An open letter to the grocery cashiers of Buttcrack

[As I may have mentioned once or maybe a thousand times, I live in Buttcrack, MS, deep in the heart of Dumbfuckistan.]


Dear Grocery Store Cashier:

I belong to a sub-culture known in these parts as "Treehuggers". One of the quaint customs of my people is the use of re-usable tote bags at the grocery store. You may have heard of it before. I hear it's very big in Japan, this custom. Also in most places where people don't want to use a plastic bag for ten minutes that will then go into a landfill for decades. I know, it's a crazy idea. Humor me, though, okay? Approximately 9 out of the 10 times I get into line with my tote bag, you are dumbfounded. Even at the grocery store where I shop like three times a week. Seriously, whatever you are doing that wrecks your memory, cut it out, okay?

Let me help you out here with some advice.

1. Do not try to charge me for my own bag and be mystified that it lacks a tag. It's RE-USABLE, see? So I bring in my own.

2. This happens probably 5 out of 10 times: you ask, "Do you want me to put EVERYTHING in this bag??" Hm, I don't know. Depends on how much stuff I have. It's not a TARDIS, see, so if I happen to have picked out more stuff than will fit in the bag, then, you know, put the rest in disposable plastic. I will re-use it for cat litter. Easy peasy, see?

3. I realize that the custom in most stores is to put one item, maybe two in each bag. But I'm guessing that somewhere along the line, you learned NOT to put squashable things in the bottom of a bag. For example: eggs, bread, chips, $5 bags of organic baby spring greens, bananas; these do not go in the bottom. Do not give me the stinkeye when I stop you from dropping canned goods and orange juice on top of squashable things.

4. If I have, say, a box of cat litter and two smaller items, do not put the 15-pound box of cat litter in the tote bag. This is just fucking stupid. Would you put it in a plastic bag? No. Do you think the bag is made of woven titanium and not some kind of flimsy fiber? God, I hope not. Seriously, put the small shit in the bag, and I will carry the cat litter with the HANDLE ON TOP OF IT.

5. Do not bag my items in plastic before putting them into the tote bag. This just defeats the purpose. You DO understand the purpose, right? To not waste plastic bags??

6. When I tell you not to pre-bag my items in plastic, don't roll your eyes, take the item you already bagged out of the plastic bag, wad it up, and throw it away. I can't tell you how depressing it is when you do that.

Sincerely,
Jezebella

Upgrading the apparatus

People, I have made what I suspect is a life-changing home appliance purchase. First, the background. PoopMaster Ferris, the 9-year-old Siamese thug, has recently been diagnosed with Irritable Bowel Syndrome. As one might imagine, the weeks leading up to a diagnosis of feline IBS were fragrant in the extreme. Frankly, as a person not much inclined to cleaning, I was doing a lousy job of attending to the task at hand. Plus, my gag reflex is sensitive. Anyway. The recent regimen of antibiotics and steroids seemed to be working, until midday yesterday, when something apparently distressed his delicate GI system. This weekend's "pet messes" (as the cleaning industry so delicately refers to puddles of wretched stinking poop on my oriental rug) were absolutely soaked into the fibers. I dredged from my memory the recollection of an advertisement featuring a smiling blonde hausfrau in neatly pressed khakis (aren't they always?) happily toting around a Little Green Machine which appeared to suck up huge and horrific messes in an instant.

My friends, I hied myself to the Walmart, as I live in Buttcrack, Mississippi, and the only place one can find a vacuuming or cleaning device of any sort on a Sunday is the WalMart. I was determined to spend any amount of money up to and including the $200 currently in my checking account in order to avoid spending the evening on my knees trying to clean cat poop out of the carpet. I took a deep breath, plunged in, and purchased two - TWO - kinds of cat food in an effort to find one that does not cause the Beast's Bowel to be Irritable, and then I went to the vacuum aisle. Yes! Victory! A Bissell Little Green Machine, alleged to be "Green" as in eco-friendly, even. A bottle of pet-specific Bissell fluid was $20, but did I hesitate? I did not. The self-checkout revealed the $99.98 machine to, in fact, be on sale for $79.98, which I consider a sign that this, indeed, was the appliance for me.

