Black Friday Shopping Madness!

My daughter and I have had a lot of fun shopping on Black Friday in the past. However, this year we have most of our holiday shopping done already so there really didn’t seem to be a need.  But when we heard even more stores were opening at midnight, and looked through all the flyers, we decided it might be a fun adventure.

So once the Thanksgiving festivities were over, we took a nap so we would be up and ready for our midnight rendezvous with crazed shoppers looking for deals.

Since we were in no need of any of the door buster deals, we left the house a little after midnight, believing that the rush of shoppers who had waited in line, would already be tapering off by the time we got to the mall.

We got less than two miles from our house and out of nowhere, blue and red flashing lights appeared behind us. There was a car directly in front of me and I pulled over, just hoping the police officer would drive right on by and either stop them or go to the emergency he must be dealing with. Wishful thinking. He pulled over right behind me.

Was I speeding? It didn’t seem like it. And if I was, so was the car in front of me but I decided I wouldn’t bring that up if given the chance. I'm pretty sure officers don't appreciate that.There was a long wait for the officer to finally approach the car. I was waiting for the “Do you know how fast you were going?” question and my honest answer would have been, “No.”  I really thought I was within the speed limit to be honest.

It turns out that’s not why he stopped me. He stopped me because I have a headlight out. Which sort of ticks me off because I just had a headlight replaced within the last two weeks! Not ticked off at the officer, mind you. Just ticked off in general that my headlights keep burning out!  That’s four headlight replacements in two years!! Two in the last two weeks!

And although I love my Subaru, the engineering on my Outback requires the garage to remove the entire front bumper every time they need to replace a headlight. That’s 1.5 hours every time I have to bring it in for this! Grrr!

Back to the story. I said, “Hey, thanks for letting me know. I’ll get it in to be replaced.” I was relieved and ready to be on my merry way. To which he replied, “Can I see your license, please?” Hmmm.  Okay. I thought telling me my headlight is out was just a nice public service gesture… but okay… He took my license and my insurance card, looked at it, verified the address, asked for my telephone number and asked me if there was anything he would find on my record. Of course I told him no.  And there really isn’t anything there. I am nothing if not a law-abiding, rule-following kind of girl.

So we sat and waited for what seemed like a very long time. I was amazed at the number of cars traveling on this road at this hour of the night. After the adrenaline of being pulled over started wearing off, it was sort of embarrassing to be sitting there in the bath of flashing lights!  But what can you do? We actually laughed a little bit about it. Our first stop on Black Friday wasn’t exactly what we had pictured it to be!

Eventually the officer came back….. with a warning. I have five days to get my headlight fixed. Then I have to find an officer to verify that the repair has been done and ask him/her to sign and provide his/her badge number.

I wanted to ask, but was too afraid to, "How do I find an officer to verify the repair?”  Do I just drive around and look for one stopped at a gas station? Do I drive down to the one who hides by the park in our neighborhood and walk up and knock on his window? If I see one in the median, should I pull up behind them? Do I drive around looking for a police station?  Stop at a weigh station? How do I do this?

Hey, here’s an idea! I could drive down US Highway 41 at 90 mph and when an officer finally pulls me over I could say, “Thank goodness you finally caught up with me Officer! I need you to sign this form for me.” 

Hmmmm... I guess that’s probably not the best approach. I’ll figure something out.

You may be curious if this stopped us from our Black Friday shopping.  Nope!  We continued on and in just a few hours we were back home with a few good purchases.

My daughter has had enough excitement for one night and has gone off to sleep. I’m getting ready to go back out solo to do a little more shopping. And then it’s over to the Subaru dealer to be first in line when the service department opens at 7:30 AM! 

Just another adventure in A Very Kari Life!

Keep on smiling!

Don't Let the Man Keep You Down!

Our favorite dog in the whole wide world, big chocolate lab Truman, turned none years old yesterday!

When we brought him home from the shelter all those years ago, we were not sure if he would stay in the yard and we didn’t have a fenced in yard. So we always took him out on a leash for nice long walks to let him do what he needed to do.  It seemed like a great idea at the time.  We lived on the edge of a neighborhood development so just one house away got us into the woods where Truman could take aim and pee on anonymous trees in the forest, rather than someone’s prized rhododendrons.

But what it also did was to teach Truman is that he doesn’t want to do any of his business in our yard. He only wants to take care of business if he is out on a walk.

We live in a different city now and there are no woods nearby so we spend a lot of time walking through the neighborhood with our dog, keeping him away from the prized rhododendrons. My husband knows everyone in the larger neighborhood area not by name, but by their dog’s names. It’s too funny. When we meet people in the neighborhood in social situations, we hear comments like, “Oh, you guys are the ones who are always out walking your dog.”  Yes, we’re the crazy dog people.

