All parties must come to an end and usually I know the party is over when I find myself back in the Westgate Kroger again. Today we landed back on the Planet Ann Arbor and found that the cupboard was definitely bare, so I navigated a gauntlet of stop lights until I got to the WK parking lot. Btw, Houghton Lake folk, I think I left a few perishable items in the refrigerator up there. I hope you either ate ’em or threw ’em out. I don’t care either way. I love y’all and I apologize for leaving extra food 🙂

Anyway, I am not sure who designed the WK parking lot but it had to be an engineer who was walking around at about 100. And I do not mean 100 degrees although it felt about that hot in the WK parking lot today. I think this because just about the entire lot slopes almost indiscernably down from the store entrance to South Maple Road. And, of course, that means that when people who are walking around at about 100 have forgetten grok grok. Who is walking around at about 100? grok grok. You can’t even spell. grokGROK! Okay, forgotten. Anyway, when people mindlessly abandon their grocery carts in the middle of the parking lot, they have a tendency to start rolling down the slope and smash into whatever is in the way. I mean the carts do the rolling, not the people. I have not actually seen anyone’s children roll down in a cart but once I saw a guy’s wallet head down the hill. He was screaming bloody murder and swearing like a drunken sailor about someone stealing his wallet until I pointed out that it was in his cart, which was down at the end of the parking lot smashed into somebody’s vee-hickle. Not mine though because I park strategically.

So I parked strategically and sprinted into the store. I was about to grab a cart, swing it around, and push it into the store. I can do that in about one motion as long as the carts are not all tangled up with each other. Except today there were NO CARTS! Where were the carts? This was the full-tilt-boogie twilight zone. Yeah, I know. I was in the full-tilt-boogie twilight zone for a while yesterday too. After a few minutes of standing there gaping dumbly at the empty space where they keep the carts, I managed to get a grip and walked outside to search one out. Grocery shopping tip: *always* get a grocery cart. Even if you think you are only going in there to purchase one small item.

First I was nearly mowed down by two people who were driving vee-hickles around at about 100 (and I do NOT mean 100 mph) and almost crashed into each other. And me. Somehow I managed to make it to the cart corral intact and extract a cart. It was just about as bad inside as it was outside. It was almost like a Thursday morning when the bus people get dropped off to do their shopping. 100 appeared to be about the average and I do not mean 100 years old. People were dawdling around blocking just about every aisle I tried to go down and we will not even talk about the people attempting to check out via the uscan. Fortunately, the WK management was smart enough to schedule Elsie to run the uscan today. I’d have been ready to jump out of my skin if that goofy guy had been there. Hmmm, come to think of it, I haven’t seen him around lately. So maybe he’s not around anymore. Uh, this is a different guy than the Tourette’s guy I blahgged about a few weeks ago.

I made it home and we aren’t gonna starve tonight and I’ll prob’ly be back over there tomorrow. Grok grok. You WILL be back over there tomorrow because we are out of frog juice! grokgrokgrokGROK!! And, kids, I know you hate when I talk about the 100s. But I didn’t want to leave Houghton Lake this morning and it is hot here on the planet and it smells a little funky and it’s messy and that means I have to clean and I am a little crabby. And it’s my blahg and I can say what I want 😛 I love you but deal. grok grok.

<laundromat_blues>Sitting here in the Super Suds Coin Wash watching filthy, musty old sleeping bags agitate in big front-loading “Texas” washers. There’s only one guy in here that might’ve made me feel a little nervous back in the day. Most of the rest are just typical laundromat characters, older guys of various ethnic backgrounds, kind of sad and lonely looking. Or maybe just tired at this early hour of the morning. The kind of guys that look the other way the minute I take out my powerbook. A woman with a computer? Yikes, stay away from her! And that’s good because I can hide behind this thing, typing and watching people while I’m at it.

Now there is a mom with a couple of little girls. I used to spend a lot of time in laundromats with little girls. Sometimes they would whine or complain or fight. One time Mrs. Piche, who used to run the now-defunct Soo Plaza Laundromat, took it upon herself to break up a little scuffle between my then two- and four-year-old daughters. Mrs. Piche was much more effective at discipline than I was. I used to think I couldn’t wait until those kids grew up enough that they might actually be of some reasonable help. Either that or I could leave them home and just rip through the laundry by myself. Now I see that other mom and I miss them.

The weird guy that used to bag groceries over at the Westgate Kroger is not here. I think his problem was probably Tourette’s. He used to blurt things out randomly. Usually it was just monosyllabic nonsense but one day he got stuck on “paper or plastic?” and was asking every customer that over and over and over and over. Arlene the cashier and I rolled our eyes in unison. Who wound him up, I wondered. Anyway, I used to have a POC-style washing machine, so I was at the Super Suds a lot for a few years and I used to see him over here sometimes. He would always try to strike up some kind of strange, unintelligible conversation with me. Like, say what? I’d probably talk to him nowadays. What the heck, potential blahgging material maybe. But that was back when I was a young mom with a couple of little girls and he just kind of creeped me out. I haven’t seen him in forever. I wonder if he’s dead.</laundromat_blues>