Maybe it’s the constant onslaught of winter weather, but I’m feeling a wee bit bitchy lately.  I feel like I’m going to look back at my posts in a few months and diagnosis myself with chronic PMS or something.

As I sit here now, listening to freezing drizzle hit the window, I’m not lulled or calmed by the melody of the sound, I’m annoyed.  This, in part, is because we seem to get a winter storm the same time every week, and it keeps falling on my grocery shopping day.

I walked into the store yesterday, already irritated, at lunch time behind an elderly woman with a cane, a team of shopping friends (wth?), and a family. This I never understand either- why are both parents out with three kids? If you have two available parents, one of you should keep your infant, young baby and toddler at home…and the other does the grocery shopping (don’t forget the birth control!).  Anyway, I was on a time crunch and had just 40 minutes before my husband’s lunch hour was up. Normally, this would be a tight time constraint for my weekly trip anyway, but with the store packed with snow-a-phobics, I knew I was in trouble.

As I weaved my way down one aisle after the next, I felt like I could be a champion on the old show, “Supermarket Sweep.” I checked off one item after another, maneuvering between shoppers, carts, stray children, stock boys and the like marveling at the speed and good time I was making.  It’s times like this I do feel like I’m domestically gifted, and just as I was making my way down one of the final aisles, I encountered one of the sixty or so seniors doing their shopping too.

The woman smiled kindly at me, and I watched as her 90-something year old arm trembled as she attempted to reach something on a shelf that was just out of her arm’s reach.  “Here,” I said, “let me help you. What can I get for you?”  I smiled as I pulled the box of dark brown hair dye  down from the shelf, and tried not to giggle as I saw wisps of her white and brown hair peeking beneath her scarf.  “Good for you, Grandma,” I thought silently as I handed her the box.  She studied it for a minute, and I was then instructed to remove two or three more boxes searching for the  right shade of brown.  Just as I thought we finally found it, I heard a loud commotion just behind me and a string of curse words.

Coming to a stop was an older man on a motorized scooter.  My cart was stopped next to the old woman’s, blocking the man’s path.  I quickly apologized and went to move the cart when the man said, “People are so damn inconsiderate!”  I stopped behind my cart, turned, and asked the man to repeat himself.  “You’re blocking the whole damn aisle.”

I stood there for a moment and considered hitting him in his fat, wrinkly head with a bottle of shampoo, and then had a quick daydream about kicking him off his store-borrowed rascal scooter (he didn’t look incapable of walking, he looked lazy).  Instead, I just said, “I’m terribly sorry to have slowed you down and caused you such a terrible inconvenience as I helped this woman reach a product off a high shelf. To help you make up for lost time, let me just give you a heads up, the tampons and Midol are located in aisle 12 now.”  He just glared at me, and to my delight, the old woman began to chuckle.  We both had a hearty laugh as the lazy old man motored past us.

“What an asshole that old guy was!” I complained to my husband as I brought my bags inside.  “I mean, I know we’ve had this conversation before, but I don’t care if you’re 4 years old or 70-something like this guy, just cause you’re old and maybe even disabled doesn’t mean you’re excused from acting like an asshole!”

Jake, overhearing the conversation, chimes in with “I learned that azz-hules on Dora are blue.”

I immediately stopped what I was doing and tried to process what he was saying. He then questions, “So some azz-hules are old and some of them are blue too?”

Then it clicked. “First, Jake, please don’t repeat my bad words. Don’t say asshole or ‘azz-hule‘ as you said. Secondly, it’s azul, and azul means the color blue.”

Jake, clearly irritated with me, just said, “well, people can be azul.”

“Yes, yes they can, Jake. People can be azuls…it’s a good life lesson.  Oh, and why don’t you ask your brother about blue people.”

Cheer me up!  Give me a vote!  It just takes one click of the link below. Otherwise I may end up kicking old men in wheel chairs.  You can help.  Oh, and leave me a comment too?

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