On the bright side, it’s great exercise for both dog and human! Of course when it’s 20 below zero, the exercise doesn’t seem so appealing..

So all of this walking with the dog gets me thinking about stuff.  Like how does a dog automatically know that he should pee on a fire hydrant?  Truman is constantly on the lookout for fire hydrants. Yes, I know he smells the scent of other dogs, but how did that very first dog know that peeing on a fire hydrant is something that all dogs must do?  And I wonder if they know how cliché they are being.  A dog peeing on a fire hydrant. Yeah, real original. Way to be a trendsetter.

But here’s the one that makes me think that dogs are much smarter than people ever give them credit for.  We have a beautiful walk/run/bike trail in our neighborhood. It runs past a park.  Every time we take the trail past the park, Truman makes an incredibly strong beeline for a certain sign on the edge of the park. I have attached a photo of it below.

There’s no stopping him. He is determined and uses all his strength to get to it. I have to pre-plan how I will get by the park. If there are people in the park or if there are cars going by, I either run by the sign as fast as I can and hope he doesn’t see it or catch a whiff, or I casually turn and walk out on the road with him. Because it’s just too embarrassing to be standing there while your dog is peeing on a “No Pets Allowed” sign!

I certainly admire his “Don’t let the man keep you down!” attitude though! There’s probably some little nugget of wisdom to be learned there. I’ll need to think about it while I’m out there on our next walk!

Keep on smiling!

Bless Your Heart

I am from the North. I have lived my entire life in the North.  The only way I have heard “Bless your/her/his heart” used is when someone does something really sweet, nice or kind for someone else.  For instance, when a neighbor comes over with a freshly baked loaf of banana bread, it is a good time to say, “Well bless your heart. You’re so sweet!” 

Maybe I have simply led a sheltered life but that’s the only way I have heard it used.  Until one day I was telling some stories to a friend of mine who grew up in the South.  And the comment back was, “There’s only one thing you can say to that – bless her heart.  In fact, every time you use her name, you should pause and say, ‘Bless her heart’.”

I learned that in the South, “Bless her/his/your heart” is a phrase used to convey many deeper messages.  Sort of like “uff-da” can have more than one meaning to those of us from Norwegian heritage.

Here are the meanings as I understand them.

1.   “Bless your heart” can mean that you are showing empathy. When a friend is going on and on about how they have been wronged by their friend, co-worker, spouse, in-law, boyfriend, hairstylist, etc., people in the South, shake their head, add in a little hand pat and say, “Bless your heart.”  It’s sort of like saying, “I feel for you girlfriend. Sure glad it’s not me!”

2.   It is also a phrase used to come before or after an unkind phrase or insult. “Bless her heart. That outfit looks hideous on her!”  Again, this is done with a gentle, you poor thing, head shake.

3.   The third way it is used is when someone just isn’t the brightest bulb on the string yet you love them anyway.

I have some stories that fit perfectly into the third example. So here are my “bless her heart” stories.

I once worked with a receptionist who, in an effort to protect her identity, I will call Katherine.  Katherine is well put together, very stylish and quite beautiful.  She reminds me of the Miss America contestants from long ago. Big hair, never a strand out of place, perfect make up and stylish. To add to the persona, she also has a very syrupy sweet little girl type voice- the kind that you can envision talking about world peace when asked that all important question in the interview round of the pageant. I won’t even try to guess her age but she has grown children and even some grandchildren so she is neither young, nor past retirement.

Katherine was put in charge of ordering the invitations for our annual length of service and recognition banquet. A couple of days before the invitations were due out in the mail, Katherine comes into my office with a box of printed invitations and a panicked look on her face.  She places an invitation in front of me and says, “I don’t know what to do. There’s a typo on the invitation….” And as I’m looking at the invitation to find the typo, she adds, “And I checked through the whole box and the same typo is on every single one.”  Ohhh, bless your heart!

This woman makes the best chocolate chip cookies. She brought them in on several occasions. I am not the best cookie maker in the world but I’d really like to be so I am always looking for tips and tricks to make them better.  So I asked Katherine what her secret was. How does she make her cookies so fluffy? Mine always turn out flat. I was expecting to hear something about margarine vs. butter, chilling the dough overnight, chilling the cookie sheets, mixing everything with a special spoon or spatula  or adding in a magical ingredient of one sort or another.  But this was her answer.  Without even a short pause, she said, “I use parchment paper to line the cookie sheets.”  Yeah, I don’t think that’s necessarily the secret to fluffier cookies but thanks and bless your heart!

And this is my all-time favorite. I had the misfortune of fracturing my heel one summer.  Being a bit on the stubborn side, when the pain started in my heel, I kept running on a daily basis and believed I could run through the pain. Several weeks later, when I finally gave up and went to the doctor, I ended up in a boot cast for quite some time.  Mobility, although certainly nowhere near impossible, was a challenge for a while.

