Barnmaven

Brrrr!

I'm counting my blessings this freezing cold afternoon in December.  It read 13F on the outside thermometer when I left for work this morning.  

We've been in a deep freeze since the beginning of the week, and last night was the worst so far with the wind bringing the temperature down below 0F overnight.  

The dogs go out and do their business and don't linger in the yard to bark at the neighbors as is their usual pattern.  People ask me about the horses, but they really are fine so long as they have plenty of hay to munch throughout the day to keep their calorie intake up.  They all look like overly large Shetland ponies this year, with deep, fluffly winter coats.  We keep the heater on in their water tank night and day and salt it so they will be encouraged to drink plenty of water.  With all the hay working its way through their systems they must stay hydrated or risk colic. 

We haven't had much of anything in the way of snow so far.  A mild dusting on Monday morning that blew away before I left work to head back home.  I have the occasional fleeting thought that it would be so pretty if we had a really good snow, but then I remember the 45 mile commute and the importance of this last business month of the year and I think maybe just being really cold isn't so bad after all.

SG texted me last night that he's done with his gig in North Carolina.  His plan is to start working his way home tomorrow, although the storm they're getting might have him rethinking that.  I watch the weather reports and fret, wanting him to come home soon but wanting him to be safe even more.  I pray for him to be safe on the road and for all the other people who are caught out on dangerous roads this time of year.  He will stop and enjoy some time with his son in Mississippi and then with some friends of ours who are in Houston before pointing his wheels north and coming home to me.  

It is physical inventory time at work, and I went in to help and provide support for our crew who is working overtime today.  Next weekend I'll go to our outside warehouse for their inventory.  The kids are with their dad this week and I'm happy to keep busy so the time between now and when my husband is home will go by more quickly.  I can take some days off when he's back.

As much as I'm not fond of this bitter cold winter weather, it reminds me to be grateful for the many blessings my family enjoys.  It might be cold outside, but I have warm clothes and a warm home to return to.  I might not like driving the long miles to work, but not only do I have a job, but I have a job that I love.  I might be lonely, but it is temporary because my husband is coming back soon, and I'm not as lonely as I might be otherwise because I've got friends and family who are happy to help keep me company while he's gone.

I'm feeling thankful.

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Oh Christmas.

Oh Christmas.

Annnnnd just like that, it's Thanksgiving already.  My son and I were on our way to pick my daughter up on Friday night and would you believe it, there were a few houses already lit up with their Christmas yard displays?

Seven years ago, before I started working in an industry that ships about 50% of its annual sales in the last three months of the year, this was my favorite season.  Thanksgiving through New Year's Day, crisp, winter nights, bright lights, big meals, fabulous desserts, parties and lots and lots of lovely times with friends and family.  

Now its all selling our souls to get truckers when no one has any capacity and physical inventory planning and opening on extra days so we can get all the shipments out.  After I get done closing the books for the year (on the morning of the first of January, while all the rest of you lazy arses are sleeping off your hangovers) I will breathe a large sigh of relief and start gearing up for next year.

I still love Christmas, however.  Its long been my most favorite holiday.  Having kids was a wonderful way to keep the magic alive.  Even when I'm ragged and tired from doing all the Things That Require Doing, they make sure that Christmas is appropriately celebrated.  The day after Thanksgiving, while insane people are tearing each other to pieces over the last mismatched pair of cashmere gloves on the shelf at Macy's, I will be rousted out of bed by two gleeful creatures and I will not be allowed to rest until the house is completely transformed from our boring, slightly messy everyday habitat to ALL CHRISTMAS ALL THE TIME WITH ALL THE LIGHTS AND STUFF.

Ok, I am only trying to sound as if this makes me cranky.  In truth, the day we start Christmas-ing is hands down one of my favorite days of the year, other than Christmas itself.

