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I purchased a set of weights off of Walmart.com and had them delivered to one of their physical locations.  I went to the customer service area to pick up the weights and the attendant went into the stock room.  After a few moments, followed by a grunt, the attendant returned straining under the weight of the 50 lbs of weight discs I had purchased.  She lifted package onto the counter:

Her: What’s in here?  Iron?
Me: Yes, 50 lbs of it.  Thank you.

Other Vignettes Today:

I made two low-carb pound cakes today, one with hazelnut flour and one with almond flour.  After baking both I noted that the almond flour one wasn’t browning but realized why after a bit: Because hazelnut flour is browner.

My barber asked me if storing antimatter was possible.  I said yes, that it’s done in a charged donut.  He said that wasn’t possible because he was told it couldn’t be done by a very smart electrical engineer.

 

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Ashley, Alex and I had stayed up late and rose for Thanksgiving day around 2 PM.  I contacted Mitch who was to be the host for Thanksgiving and received a nebulous response of “my shoulder hurts and I’m hung over.  Fuck Thanksgiving” when I asked him about a good arrival time.  I indicated he’d be shark chum if he canceled and we arrived around 4 PM to him preparing shells and cheese.  We and he had very different definitions of what a Thanksgiving meal consisted of so after he called around for someone who had overprepared and found none, we left to find a super market that was still open.  As we traveled from closed Publix to closed Publix we found something magical, a Thanksgiving Carnival.

To me, traveling carnivals seem to be exercises in self-parody like this gem:

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You couldn’t pay an artist to have a more depressing arrangement of lights that could shatter the dreams of a child.  They had the obligatory rides and vendors of foodstuffs as well as the Photoshop booth where one is chromakeyed into some sort of shot.  Being a sucker for farce I asked “do you have something with rainbows, a unicorn, and possibly some teen pop icon”, she said yes and later we received the following:

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Alex bought a funnel cake and I went on a hunt for an Italian sausage and, finding a well equipped food stand, saw they had turkey.  We asked if it was available and were told “that’s for us”.  This redoubled our efforts at finding an open grocer and, after winning a gold fish, we continued driving.

Walmart was still open and after a brief debate between “make it ourselves” vs.  “Golden Corral” the former won and we purchased Thanksgiving.  All the parts assembled, we were nearly back to Mitch’s house when his aunt called.  Apparently both she and Mitch’s grandmother had prepared a raft of food, not knowing the other would and our purchases turned into a talisman against hunger.

On the way back, Ashley noticed that the floor of my car by her feet was wet, very wet and I chalked it up to something having spilled.  Otherwise, Thanksgiving turned out surprisingly ok.

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My Klondike Derby had dropped well below 100 compared to the initial 390 that I was anticipating before two delayed starts.  So, I went to Wal-Mart to pick up mediocre ropes at low low prices and I got to fulfill the child-abductor archetype by tooling around the children’s toys area with a cart full of rope.  Victory!  12″ tennis balls were on sale for a mere $4 and I bought everyone in the store, all one of them.

The look of the attendant while checking out with a few bags of candy, a giant tennis ball, black sheets, and 400 feet of rope is its own reward.  I should have gotten a home pregnancy test and a box of shotgun shells too.

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Boy Scout events invariably result in repeated trips to Wal-mart.  While waiting in line to purchase 30 pounds of rope I saw the following sign:

"40" vs. 18

"40" vs. 18

The age eighteen is properly represented as 18 yet forty is represented as “40”.  I wonder if this a sop to women who’ve turned 29 11 times.

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Getting last minute things for Woodbadge proved to generate several Walmart trips grabbing rainbow card stock, hot glue sticks, lamination pockets, tongs, and propane tanks.  Each time  I grabbed one or two gallon jugs of Light Hawaiian Punch each time.  I was unsure of how many I got until I put them all together and found that I had enough to fill a  medium fish tank.  I think I’ll just grab a 20 gallon tank and put a piece of hose and a pond chiller into it and call it a day.

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I overpurchased matches and returned the extra set today and decided to do a round of the store to see if a sale from the previous visit had been extended.  On the way I passed a teeny bopper in front of the poster rack that changed the poster on display and let out an excited yelp.  I passed the rack showing the Jonas Brothers on the left and Eminem on the right.  I rolled my eyes until she said “I loved him in 8 Mile”.  I wasn’t ready for that.  The war of pop culture makes strange bedfellows.

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One of my recent venial sins is buying barrels of Hawaiian Punch Light from Walmart.  Today there was a Webelos Scout (Cub Scout of about the age of 9-10) selling popcorn (a perennial Scout fundraiser) outside of Walmart and he was a pinball.  Every person exiting was hit with “Hi, my name’s Chris and I’m selling popcorn”.  That was as far as I got before I gave him a 10 which is my regular tack with such kids but as I walked away I heard him repeat this intro at least a half dozen times being rejected in various ways with responses ranging from “no thank you” to “screw off” and he kept chugging.  I don’t even know if he knew why he was selling popcorn as he was more machine than child which inspired me to create a new award for Scouts: the FLS (fearless little shit) award.  This would go to the kids who sell raffle tickets in the rain at gas stations, vend popcorn in front of low-cost retailers, or do food drive pickups in Camden.  The name may need some tweaking.