Bulk shopping: from fire to friend

A month ago we joined BJs. If you don't know what BJs is, congratulations. You have managed to avoid American big box culture. For all others, I know, it took us a while to get on board.

I don't hate BJs. Let me start with that. (And men, stop giggling.) Costco, BJs, or whatever other feedstore is out there that requires you to buy everything in bulk is more acceptable to me than Walmart. Walmart has stripped the American economy of any individuality and left a wide path of destruction among the American small business [here, here, and here for example]. I try to avoid shopping in Walmart, and have often "stayed in the car" while others in my party have gone in. To be honest, my opinion of Walmart is also affected by my personal experience there in the fall of 1997.

I was with my college roommates on a trip out of our dorm and the car we were in wouldn't start in the parking lot. We thought it had overheated, and listened to music while it cooled off. After a bit, I decided to check under the hood as I was dating a mechanic at the time and had watched him work on cars long enough that I figured I could see if something looked out of place. To be fair, every car I had driven up to that point needed some sort of fiddling to start (open air filter vent, pump gas pedal 5 times, etc). Well, it turned out the car engine was on fire.

Yes, on fire.

I quickly shut the hood and told everyone to get out. Now.

The four of us quickly secured the car and stepped about 10 feet away. Then realizing that wasn't far enough, we ran into Walmart to get help. The friendly, elderly greeter at the door responded to our cries for help by handing us the sales flier, and the "customer service" desk refused to call the fire department because the parking lot was not their jurisdiction.

Plus, it was the 2nd car fire there that week, so they had some concerns about insurance.

Meanwhile, we went back to the car which now had smoke spilling from the front grill...which attracted some attention, but not as much as you would think. However, one person who did come over was a very, very, very tall man from Africa. He said that in his country (I don't know which part of Africa he was from, but realize Africa is not a country) people had to help themselves and not rely on the government. He proceeded to open the hood, which I had not shut all the way, and throw dirt on the fire. Except we were in a landscaped parking lot in Latham, NY and there was no dirt. There were wood chips. So, this man added wood chips to the car fire.

At this point I ran to a pay phone (oh, the era before cell phones!) and shouted at the person using it until they hung up and then I dialed 911--who were not concerned about our situation until I said we attended the local college . They must have thought we were trouble makers as they said someone would be there right away!

And they were. At this point the very, very, very tall African man had disappeared and we were left huddled together watching the fire fighters spray down the engine. Then, they looked inside and began pulling the wood chips out.

"Did you throw WOOD on the fire?" they asked us.

We attempted to explain about the very, very, very tall African man but we sounded a bit loony, and they didn't want to hear it. Instead they started making fun of us.

The car needed a tow and we were out of there. Walmart never was the same for me.

But BJs is different. While the three leading bulk sized stores (that's what I'm calling them, I'm sure there is a proper name) [Sams Club, Costco, and BJs] can be considered an obstacle to the lower economic classes as they have yearly membership fees and sell in bulk so you must pay more for the product up front, we decided that bulk shopping may be for us. So we joined. We are lucky enough to have the money up front to do so, and pay for the membership fee [Disclosure: we are the middle...right in the 50% of that 99%. I don't do math, but I think you get the point.] I had been in a bulk store before as my roommate in college worked at Sams and we used to visit her, and have also worked in the food industry and been sent out to one of them for giant cans of caramel.

My first time there as a member was overwhelming. Did we really need 40 rolls of paper towels at once? How many boxes of cereal equals that large box? Plus, I wasn't sure we were saving money. In fact, I'm pretty sure it's exactly the same. And I'm not buying meat from BJs. I just have a hard time about that...I'm sure it's fine, but we have access to a farm for beef. But it turned out we do need those paper towels. And my husband is building us storage cabinets. And...we've turned into peanut butter speculators.

My husband heard through some news report that the peanut crop was bad this summer, and decided to stock up on peanut butter. Sure enough, there is now a limit on the number of jars you can buy at BJs and the price has gone up. We're stocked up though.

Know what they also have there? Appliances. Gift baskets. Free samples. Everything. They have everything. It's amazing.

Essentially, we're on board. Bulk shopping, I need you. You make me feel like a hoarder in a good way, and I get surprised when I find I did not run out of that essential pantry item.

Plus, based on my encountered with staff at BJs, I am pretty sure they would call the fire department if there was a car fire in their lot, although they may ask to see your membership card first.

Reunions and Thanksgiving meet ups

The end of November not only signals a giant turkey dinner with lots of family, but also the time when people return to their home towns and attend their high school's grudge match football game.

If your high school had a football team and you are in to that.

