Happy Yule!

Brightest Blessings in the New Year. Much love and light to everyone.

Aside from my Once-A-Year Love for the Whole World...

A note to my self: avoid grocery stores on the Solstice. Especially at 5 o'clock. 5 o'clock seems to be a bad time to shop anyway because the lines are usually absolutely enormous. But 5 o'clock on the longest night of the year was just downright creepy.

Why do people always ask me things in grocery stores and department stores? I wasn't even in my Excalibwhore uniform. I was looking all scraggy in my jeans & baggy green sweater & leather coat, my hair sticking out from my ponytail... Rob's got his 'oh-my-Gods-I'm-in-a-grocery-store' dumbfounded gape on... and suddenly someone's asking me if I know where the fresh cranberries are. I'm like, 'Uhhh... usually they aren't fresh - usually they're in bags'. The woman proceeds to tell me, "Yeah, fresh cranberries!" She roams off once she realizes that I'm clueless but hunts me down to tell me, "They'll have them in stock tomorrow!" Ok, well, I'll be sure to run down to Smith's first thing to get them... Then, we're in the soup aisle & some old hacking coughing woman is picking my brain about the evils of soup in metal cans. She apparently 'can't do metal' & absolutely has to eat her canned soup out of the plastic microwaveable cans. I'm like, "Well, that sure narrows your choices I guess" & then she tells me she never eats canned soup, but she's too sick to cook any from scratch. "Gee, that's too bad. Good luck, there." Finally, over picking through Smith's limited meat selections & this woman who literally only comes up to my boobs starts asking me about the prices on the meat stickers... Which is about the fifth time I've been in Smith's over the past month & had to explain to some stranger the regular price vs. the 'Fresh Values' price & what, exactly, the price-per-unit means & why is it even relevant. Now, our Smith's is ghetto. It doesn't even stay open 24-hours. There are usually homeless folk roaming around on cold nights, just trying to stay warm. Whatever, I can deal, I know how to tell people, "Sorry, I only carry plastic" & they leave you alone. But tonight there was an unusually large proportion of space cadets roaming around in there. People just stopped in their tracks, staring aimlessly, blankly, into space. You could tell they weren't comparison shopping because they were looking through the shelves, not at them. Even our checker spent more time mumbling, 'Remember to tell people Merry Christmas' than interacting w/her customers - and usually the blonde lady is pretty swift. She finally finished her Merry Christmas mantra & said it fully out loud to me, which caught me off guard because I had kind of gotten caught in her personal loop.

But, we made it home alive & are well-fed now & about to settle down with M. Night Shamalamalan's <i>Lady In the Water</i>. He's ok, even for a Scientologist.