It’s been a strange day. All the dire predictions, starting last Friday, of terrible storms and tornado warnings, have now passed, and we have glorious green foliage everywhere against brilliant blue skies, but without receiving a drop of rain. But the downside is that the temperature has now dropped from the eighties last week to the forties last night. And the furnace picked this morning to quit working. The whole system is getting a checkup on Friday; I just have to figure out a way to keep warm until then.  My solution for today was to go to the grocery, where I could hover around the deli department’s freshly roasted chicken warming displays. That was cozy but I began to look like a chicken predator.The rest of the grocery was strange, too. I needed a tablespoon of lemon juice for a recipe. The produce department only had bags of 24 lemons, no individual ones. So I headed clear across the story to bottled juice, where I found an empty shelf labeled lemon juice. All they had left were half-gallon sized bottles. Remember, I only needed one tablespoon. That recipe went back into the box. I scored a triumph by remembering both sour cream and a cucumber to make German cucumber salad. I’ve been thinking about making that for weeks but alternated between forgetting the sour cream or forgetting the cucumber. Now feeling proud, I rewarded myself by purchasing a single cream stick topped with heaping swirls of chocolate fudge (69 cents worth of indulgence) in the bakery. It was destined to be tonight’s dessert. Except — when I got home, I found it at the bottom of a bag under a pile of canned goods. Cream stick will have to be licked off the paper it was once wrapped in. And to top off the day, I replenished my supply of kitty litter. The bag boy asked if I wanted each of the packages in its own separate plastic bag. “Of course not,” I said. “Not unless you plan on punching holes in the paper containers.” Karma! When I unloaded the car, I started with kitty litter and carried the first two bags to the back of the garage. One bag slipped as I lowered them to the floor. It hit the concrete with a bang and the whole bag split open top to bottom. I now have 10 pounds of litter to sweep up.  Maybe I'll go back to bed until summer arrives. |