Well, my school did have a team and I would love to attend the DS-Medfield game on Thanksgiving morning--like I did for 4 years in HS as a cheerleader--but a few things stand in my way. One being a road race I'm running, the next the giant meal I have to help prepared for 21 people coming to my house, and the fact that I'm a good 45 minutes away from my old school. But mostly it's because I really don't care that much. I'll be excited for my son when he begins to have games each season, but life goes on.

The first few years out of high school the night before Thanksgiving was a big night meeting up with people. In the town I live in now it's known as Orange and Black night (school colors) and the many bars spill over onto the street. But that does happen often. I'd be more likely to go to Black and Orange night than whatever it's called in my old town (Blue and White night? Warrior night? Big Blue eve?) All over New England (I can't say the US, as I have no idea) Thanksgiving brings together people who spent the better part of their tumultuous teen years back together. But now we are self assured adults. Mostly.

But this year is my 15th high school reunion. It's the Saturday after Thanksgiving in Boston, and I'm debating on whether or not I should go. I want to because it's at a Legals , but I'm leaning towards no. With Facebook these days, I know what most of my classmates are up to without having the awkward conversation with them in a loud bar with overpriced drinks. Plus, I would have to get a babysitter, which I don't want to do at this time because I want to go out the weekend after for my birthday. Lastly, most of these people didn't really speak to me in high school, what should I say to them now? I have no part of me that requires validation. In fact, if I go I run the risk of ruining the nice self image I've built for myself. What if I turn out to be a Liz Lemon?

I do have to say I went to my 10th reunion, which was at Felt in Boston. It was OK. I ended up being cornered by the girl who tried to steal my boyfriend senior year as she cried (really, she cried) about how her life sucked (no vindication there...I seriously worried about her state of mind), then caught up with a two girls I was friends with in the 10th grade. But mostly drank some beer and saw how the personalities of people developed in the previous 10 years. There weren't too many surprises. No one was horribly bitchy or overly mean. No one was excessively nice or apologetic. No man walked up and professed his hidden love for me (I do have a funny story about that from my freshman year in college, but it really just made me feel like an ass.) It was like high school on Prozac. Although had I taken Prozac in high school I may have had a much nicer experience and been able to hold a decent conversation.

Don't get me wrong, there are still one or two people I want to know what happened to, but they probably aren't going. And while I would love to walk up to and smack a few others, 15 years is a pretty long time, and I wouldn't be smacking the person I wanted. They are just scratched out photos in a tossed aside year book. I need a time machine for that satisfaction.

Unless I provoked them into showing hostility towards me. Hmmm. No, no. Then I would be the bitch.

All in all, I'm not going. Instead, I will....OK, I have no plans, but at my age I don't need them. I just don't want to go.

Things you tell strangers

The people have spoken!

I was thinking about this blog on my drive to the train station this morning, and how I kind of don't want to write down what I tell strangers, as my friends and family read this blog. Which is the whole point of telling strangers your biz-nuss I guess. They don't know you.

This came about during my last half marathon, the Lowell Sun one Sunday in October. First off, I usually run alone. It lessens the risk of being embarrassed when people want to speed up, I like to get lost in my head, and I particularly enjoy the silence of running. I knew the race had some scenic portions (Yes, even in Lowell there is nice scenery) and I lined up by myself at the start line ready to have a 2 hour sojourn into the workings of my head while my body beat itself up running.

However, I heard someone call my name. It was Miss Debbie, Dylan's music teacher. I knew she was running the race, but not being friends, we had made no plans to meet up for it. In class we had said figured we wouldn't run into each other. To clarify, Miss Debbie (sorry, I have trouble calling her just "Debbie" as she is a teacher) is Dylan's Music Together teacher. For 12 weeks or so we meet with her for 45 minutes a week and sing songs like Teeny Weenie Spider, Shoo Fly, and jam on little tambourines. Basically she gets to see me act like an idiot trying to keep my 18 month old engaged in the class. However, the class is over in two weeks and I'm pretty sure I wont see her again. Unless we take her again in the spring.

We exchanged hellos and the race began. And...we were running together. Now, I can turn into a Chatty Cathy if I am in the mood and I guess that day all my usual running habits were gone as someone was running next to me who was pleasant and was working a lot harder than I was. So we began to chat. At first I wanted to distract her from her laborious breathing, but then I got on a roll.

And the floodgate opened.

Around mile 6 I realized I was in the middle of telling her about my bad reaction to anesthesia during my last surgery. It was like I snapped back in my body as the words "shot of epinephrine and Jon looked over the screen at my stomach." Not only was I telling her of how my heart kept wanting to stop or blood pressure bottomed out...it was the story of my c-section and labor.