I will pass over in silence the tedious details of cleaning, because, dear MAUDE, cleaning is boring, but I will summarize thus: in a short amount of time, with almost no effort on my part, my task was completed. The machine sits in the utility room, locked and loaded, ready for its next task. And I, my friends, will sleep a little easier tonight.

migraine again today

Outdoor kitties plus painting in progress:



That would be Polished Silver, a Valspar color, color-matched in Benjamin Moore Aura paint, which is truly amazing and wonderful stuff, on the walls. It's low-VOC so it's not stinky, covers beautifully, and goes on like buttah. Seriously, painting with a nice creamy paint really does help. I'm in the process of painting the woodwork Cloud White, also in Aura.

The larger black cat (at right) is Nigel's littermate; the other three are Mama Kitty's younger litter. Mama Kitty kind of comes and goes, but she made sure to take off for a good long time when the babies were juuuuust young enough that I felt bad about not feeding them. Well, it was either feed them, or come home to a dead bird on the deck every day. So they line up in the window for breakfast.

brand new information about my lawn

So, I totally love it when I find out that some habit of mine has A Name and A Movement. To wit, the "Freedom Lawn":

The freedom applies both to the plants and the people, the latter of whom
needn’t water, fertilize, pesticize, or other otherwise interfere. Nurseries now
sell Freedom Lawn seed mixes, for lawn owners who life in parts of the world
that have been shortchanged in weeds. But even before I came across the official
term, I thought of my yard as a Darwin Lawn. Whatever could survive the mower
and the drought was welcome to stay.

I am a lazy unmotivated lawn owner. I just can't bring myself to care about the lawn. I pay a guy to mow it regularly, but invest not a whit of water or chemicals in its greenification. This is perhaps the result of frugality as much as laziness and my general feeling that the lawn? It's a low priority in my life and my budget. After seven years of benign neglect, my lawn looks much the same as my neighbors' lawns. Patchy under oak trees, a few brown spots, but on the whole greenish when it's rainy and brownish in winter. There's no point in trying to grow grass under a tree, for heavens' sakes! It's all shade, all the time. I've noticed a bit of moss growing in between the roots, and that's nice-looking. I'm not at all opposed to it. I, too, refer to my gardening habits as "survival of the fittest." It's why I'm not so good at keeping plants in pots alive. You have to pay attention to them on a really regular basis.

So it turns out, Freedom Lawn is good for the environment! Yes, yes it is! Woo. I'm a greenie pro-environment lawn-owner and I didn't even know it. Sweet.

Where I learned about the Freedom Lawn:

Turf War: Americans can’t live without their lawns—but how long can they live with them?

I also liked this bit:

The Freedom Lawn is still mowed—preferably with a push-mower—but it is watered infrequently, if at all, and receives no chemical “inputs.” If a brown spot develops, it is likely soon to be filled by what some might call weeds, but which Bormann, Balmori, and Geballe would rather refer to as “low growing broad-leaved plants.”

I suppose where I fall away from Greenie Perfection is the lawn guy who I pay to ride around on his enormous riding mower and weed-eat with his noxious gas-powered weedeater. He comes every two weeks in summer, once a month in winter. I'd love to do away with the expense, but I'd have to buy equipment, build a shed in which to store it, and worst of all: mow it myself. In summertime. With the bugs, and the heat. I'm not ready to go that far, not yet. At least, not until I find an acceptably non-ugly shed to build, which I can also afford. Because gardening sheds are either ugly or expensive. Often, they are both. As a commitment-phobe, I cannot bring myself to build or buy an ugly shed. Or an expensive one. So, lawn guy is on the job. For now.