Staycation Day 5

Neither rain, nor cold we keep me from my appointed round to the local landfill.

I love the landfill!  Its very organized with individual dumpsters for different types of junk.  There's this wonderful feeling of satisfaction with dumping a contractor bag full of junk into the dumpster and watching it get smooshed.  I love it!  For bulk stuff, you get to heave the items into really big dumpsters situated below a wall.  Its like your very own little world of stress relief.  The big burly guys who work there always try to help me toss my stuff, but I wave them off.  That's the fun part and dammit I'm gonna toss it in the bin!

I had two runs to the landfill, the second being some dry wall that we had in the very back of the back room (for some reason), and to make it fit in the RAV I had to break it up.  If you've never broken dry wall, I highly suggest buying a huge sheet of it, leaning it against a wall and karate kicking it.  It breaks really easy and makes you feel invincible.  I also got to toss in the huge glass screen door pane, but I was totally disappointed that it didn't shatter in a zillion pieces.  Even when I purposefully tossed the dry wall on it... nothing.  Now that's glass!

Next it was a drive over to Salvation Army with a huge contractor bag of clothes and purses, and then off to Starbucks... because its Starbucks and I needed Starbucks... seriously, I have to explain that?

On the way home I went to Lowes, where I bought the last two plastic (edible) shelving units... which means I have to go scout out another Lowes for more.  One major complaint with Lowes:  your self check-out needs one of those scanner wand things.  All of the other stores have them, so I have no idea why you don't... do you know how hard it is to scan a huge plastic shelf?  Well, it looked really hard because the guy in charge of the self checkout had to do it twice.

By the time I got home it was now POURING rain, so the only thing I could do (other than nap) was continue purging the back room and minimizing the kitchen counter stuff, so that's what I did... and frankly as I was working in the back room the only thing that came to mind was: "On this episode of Hoarders... Penny suffers a hernia and goes insane".  I did manage to make enough room to put up the two new shelves and stock them with boxes.

Did I mention it was POURING rain?  Yep, for hours, and hours, and hours, and frankly when the water level in the back yard was getting alarmingly high... I wondered if Katia was ahead of schedule (apparently we're getting Lee... which needs to go to Texas), and we were getting a rather disturbing amount of water coming into the outside back porch... duh because I had accidentally knocked the drain pipe off the back gutter, so I went out in the POURING rain to fix that.

During the POURING rain, Meeshka decided that she wanted to stay out in it and dig for grubs, taking a break once in a while to bang on the door to come in, shake her mud everywhere, then go back out.  So it was generally a few hours of moving heavy boxes, getting showered with wet husky, moving heavy boxes, more husky shower, Loki wanting out, then in, then out, then in, drying feet, and finally Sam joined the grub hunt and it was three soaked huskies versus me.  Whoot.

I gave up and did some Angry Birds relaxation, read (Dick Cheney's book... which is really good so far), and watched some tv.  Sometime in the middle of the night I woke up and saw an infomercial for a chair-like device with handles that you sit in and wiggle around and tone your midsection.  I was a bit disturbed by the claim that kept scrolling at the bottom, and yes, in the middle of the night I got up and took a picture of it:

Frankly, I don't think I want 7 pounds of fat running loose in my body

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.