To be fair (and reassuring to myself) she seemed fine with it. Not only was she probably not listening because she was trying to breathe, but she was a mother 2 times over, and I think (THINK) she had started the labor conversation.

However, when you run races you are often not alone. Runners keep to packs for timing purposes even if they don't acknowledge you. I took a quick look around and sure enough, three men were running right behind us. And they all looked at me very strangely. One, I realized, had been coughing lightly...most likely to alert me to the fact that he was there. Miss Debbie just kept nodding and then told me about how her daughter was also a c-section. Here we were, two women who barely knew each other, speaking in public about operations and labor.

This is just one example of my lack of filter. Or failure to use it. Now, if someone I know asks me about my labor, I say it was long and ended in a c-section. That's it. I don't get into the gritty details. But this woman (and the men behind me) know things that most of my friends don't. So what is it about strangers? True, you'll never see them again. But that just leaves room for more...

Another example of something I have told strangers is the common one: lies. This one dates back to college, when it was considered safe to make up a fake name. That way if the strange men you got to buy you drinks came up to you another night you could say that wasn't your name and be on your merry way. My friend Janet (or is that her name?!) and I used to do this at the larger Albany bars where SUNY students went. We only knew each other and the bar was ours for the taking. We could be anyone, and chose names that we could barely remember half the time. I also went through some interesting majors in those conversations (most memorable: anthropologist, with a detailed plan for my senior thesis of visiting tribes in the Amazon). However, I also carried it over after college, having fun with people and telling them wild tales of my life in Russia. Ahem, yes. I admit I have told one or two people in the world that my name is Petra and I lived in Russia for a large portion of my life. To be fair, I didn't want to be talking to them, and pretending not to speak English is very convenient to get strangers to leave you alone. It was also quite amusing. Another one of my favorites is "It's ok, I used to be..." fill in the blank. I've used waitress (That IS true), in the band (just funny really), a sound engineer (my, I'm creative when I want the music in a bar to be turned down), and a nurse.

But the biggest culprit of stranger sharing information in on public transportation. Sitting on a bus next to a friendly old woman, or being stuck on a train in a tunnel for 45 minutes makes people really talk. I've had a man tell me about his dead mother and how she haunts him. A woman who told me about her cocaine problem, and how it wasn't really a problem. Once in the street, a man told me about his three children who he had basically left with their mother and wasn't going back.

Oh, and what happened at the race? At mile 8 I realized I didn't want to bore the poor woman anymore with my stories and true confessions and I pulled ahead and finished 12 minutes in front of her. So I ran away. I actually ran away from her.

Of course I saw her the next Wednesday in class and she was back to being Miss Debbie. The happy music teacher. I think she must have blocked all of my ramblings out in her focus to finish. Or, I'm just really boring and nothing stuck with her!

Essentially, strangers are free therapists who could possible follow you home and kill you. Just like real therapists.

October ate my soul

I really meant to write more in October. I even kept a running list of topics to blog about. But I got side tracked. We redid our roof, had the driveway redone, I went to Albany, ran a half marathon, prepped and attended a major conference for work, banged out articles for the paper, attended a 5 hour long town meeting, made Halloween costumes, got snowed on, was nearly killed by a tree (ok, it COULD have killed us but didn't so that is good), now have a giant tree resting on the roof and garage, and whoops, that was October.

My schedule left little time for writing outside of work mandated things. By the end I was mainlining coffee and writing articles in my sleep. However, here is the list of stuff I wanted to write about for this blog, which is my fun writing.

1. How rain wrecks things.
2. What Friendly's means to me (and why Im sad the one near me closed)
3. Music and children
4. Ski mountains
5. Allergies and aging
6. Things you tell strangers
7. Visiting your college 10+ years after graduating
8. I found another Friendly's near me!
9. Why am I presenting this data at 9:30 PM on a Wednesday?
10. Reasons to not like the government...I think I'm a Libertarian
11. Ladybug wins 2nd place
12. BOOM. Or how I did not die.

I making November my clean slate for chaos and also ushering in a favorite project of mine, NaNoWriMo, which is a challenge to write a 50,000 word story in a month (1667 words per day). I have a vague outline and am just going to write up a story I've had in my head all year called In the Year of the Bunnies.

However, in an effort to not ignore this blog, pick a topic from above and post it in the comments and I will write it!

The music in my head and zombie stuff

Since my we signed my son up for a music class last January, I have the wonderful opportunity to get children songs stuck in my head. I can tell you there is nothing more annoying that having "Paolo Paolo Paolo" stuck in your head, especially when I don't speak any Spanish and the ENTIRE song is in Spanish. So, it's just the words "Paolo Paolo Paolo" over and over to the tune.