A big part of what makes it so special is adding the newest decorations my kids' teachers have helped them lovingly craft to the 12 years of other equally lovingly crafted ornaments, wall hangings, drawings, paintings and holiday pottery they've given me.  There's the "Merry Christmas" banner Amazon Girl made in first grade, painted in red and green on part of an old pillowcase and strung onto a green wire hanger wrapped in ribbon.  There's the foam star lined with gold paint and bearing a smiling picture of Race Car Man as a toddler.  There are wood ornaments and cloth ornaments and even the wonderful ornaments my mother made from styrofoam balls, scraps of fancy cloth and gold and silver rick-rack.  Every year when the holidays end I faithfully store each piece, adding the newest treasures.  Opening up the boxes and unpacking everything sends my mind traipsing off into a melting pot of holiday memories.  Nostalgia is a funny thing, because no matter how much angst or family drama or financial difficulties past Christmases might have held, the memories that drift nearest for me to catch and relive are those of good conversations, wonderful dinners, smiles and laughter and times spent with people and pets I love, some of whom are no longer with me today.    

Once the inside of the house is Christmas-ified, its time to put up lights.  Of all the things I enjoy about Christmas, the lights are right up near the top of the list.  I've never done anything particularly fancy or special with our Christmas lights, but at the very least I feel that by putting them up I'm participating in some small way in lighting up the winter darkness.  

Once the lights are up, the house becomes a welcoming beacon each night as we make our way home in the dark from work and school.  It is our warm place, our safe place, the place we gratefully find respite from the cold.  It is the place where we gather around our table, give thanks and enjoy hot food and each others' company, where my children's laughter gives respite from the many months of chilly dark.   Christmas carols will be played on the piano, strummed on the guitar and sung in a cacophony of voices.  We'll sit down and watch Rudolph and Frosty and The Sound of Music for the eleventy-zillionth time.  We'll wrap presents and bake cookies and make hot cocoa with marshmallows.  Maybe it will even snow!  

The days until Christmas will pass - too quickly for me, agonizingly slow for the kids - and then it will be Christmas Eve, and while my kids pretend to sleep I will pretend to enjoy assembling toys with far too many small, complicated parts.  There will be nothing at all pretend Christmas morning about their joy in discovering their presents, or mine in watching them do so.  We will try, as always, not to let the commercialism of the holiday overwhelm our faith or undermine the spiritual meaning of the day.  Later we'll gather with family and when we hold hands to give thanks, the saying of that grace will feel more meaningful than on any other day of the year.

I find that if I condense all of the wonderful things I love about Christmas, it is possible to apply it like a balm to the stress of work and the worries of life.  It takes away the sting, eases the pressure, reminds me to leave the daily grind behind, to focus on what's good and bright and beautiful.  In glimmering red and gold, Christmas tells me that we're halfway through the darkness and soon there will be light.  It reminds me to see life through my childrens' eyes for a while -- there is plenty of time to be (or pretend to be) an adult.

Oh, Christmas.  I'm so glad you're almost here.

Its supposed to go better than this

We were already set up for a followup IEP meeting yesterday for Race Car Man.  As it turned out, even if there hadn't been one on the calendar we would have had it anway.  Tuesday...

...He had a good morning.  He was medication-compliant.  He got dressed when he was asked.  He rode the bus, stayed in his seat, kept his hands and his voice to himself, and earned a reward:  iPad time when he got to class.

Except when 10 minutes of iPad time was up, he was not ready to be done.  He melted down, all the way to the core.  It was bad, not only bad enough that he had to be picked up but also bad enough that he said some things he really should not have and got himself suspended for a day.  In the wake of events across the country, everyone is on edge and things they might have shrugged off last week aren't getting a free pass this week.

Later that afternoon, the new dog, who had been doing wonderfully well, was unpardonably aggressive.  We are responsible dog owners.  We knew what had to be done.  We checked out some alternatives but none of them were workable.

Tuesday night was kind of a blur of sadness, frustration and fear.  Its Christmas, dammit.  This is not how I hope for the holidays to commence -- with another tough IEP meeting where I get the distinct impression my son's teacher wants him in a different placement, followed by a tough decision about the fate of a much-loved pet who cannot be rehomed and who is a danger to people.

Fortunately at our IEP meeting, I had support from the district counselor whose opinion and mine were the same:  A change in placement doesn't solve the problems.  The problems will still exist and we can't ignore the danger of disrupting a child who is already struggling.  If the accepted model of behavioral therapy is applied, we see that we are trying interventions that aren't working.  Either we are mis-reading the antecedent behavior or the responses we are implementing are not working and we need to figure out new approaches.

