Diary of a Middle-aged Woman

01/26/2007 - Here comes the weekend!

Here it is, at long last - FRIDAY! I didn't think it would ever get here. It's funny because yesterday one of the women I work with asked me if I thought the week was going fast. I told her she had to be kidding. This was the longest week ever. Apparently no one shared my insight. They all seemed to think the week was speeding by. Oh well!

This weekend I have my normal routine all set to go. I start my Saturday off with grocery shopping. I go to the grocery store twice every Saturday. Once for my mother's groceriers and once for mine. It is to the point where I think I'm having an affair with the Dairy Manager. I see him there every Saturday morning, and we always have a pleasant conversation - both times I am there. Now I know about his ex-wife (he really emphasized the "ex" to me), his teenage son who lives with him, and this girl that he is "sort of" seeing. I even know what he did over the holidays and how much he spent on his son. Whenever I walk down the dairy aisle, if he isn't stocking shelves with cheese, he quickly pops out of the stockroom and makes his presence known to me. Because of this, I always make sure that I look presentable when I go to the supermarket. No bedhead or smeared make-up for me. I now have an image to uphold to my supermarket's Dairy Manager. The funny thing is the other supermarket that I used to shop at had a Dairy Manager that would always go out of his way to talk to me too. Dairy managers must be drawn to me, or maybe I'm a magnet for them.

As I said, I do my mother's grocery shopping. To make things easy, she calls my answering machine and leaves her list for me. I am always amazed at the number of messages there are from her. Yesterday there were seven. Most of them began with "Oh and one more thing that I forgot to put on the list is . . ." I sit by the phone with pen and paper in hand scribbling her order. On every list there is that one item she asks me to get that either doesn't exist, or can't be found anywhere but in her mind. A list that should only take about a half hour ends-up taking me over an hour because of her oddball items. Things such as Cascade for washing dishes but "not the one for dishwashers". First of all, Cascade, as far as I know, doesn't make a dishwashing liquid for anything other than dishwashing machines. One time she asked me to get her Easy Off oven cleaner - the kind that is fume free. Ok - no problem, or so I thought. I dropped it off and the next day she called me to tell me that I got the wrong kind. She meant the "other one". Ok - no problem, I bought the one in the yellow can the next time. Again she called me the next day and told me this was wrong too. She meant the "other one". I told her they have two kinds - a blue can and a yellow can. She told me to forget about it that she would have someone else get it for her. When I went to her place the next weekend, she said, "I finally got the oven cleaner that I needed." I looked at the can on her counter and there was the Easy Off in the yellow can. "That's the same one that I got for you," I told her. "No, the one you got was the wrong kind. Now, I FINALLY have the right cleaner." Whatever!

She'll also use names for things that other people would never know what she is talking about. Such as "house spray", which when translated means "air freshener". Or "toilet doodads" which means those little toilet deodorizers that hang on the inside of the toilet. Every shopping trip is an adventure or should I say scavenger hunt.

Then there are times when she'll mention one item, but really mean something else. I, in turn, am expected to know what she REALLY meant. For example, she wanted me to buy two cans of chicken a la king. Ok, fine, I bought two cans of chicken a la king. "I meant chicken chow mein," she said on the phone later that day. Somehow, it was my fault that she got the wrong item!

Parking in front of my mother's house is an adventure too. There is no off-street parking which means I park in front of her house. The street in front of her home leads to the mall. Needless to say the traffic is always heavy. Her next door neighbor is a crochety old man who doesn't want anyone parking on his sidewalk. So he has buckets positioned to prevent anyone from parking there. One Saturday morning he poked his head out of his door and yelled, "pick-up that bucket you knocked over or I'll have you arrested for hit and run." I picked up the stupid bucket and went to get in my car. Did he let it go at that? NO! "I'm sick of you people knocking over my buckets. There's plenty of parking on the street." "WHERE?", I yelled back to him, but he already retreated back to his hobbit-hole. I know this sounds mean, but since that day, I always flip him the finger as I drive past his house. He isn't at the door, or looking out the window (as far as I know), but it just makes me feel better to do it. Crazy isn't it?

Oh well, time for me to get ready for work. Enjoy your day!