Katherine was on her way back up to the front reception area at the same time I needed to walk up that way to get some reports off the printer.  She stopped to wait for me so we could walk up together.  As I hobbled closer, I said, “Oh thanks Katherine! But you can go on ahead. I’m a little slow these days!”

She remained right where she was and as I got closer she said to me, “Oh, don’t worry about that. Some people say that I’m slow too but it’s not that. We just take longer to think things through.” I stopped in my off-kilter tracks and looked at her for a very long moment. I toyed with the thought of explaining to her that I simply meant that I WALKED slower because of my cast.  But instead I just shook my head in a knowing way and said, “Bless your heart.”

Keep on smiling!

The Health Food Aisle

Recently I took an impromptu trip to the grocery store to buy organic sucanat. Now before you become too impressed with me and my healthy ways, you should know a couple of things:

1)   I was inspired to make baked apples from a recipe I saw in a Clean Eating magazine. Not my regular reading fare but something that looked new and interesting to me. Organic sucanat was on the ingredient list.

2)   I had no idea what organic sucanat was and had to Google it to find out if I was looking for an animal, vegetable or mineral once I got to the store.

Turns out it is dehydrated cane juice or “free-flowing organic brown sugar perfect for baking”.  Okay, that makes sense. Maybe.. At least I had an idea of what it might look like. Off to the grocery store I went!

The most logical place I would find this magical organic sucanat would be in the organic foods aisle (of course) so I headed through the crowds to look at all things health food.  As I approached the aisle I noticed that the volume of activity and noise decreased dramatically. In fact, what I saw when I rounded the corner struck me as sort of funny.  There were 4-5 people in the aisle. All were standing silently in front of the shelves, each with a different item in their hand and each was studying the product in their hands with the furrowed brow of concentration.  This made me giggle. I desperately wanted to blurt out, “Hey, you’re in the organic food aisle for goodness sake!  Isn’t that enough for you? Isn’t the fact that you are shopping in the organic food aisle like a free pass from the nutrition gurus? No matter what it is you are studying so intently, it should be good for you, right?”  But I didn’t dare say anything. It was like being in a library with an overzealous librarian nearby. I neither spoke nor dared to make eye contact with these students of the organic.

This made me very curious. So I grabbed my organic sucanat and wandered down to the chip aisle. Just as I suspected. No one in the chip aisle was studying the ingredients. In fact, they didn’t even bother turning the bag over. It was like a little Mardi Gras going on down there! Happy, smiling people throwing crinkly bags of who knows what into their cart, high fiving each other, without a care in the world! Okay, well I didn’t actually see them high fiving each other but I’d like to think it could happen.

Two ends of the spectrum right here in Festival Foods. What to do…. What to do……

As usual, I controlled myself. I took my sucanat, ran over to the ice cream aisle, grabbed some maple nut ice cream and went on my merry way.

Keep on smiling!

'Tis the Season for Christmas Decorations

The photo below is from the Menards flyer. For those of you that don't live in the Midwest, Menards is a home improvement store, similar to Lowes or Home Depot. In my humble opinion, they have the best holiday decorations of any place around. 

Anyway, this particular ad really cracked me up. Take a good look. 

Joseph looks calm and serene.

Now take a closer look at Mary.

With her wide-eyed expression and her hands crossed up over her chest she looks completely startled like she finally took a good look in that manger and is saying, “OMG! Whaaat?  This isn’t even my child! The nurses must have mixed him up with some other baby in the stable. What will I do? Joseph, open your eyes and look! I asked you to watch him for 10 minutes!  10 minutes while I carted a bucket of snow down to the communal fire to melt it into fresh water.  And I come back and I find you sleeping and a different baby lying in our manger!! I knew I shouldn’t have come with you on this vacation.  I mean really Joseph … Bethlehem in the middle of winter? With me - 9 months pregnant? I told you to call ahead and get a room but oh no. Don’t listen to logic. You insisted we just play it by ear, without the boring drag of room reservations and security deposits. I should have told you NO from the get go. But I didn’t. I was too caught up in the whole “miracle” hoopla. Well I will tell you this, Joseph P. Carpenter. I am not amused. You get out there right now and you find my Baby Jesus!”

Okay, well at least that’s what pops into my mind when I look at it!!

Keep on smiling!

ADDENDUM:

And now for the male point of view.

From my perspective, Joseph is sitting there with his eyes closed praying...."God/son, will you please make this woman shut up.  I have been walking for days to give her this vacation while she sat on that donkey and complained.  Never a thank you, or a do you need to stop and let me rub your back and feet.  Nothing, just nag, nag, nag, complain, complain, complain.  Please let that star fall on my head.  I just need a little sleep."

Thank you male acquaintance for sharing YOUR sense of humor!!

And as always, keep on smiling!