We ended the meeting with some plans in place -- my ex will be spending time in Race Car Man's classroom on his weekday off.  The district counselor will work with the teacher, the aides, the school counselor and school psychologist to implement some different positive interventions.  We have an appointment with a new behavioral therapist and a plan to access some skills classes for both my son and for us as parents.  Clearly we all need some more tools for our toolboxes, and although the timing is unfortunate, we've got to move forward with intention and resolve.

I left that meeting to attend another work-related meeting that lasted the rest of the day.  I welcomed the chance to concentrate and engage with a cross-functional team of adults on everything BUT autism and dog problems. 

When I got home last night I spent some time engaging Race Car Man about what happened on Tuesday.  I'm always struck by how honest he is.  He admits his behaviors.  He doesn't try to deny what happened, but tells me he can't control himself when he gets that upset.  And he's right, he can't.  He doesn't have those skills yet.  So we talk about what are things it is OK to say when we are mad and things that will get you in big trouble, and I know we will have to spend some time helping him to practice using different words when he is angry and upset so that the next time it happens he has more tools to reach for. 

I suppose I should be feeling worse than I am, but despite the heavy baggage of the last couple of days, I have a sense of relief.  We have a plan and we have a good team to help my son.  I know that a lot of his issues are temporary -- he will either grow out of these behaviors or he will receive enough therapy to help him improve them.  Naturally, these problems will simply be replaced by other problems, but that's true for every person who ever lived, autism be damned.  I am terribly sad about our dog, but its spilled milk;  I can't undo what happened and I can't take chances with my family or with other people's families.  I salve the wound by offering to foster again after the grandpuppy goes home with her dad, who is spending Christmas with the Washington State family next week.  We are all very excited about seeing him.

And finally, with all that has happened the last few weeks, we've gotten a break in an area where we really needed one:  SG interviewed for and has been offered a job HERE.  ALL THE TIME HERE.  Knowing that I will not be dealing with the upcoming months of February and March without my husband at my side makes a lot of things a lot more bearable.  Its not that his presence solves all the problems, no one can do that.  But his presence means I have someone here who's got my back, who loves my kids, who fills an empty space in my house I didn't even know was there until I met him.  

Happiness tempered by sadness tempered by excitement tempered by fear.  That's life.  That's OK.

Different and the same

Christmas this year outdid itself in being a reflection of pretty much all of this year - a study in contrast. Joy and sorrow, tremendous love and tremendous heartache.  With and without the people we love.

I did not send Christmas cards this year.  I had created a personalized card with our wedding photo and some pictures of the kids, and had printed them out the morning of the day my niece found her dad's body.  When I came home I could not even bear to look at them, much less mail them to other people.  They are still in a stack on top of the printer.  I don't know when I will deal with them, but I'm assuming at some point I'm going to want to use the printer again.  Maybe I'll just move them to another temporary storage location for a while, perhaps the top of the toilet tank or underneath my stack of incoming-and-undealt-with mail.

Our first Christmas together as a married couple.  That was awesome.  It was the first Christmas of the rest of the Christmases of my life without my brother.  That sucked.

The kids had an awesome Christmas.  I cleaned both of their rooms thoroughly beforehand, discarding old toys and organizing bookshelves and shampooing carpets.  I gently put the gifts they had gotten from their uncle last Christmas in their respective places (Ken, I said it then and I'll say it now -- a BARBIE MAKEUP KIT for a nine year old?  REALLY?  But you're right, she DID love it.  Fine, I'll shut up now.) and the heavy rock that's been sitting on my chest since three weeks ago got suddenly harder to bear.  And then on Christmas morning, in standard kid-fashion, they ripped through the wrapping paper on a few hundred dollars worth of toys and then inquired if those were really ALL the presents? in a most incredulous tone of voice.   I laughed, and then sobered as it occurred to me that there would have been two more presents underneath that tree.   And then I spent the day enjoying the sound of them enjoying their loot, even if it was tremendously annoying to have to get up every five minutes to help assemble something, put batteries in something, or keep one or more dogs from DIS-assembling something.