But this morning I woke up with a real song in my head! "Cough Syrup" by Young the Giant. Of course now we are on hour three of it in my head and I've not only listened to it four times but also read the full lyrics to see if it will go away.

I'm always surprised at song lyrics. I usually get the gist of it and had the chorus of this down. But I had no idea what was in this song...especially verse 2:

"Life’s too short to even care at all
I’m coming up now coming up now out of the blue
These zombies in the park they’re looking for my heart
A dark world aches for a splash of the sun" [thank you lyricsmania.com]

Zombies in the park? Noooooo!!

I'm tired of zombies. I'm over them. By like 25 years.

When I was a child I watched the Living Dead series (um, see previous posts about no restrictions on movies that were on Saturday afternoons!)...and I loved horror and gore.

But not now. The Ring ruined me for horror movies. I couldn't look into a mirror for months without seeing that little girl in the movie behind me. I couldn't even watch I Am Legend all the way through. (Which I did NOT realize was a zombie movie when I began watching it!)

My husband recently rented season 1 the Walking Dead. I refused to watch it, so he waited until a night I went to the gym to enjoy it. He then told me a bit about it, and sure enough I had nightmares that night about zombies.

I guess the point of this post is this: Go away zombies. I was really enjoying that vampire craze!

To do lists

This past month I've manage to accomplish a few things, and I know this because I've been tracking them with "to-do" lists.

I love making lists. I do it for packing, food shopping, organizing my day, gardening. Name it, I list it. Then I lose them. Or only do half of them. Often times I combine my different roles in life onto one list.

1. Return library books.
2. Send request for COI forms
3. Go running
4. Interview so and so.

Bam. Right there I realized my problem. That's 4 things for 4 different roles. Mother, editor, runner, writer. This month I did the unthinkable. Had 4 lists running at the same time, in different locations.

And I got stuff done.

At work I caught up on emails. From June. Yes, I replied to emails people sent me in June that I hadn't gotten to yet. Embarrassing, but it's done. I've also enabled Outlook to send me reminders on long over due emails, so hopefully that wont happen again. Especially when one of them shouldn't have been replied to and I think I created an article submission we don't really want anymore.

At home I did food shopping and didn't forget anything. Amazing. Even more, instead of crumpling to do lists in my pocket or laboring over them in the memo function on my phone (yes, I do know there is a grocery shopping list app and I've tried 3 of them and hate them), I took a picture of the white board in our fridge where we write down things we need and just used that. Success.

At the gym (or just health in general) I've taken to using a guilt-ridden group I helped start force me to work out. On FB the member of a private group "Healthy 30s"pushed me to work out at lunch, count walking as exercise (hey, if I'm going to walk 2 miles I may as well add it to my fitness scores).

And in my writing, well. It's been working for writing that has deadlines, but my creative writing is suffering. I tried to put it on the to do list, but did you know Fall TV is on again?! It seems that my procrastination skills become heightened when I don't have an actual deadline. Instead of sitting down and typing up a few scenes, I go to AC Moore and buy crafting supplies and make a wreath for my front door.
Or make a giant batch of pizza sauce. Because after all, season changes and rotting tomatoes that bring hordes of fruit flies to the kitchen are the most motivating deadlines out there.

The bright side of weariness

In the past month I survived my first vacation with a toddler, a tropical storm, and an earthquake. To be honest, I didn't notice the earthquake, perhaps because I'm too shaken from dealing with a toddler...who wanted to go outside the entire time the tropical storm was going on.

My little son, who I adore more than anything in this universe, has decided to showcase his personality this past month. He's sneaky (loves to hide), funny (love to make faces and weird sounds), head strong (knows what he wants and isn't afraid to do anything to get it), and very strong and tough (fell off a wall yesterday, stood up and brushed himself off). He also has developed a strong mommy attachment that prevents me from leaving him in the gym daycare for an hour while I work out. I was asked to leave, but I'll go back once he calms down a bit.

The work/life balance is hard for me these days as work becomes heavy heading into conference season. There are many days where I should be working late but have to do daycare pick up, and I've gone into the office at 7 AM to get stuff done far too often. On some weekends my son is like a child who is visiting...I give him extra special treatment because I haven't seen him most of the week, then spend the next few days worried I am spoiling him and that he sees the daycare people are his "real parents."

However, yesterday he showed me in a very public way that I'm doing OK.

I work from home on Wednesdays, which gives me some time with the little guy. We walked down to the library for a story time, where the kids are given free reign to wander around the room as long as they are not too disruptive. He sat in my lap for the first story, and during the break headed over to the rug where some of the older kids were sitting. But instead of sitting down he went to the adults and said "my mommy" and pointed over at me. He said this to each adult in the room then returned to my lap for the second story.

I have to be honest, my heart melted.