Where Is My Ketchup?

I ran out of ketchup last week and actually made it to the store and bought some. Ok, I had made it to the store a few times between running out and the time I actually remembered to buy some and forget every time until I pulled into the driveway and screamed "FREAKING KETCHUP!". I was still in the truck at the time, so the neighbors probably didn't hear me screaming about forgetting to buy ketchup for the 4th time and couldn't use that in my mental capacity hearing.

Last night I went to get the new bottle of ketchup out of the fridge, but it wasn't in the usual ketchup spot in the door. I looked on the shelf that held the myriad of things that we buy and never use, but it wasn't there either. It wasn't in the cabinet where we keep other things we've bought and never eat (the one that doesn't have a door, its painted, I just haven't put it back on yet). I went out in the rain to look in the back of the truck thinking that it fell out of the flimsy plastic bag that are now outlawed in Annapolis because they fill up the landfills and don't degrade, even though we were somehow forced to use them when paper became an endangered species and choked landfills. Nope, it didn't fall out.

I came back into the house and pronounced myself insane and asked my husband to please commit me now before I did something really stupid like cook a dog in the oven and take the roast for a walk. He refused. Frankly if he had done this, I would have been dialing the local loony bin, but whatever.

Tonight I get home and decide that I want a soda, so I lean down to pluck one from the landfill choking plastic bag that is sitting on the floor (because it won't fit on the shelf full of Costco sized soy sauce that we keep buying because we think we don't have any soy sauce) and lo and behold... there is the ketchup.

I blame the lack of bagging education given to the local checkout line people. Once upon a time when you went to the grocery store, you had a checkout person and a bagger. The checkout person would manually input the price of your item (which they knew from the little tag affixed to your item and put there by the person responsible for pricing every item in the store), then they would slide that item down the belt so the bagger would neatly pack your entire cart full of groceries into one large brown paper bag. It was an art form, and amazing to watch as every item was neatly placed like a Janga puzzle into the bag, fitting everything snugly.

Along came barcode scanners, and now not only do you have no earthly idea what the price of anything is (slowing up the technologically advanced line because the check out person has to shlep back to wherever you got the item from and see what the price is), but the person hired to price everything is now standing in the unemployment line. They have good company because the expert bagger is also standing in line with them. Now the poor checkout person has to scan each item, then fit it into the flimsy plastic bag (now outlawed in some locales), and heave the bag into your cart.

You take your load of 5,000 plastic bags and try to set them in your gas guzzling SUV in such a way as to limit the amount of shifting that will occur on your drive home, but invariably everything gets tossed out of the bags and you spend 45 minutes trying to cram everything back into plastic bags so you can carry them into the house (without them ripping) then try to figure out what to do with 5,000 plastic bags that you can always take back to the store for recycling, but since I can't even remember my coupons for food, I'm certainly not going to remember to take the 5,000 plastic bags back to the store. I do use them to scoop dog poop into, then toss the poop filled bag into my regular trash, as they have yet to provide me with a poop recycle container.

So, I'm not insane, I did buy ketchup, but it was hidden with the sodas.