCORE!

So the moral of the story kids, because I want you to learn from my blunders, is that if you're going to have flu-like symptoms and you want to make popcorn...don't.  Just have a piece of bread with a little butter on it and go to bed and pray the queasiness goes away...you know, like a normal person.

Say it with me, what's the name of the blog?

IT CAN ONLY HAPPEN TO SARAH!