I had a hard time making phone calls and I didn't call everyone I should have, because if I hadn't already talked to them about my brother I didn't want to have to go through any of it again.  I wanted to only have to say things like "this is really hard" to my mom and dad, because it required no additional explanation, and "I'm doing okay" to my sister, because mostly I was and I knew she would accept this and not push me for more.  And yet there was good news to report also, some awesome successes for my son on an anxiety-reducing medication that has in just a short two weeks made a world of difference for him (more on that in a post to follow).

We spent time with the family that was here and missed the family that was elsewhere. 

Where in Christmases past I have taken whole rolls of pictures (and made you look at them all, too), I took maybe four or five.  Some of the kids opening boxes, and some of dogs being tortured with reindeer antlers (T-Bone thinks you ought to call the ASPCA and turn me in).

It was...almost exactly what I expected it would be.  Easy and hard at the same time.  Different than last year, different players, different in some of the mechanics, but similar in our traditions and our enjoyment of children and family.  Just like all the Christmases of all my life have been.  Different and the same.

At the same time

For some reason, its a concept that doesn't seem to permeate my steady state of consciousness.  I forget all about it, and then suddenly, WHAM! - it smacks me on the forehead and I remember.

I remember that it doesn't have to be one or the other.  It really can be both, you know.  My marriage taught me that.  Parenting taught me that.  Winter reminds me.  Christmas reminds me.  My grandmother's birthday reminds me.  My dogs, those present and those no longer with us, remind me.  A lifetime of love and happiness and grief and loss.

Life can be simultaneously painful and joyful, both things can take your breath away and sometimes you won't know exactly what it is that makes your voice catch and your eyes swim with tears, but there you are in the middle of it all, feeling both.  The emotional component of each is different, but the physical reaction can be the same. 

Sometimes, during those years where the marriage cracked and crumbled and eventually dissolved, the feelings were so overwhelming that I wasn't sure what I was experiencing.   Anger turned to sadness turned to grief;  intermingled with these were the joy and the delight over those moments with my kids or with my friends or even with my husband on those days when we could connect in a meaningful way. 

There were times when I though that all I was feeling was sadness.  Or anger.  Whatever the emotion du jour happened to be.  And yet when I let myself just be, in the moment, I realize that emotions are not simple, primary-colored boxes of paint.  They are complex, perhaps shaded darker by the strongest and deeper reaction to what's happening in my life, but many-colored, shot through with strands of the blackest black and silver shining light. 

Maybe that's what my friend Charles was trying to tell me a few weeks ago.  He gave me the analogy of a stack of paint cans - or the dead folks he talks to regularly gave me this analogy, whichever you prefer.  He said that he could see the cans all toppling together and that it might seem like it was going to be a horrid big mess, but that in the end the colors would all turn out right.

Christmas and birthday, I've written about them before.  My favorite and least favorite time of year, simultaneously. 

Birthdays are, for most people, a time of celebration.  At least until you reach the age which you never thought you'd actually reach, the age you consider to be "old," and then they lose their luster...but that's not the crux of the matter for me.  Its the dichotomy presented by birth, a joyous occasion for most people, but not for everyone.  My birth wasn't something that was celebrated, my birthday was a day that brings back painful memories for at least one person that I know of, and for me it was the day that I lost a mother and a family, but unknowingly got a chance at a life much brighter than would have otherwise been possible.  Still, I cannot ignore the feeling of loss.  The loss of what never was, what never could have been.   I mourn the shadow birthmother, the one of my dreams who was perfect and loving in every way.  She didn't exist, really, but in the fertile imagination of my growing-up years, she was a real as I am.  So.  Joy and sadness.  Because I got that loving mother, I just had to wait a little bit for her, and then thirty or more years for events to unfold that allowed me to truly appreciate what an enormous break I managed to get.

