A lot of various strange smells have come and gone in the hallway of our apartment building (burnt dog food smell is a common occurrence, for some reason), but the strangest yet may be this morning’s extreme fake watermelon scent that reached me all the way into the far corner of our bedroom.
I just poked my head out the door, and it’s overwhelming. It’s like someone shampooed the carpet all the way down the hall with kids’ watermelon shampoo, or else Bubbleyum is holding a convention in the apartment next door. It’s insanely sweet and sickening and fake-watermelon-y. WHAT COULD BE CAUSING IT. This question will haunt me for the next few hours, or until the smell goes away.
I’ll be back in Oklahoma next week to provide some moral support to my dad, who is undergoing some much-needed surgery on his back. (Go Dad!)
In preparation for my trip, I checked out the hometown newspaper to see what’s up. The recent police calls tell me that not much has changed.
5:49 p.m. - Check Person. Headed toward corner liquor store, no pants on. Handled.
4:39 p.m. - Check Person. Walking in between lanes yelling at people holding signs that God will provide. Handled.
10:33 a.m. - Theft Report, Wendy’s. Lock busted off, someone stole grease, third time this happened in past six months. Report.
I was summoned for jury duty recently (it involved waiting for a few hours and not getting my name called), so I had occasion to walk around the vicinity of New York’s City Hall. There are a surprising number of odd lots stores in the area. Why, I don’t know, but I stepped into one out of curiosity.
(I apologize for the bad photo quality; my camera phone was scratched a while back when it fell out of my purse during an airline check-in and skidded across the floor.)
This particular store had a generous supply of the usual: candles, small gadgets, Panasonic batteries, and a random assortment of packaged foods.
I thought these Spider Man piggy banks were interesting. Or rather, the sheer number of them was interesting. Are there that many people in this world who desire a Spider Man piggy bank?
Then, toward the back of this brightly-lit store was a section of… Adult DVD Movies?
I partly convinced myself that the “Adult” in “Adult DVD Movies” means “not G or PG-rated DVD movies,” but I still wasn’t going to get close enough to the giant pile to read the titles.
My hard drive crashed last week. The techy people I took it to told me it would be a week to fix, but it’s now been well over a week, and their new estimate is “we have no idea how long it’s going to take.”
I was hoping to keep this mundane and somewhat embarrassing news (no, I hadn’t backed it up in a loong time) out of the blog, but the situation has disrupted my work and brought a few of my projects to a halt, and I’ve also lost some photos I had been planning on sharing on my blog. It’s taking long enough now that it seems like time to whine publicly.
In the meantime, I’ve started scrambling to replace stuff I’ve lost (only temporarily, hopefully). Among these things is a new top-secret pattern coming very very soon.
A while back, I picked up an extra bag of polyester fiberfill while staying with my parents in Oklahoma. It’s got to be the creepiest polyfil packaging on the market.
Has anybody else seen this? I think I got it at a Hobby Lobby. What I find especially unsettling is the way that the sewing grandmother almost looks like she could be a real person (perhaps the user of said polyfil?), but then if you look at her hands, she’s pretty clearly a very realistic-looking doll. And then we’ve got what look like three little gypsies, something colorful that doesn’t really look like anything, something faceless on the left that might be an art piece (?), and a scary giant Santa.
I just wish I had taken a better photo of the bag—I left it at my parents again for use next time I’m in town (if they don’t throw it away first). The polyfil itself is pretty good though.
Oh what a magical place those KFC/Taco Bell/Pizza Hut combo restaurants are. Yesterday I stopped in one in Massachusetts (it was the middle of a long drive), and along with my delicious seven-layer burritos, I was served water with the most charming pink hue.
It came from an ordinary soda machine, one of the kinds that doesn’t have a designated “water” tap, but instead has a tiny “water” button that shares a nozzle with fruit punch. The the punch dye must have seeped in just enough to tint the water, resulting in the glorious beverage you see above.
The water tasted basically normal, until I had been out of the restaurant for an hour or so, when its greasy KFC/Taco Bell/Pizza Hut aftertaste seemed to become more pronounced.
I got an exciting newspaper clipping from my mom in the mail yesterday: recent police calls from my hometown newspaper! Mom had written “Good Stuff!” at the top, and had marked a full 17 of the calls in yellow highlighter to convey her enthusiasm for her fellow citizens’ less-than-shining moments.
My favorites:
10:55 a.m. — Reporting party advised that a subject was posing as a magazine salesman. Reporting party advised that the subject was asking questions such as do you have dogs in the house.
7:08 p.m. — Reparting party advised that two people came to his home looking for his son and said they were going to ‘take care of this’ at Red Robin
8:36 p.m. — Reporting party wants an officer to look at the bone that dog dug up.
12:52 a.m. — Police Department and Air Marshalls are training and air marshalls locked themselves out of their vehicle.
9:31 p.m. — Subject dressed as the Grim Reeper [sic] is chasing people around the parking lot.
Thanks for the laugh, Mom!
As I’ve mentioned here before, I go to my neighborhood Whole Foods a lot—an average of about . 75 times a day. Since I go so often, I try to remember (though I usually forget) to stuff a couple of their plastic bags in my purse when I leave the apartment so that I can reuse them, get 10 cents off my groceries, and feel just a little bit smug. Whole Foods has seemed proud of its plastic bags, displaying signs touting their strength (they can hold “up to 25 pounds”), which makes double-bagging a thing of the past. They really are good bags.
But not long ago, Whole Foods announced plans to entirely phase out their plastic bags by Earth Day, further compelling us shoppers to bring our own. And if you forget your own? Your punishment is a paper bag.
I never really had anything against paper grocery bags until my Whole Foods checker gave me one today. She actually gave me two, double bagging them. The feel of the crisp 100% recycled paper was kind of a refreshing change at first, until I walked the 10 minutes back to my apartment with the hefty load during rush hour. Talk about chafing! And there’s no way I’m going to fold this stiff paper up in my purse to re-use tomorrow. (It wouldn’t fit, actually.) I suppose I’ll eventually have to settle on a couple of compact nylon sacks to slip in my purse, sometimes, when I remember.
But what to do with all those paper bags we’ll surely be amassing? Whole Foods is one step ahead of us, offering up five things we can do to “keep this bag alive” right on the side of the bag. How handy! The list includes wrapping a gift with it, putting something in it and giving it to the needy (I say this one doesn’t really count, since a plastic bag is arguably preferable for this use), and making a paper airplane. So we may have higher fuel costs for shipping the to-be-doubled paper bags, and chafed hands from carrying them, and guilty consciences for taking them, but we’ll at least have an endless supply of paper planes to throw at each other for the foreseeable future.
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