Celebration and grief.  Joy and sorrow.  Forever entwined in every life.  The joy of talking to a dear friend on the phone and catching up on life; the sorrow of her terminal illness makes every conversatio more precious.  Finally really enjoying a relationship with a relative and realizing that the years left to have that bond with them are few.  The satisfaction of watching your child teach himself to read, early, comingled with the frustration and sometime hopelessness of knowing the struggles that lay ahead because of his particular issues.  The sweet piercing sensation you get when you look at your breathtakingly beautiful daughter; the tears you shed for her when someone at school whose opinion matters to her doesn't like her or treats her badly. 

Watching them grow and succeed and stumble and fall, all at the same time.  The utter beauty of this wrecking ball of emotions grabs me by the throat and will not let me go.  I am shattered to the core by the depth of feeling we are capable of; no surprise, then, that I spend much of my life doing 'busy things' to avoid that bottomless well of emotion.  Sometimes, though, I must remember to just sit and let the feelings come.  Embrace them in all their beauty and their ugliness.  Its what life is about.  Sometimes the feelings are all we have.

 

Christmas lasts 10 minutes

Its Christmas day.  The turkey's in the oven, and as it requires basting every half-hour for the next few hours, I'm going to just sit right down and put up a post and wish everyone a very Merry Christmas!

My brother is spending Christmas with me, the first in probably 20 years we have had together and it is a real treat.  Well, except for the fact that we currently have five dogs in the house since he brought his two.  That I could live without (and so could the cats, frankly).  Its a dadgum zoo around here with his two little yappy dogs chasing the cats and beating up on my big dogs.  Juliet, resident princess kitty, is severely offended.   That and Gizmo the chihauhua periodically emits this piercing "YAP!" that makes my eardrums bleed.  Gizzie used to be my dog, but J hated his guts and it seemed mutual, so when my bro was looking for a younger dog to be a companion for his aging Dachsund, I decided it would be a good time to rehome him.  Its been a good move, my brother is patient with him and he is a much improved dog over a year ago.  I suppose I can tolerate him for a couple of days.  What doesn't kill me...you know the rest.

The kids spent the night at J's house and he brought them back over in the afternoon and stayed the night here with us so we could all have gift-opening together.

We made cookies for Santa:

But Little Man had to do some quality-testing:

After dinner, we rented some movies, then put the kids in their new Christmas pajamas to go to bed in my room, after putting Santa's milk and cookies out:

 
Someone please tell Child A that Tinkerbell pajama's aren't THAT scary.

I went off to church for midnight service and left the guys home to watch violent, sex-filled movies.  I realize there's a dichotomy there, but we can live with that.    After church I came home in time to catch the tail end of a very disturbing movie called District 9.  I'm not sure if it would have been more or less disturbing if I'd actually seen all of it.  The tail end was absolutely loaded with gore and blood-spatter, and then the guy turns into an insectile alien and apparently spends the rest of his life living in some futuristic refugee for bug-aliens, eating garbage.  Sorry if I gave the ending away.  You don't really need to watch this one, trust me.

So it was pretty late and I was falling asleep on the couch with Hercules when I decided to go to bed.  I should have stayed on the couch.

My brother was in Little Man's bed and J in Child As, so I attempted to sleep on my own bed with two children and three dogs.  Yes, that went about as one might expect.  At 4 or so I dragged my tired self back to the couch and attempted to get a little bit of sleep.  Child A woke up at 5:30, got her brother up, and the carnage began.  It was over in 10 minutes...so glad we put all that time into the wrapping!  

 
Tearing in...

Rocky the Robot!!!

 

A Barbie Camper AND Polly Pocket Roller coaster...this child is spoiled.  But look at her.  She deserves it.

Lightning McQueen GeoTrax!  "Mom, stop taking pictures of me!"

The carnage.

At least this will keep them busy for a couple of hours while I work on dinner and picking up the same house I cleaned yesterday.

So that's it for Christmas this  year.  J went back home for a while, he'll come back in a couple of hours and we'll all have turkey dinner.  Speaking of which, time to go baste again.

I hope everyone has a wonderful Christmas, or whatever holiday you happen to celebrate.  May love and joy find you wherever you are.  Peace out!
 
   

  
   

Santa does all his best shopping on Black Friday

My Black Friday shopping trip was absolutely perfect fodder for a blog post.   Unfortunately, its taken me three days to recover enough from the experience to write about it coherently.

I have never been a Black Friday shopper.  I believe the internet was invented for the sole purpose of relieving me of the need to ever set foot in the mall during Christmas Season.  Its not that I don't love Christmas, quite the opposite.  It is my favorite holiday.  I absolutely LOOOOOVE Christmas.  Its the time of year when everyone's house looks warm and inviting, when being "home" means hot coca and big fuzzy slippers and flannel PJ's, a fire in the hearth and soup on the stove.  It means pretty lights everywhere and Christmas Trees, OH CHRISTMAS TREES!  Being a parent has made Christmas even more meaningful.  I can't get enough of watching my kids' faces light up when they open a pretty package and a toy they really, really wanted is found inside.  I love going to church and singin my favorite Christmas hymns,  I love the Christmas music on the radio and the specials on TV.  In short, I am a Christmas Nutcase. I freely and openly admit it.  Mock me if you must, I can take it.

Every year we get three or four copies of the Toys R Us Christmas catalog in the mail.  The kids go through it for several days in a row, tell me they want everything in it.  But there's always those one or two toys they just keep going back to, and I know that those are the toys they want.  

Child A went even one better this year, all by herself she composed a letter to Santa, which I found on the end table after she'd gone to bed one evening.  So I have my kids' Christmas lists.  Aeryn wants a Polly Pocket Roller Coaster and a Barbie Camper and a real live puppy.  So we know what she's NOT getting.  Little Man wants a Rocky the Robot Truck, a Transformer's Airplane and Legos.  And anything Lightning McQueen.  And then Child A gave me the final toy clue one day at the store when she saw a big plastic zip up container full of Little Pet Shop animals and accessories.  Her eyes went wide, her mouth made a great big oval shape, and all she could say, a little breathlessly, was "Oooooooooohhhhhhhh....."  So noted by Santa.

For some crazy reason I decided I'd have a better chance of getting everything I wanted inside of my budget limitations if I shopped Black Friday. I don't know what exactly convinced me this would be the case, but I did start comparing ads, and then noted that Walmart (lets talk about the whole support/don't support Walmart argument later, I'm broke most of the time and they save me big on Groceries when I need it) had some pretty good prices on some of the toys I was looking for.  So I asked the J if he would switch his Friday night for my Thursday, and made plans to be up and at Walmart by 5 AM so I could take advantage of REALLY BIG SAVINGS.   In retrospect, this would have made sense if I'd been buying a big screen TV or a new PC or a Blu-Ray DVD player.  In reality, I was buying a couple hundred dollars worth of toys.  Regardless of reality, I had myself convinced that Black Friday shopping was THE WAY TO GO.

Morning after Thanksgiving arrives.  Alarm goes off, I wake, dress, make coffee to go, etc, and climb into the car, leaving my garage in the rainy black night. 

The first clue that this was a huge mistake should have been that the closest spot I could get to park was about seventeen bazillion miles from the store.  I AM NOT KIDDING YOU.  I parked my car on Pluto to go shopping at Walmart.  There were young overweight women in fuzzy boots and pajamas RUNNING through the parking lot to the doors.  Because, you know, they might SELL OUT of everything by 5:01.    Well, maybe they were running because it was raining.  But that really detracts from my outright dramatization so we'll just not go there. 

Clue number two:  There are five shopping carts left outside the store.  FIVE.  The other eleventy thousand are inside the store WITH ALL THE CRAZY PEOPLE.   Of whom I am now one.  I grab the only shopping cart not soaking wet from the rain, the automatic doors whisper open and I step inside.  Into complete and utter chaos.

Have you ever dropped something on an anthill?  Like a rock?  Or a lit match?  Just to watch the ants go crazy?  Walmart on Black Friday, from my somewhat perverted recollection, is somewhat like a huge anthill whereupon some giant person has just dropped a kerosene torch.  The minute you walk through the front doors, the frenzy is ON.  Available aisle space has been reduced to half by pallets piled high with things like televisions, DVD players, pajamas, crisco, winter coats, gun safes, fishing poles, stuffed toys and perfume.  The excessively large crowd mills about with no discernible lack of direction, but with rank determination.  Don't mess with these people, they are SERIOUS.  Don't even THINK about cutting in front of the guy in the overalls with the mullet, he'll TAKE YOU DOWN, MAN.  And the store employees?  The only fate I can think of that might be worse than spending it in the fires of hell would be to be eternally assigned to make sure the 48+ flat panel TV's do not go at a rate faster than ONE PER CUSTOMER.  Sorry, ma'am, you may NOT have two. 

Now, there are lots of extra employees on hand on this Black Friday.  As near as I can determine, the purpose of the excess employees that retailers like Walmart hire to work on these kind of holiday shopping days (if they're not responsible for making sure no one gets two televisions) is to stand in the entrance to the side aisle and make certain that none of the shoppers escapes the Running-of-the-Bulls that happens in the aisle as everyone rushes to the section with the really cheap big screen TV's.  And I am convinced of this because no matter how many times I said "Excuse me, could I get past you so I can get to the toy section without being trampled by the enormous crowd of people that are trying to run me over to get to that television there?" not a SINGLE ONE of the Walmart employees planted in the side aisle would make eye contact with me, much less MOVE THEIR ENORMOUS ASS OUT OF THE WAY.  So, stuck in the milling crowd of people, I inched my way to the toy section (in the middle back of the store) one painful centimeter at a time.  I say painful because I have at least six visible bruises from being bumped into by other people's shopping carts.

FINALLY I made it to the toy section without having been stabbed in the heart by the woman who thought I was out to get to the big pallet of TV's before her, or having torn any other shopper limb from limb, even when I thought they deserved it because they were block the WHOLE aisle with their cart looking at sponge-bob pajamas and didn't think they should move a little bit so I could get past.  Jerks.  Whatever.  I made it to the toy section.  And you know what?  THEY DIDN'T EVEN HAVE THE BARBIE CAMPER.  OR ROCKY THE ROBOT.  Nope.  I found everything else I wanted, including the sponge-bob pajamas I took from that other woman's shopping cart, loaded it up, and then threaded my way through the lingerie section to about halfway to the front of the store - because that's where the lines for the cash registers ENDED.  Oh dear god. 

I sat there for what seemed like forever, listening the the lady on the intercom paging for a store manager to come to the electronics section.  And for a store manager to come to the personal care section.  And for a store manager to come to the hardware section.  And for the store manager to come to the electronics section again.  I bet the crazy TV lady was going after someone else she thought was going to get her TV.  After some endless time in the non-moving line, the coffee finally engaged and I woke up enough to notice that there were a few lines that were shorter in the middle of the store.  The self-check out!!  Yay for self-checkout!  I "excuse me"'d and shoved and bumped and bullied my way over a few aisles and made it up to the shorter line at the self checkout.  The people right in front of me only had some towels and the hippy couple in front of them with the dredlocks and the tie-dye shirts looked to only have a few measly electronics (wait, are hippies ALLOWED to have electronics?  Can you even WEAR tie-dye if you use electronics?  Or is that amish people?).  I was so excited.  I was going to be out of the store soon!  I was ALMOST NEXT!

The hippy people checked out their items and things were going really well, or so I thought, until the little green light above the register started flashing red.  And everyone sort of stood there a while, wondering what to do next, when finally a weasly little Walmart guy with a big clip-on key ring and funky Gene-Wilder hair came up and looked at the machine.  He started pushing buttons on the screen.  And pushed some more.  And frowned.  And pushed some more.  Then he got another Wal-mart person, maybe his supervisor.  And SHE pushed some buttons.  And some more buttons.  And then they both stood there and talked about maybe how HE pushed the wrong buttons or she was a crappy supervisor or maybe they were wondering why hippys even NEED electronics.  About ten thousand hours later, they finally had some sort of A-HA moment, pushed some more onscreen buttons and the hippy people got to take their new electronics home.  And I WAS NEXT!  

I wish there were some big climactic event that took place so I could finish off this blog with a bang, but really, being NEXT was pretty much the most exciting thing.  And then the other people were done, it was my turn, I checked out and went home and crawled back into bed.  The end.