Life Lately

     Happy Halloween!

     Wait, that was yesterday.  Life's been like that lately . . . breezing by before I have a chance to recollect.  I wanted to have a new blog up before my favorite holiday.  Obviously, that didn't work out.

     The picture above is the pumpkin I carved from a stencil you could print free on-line.  Taking into account that I have absolutely no artistic still, I thought I did pretty good.  What I'm better at is decorating my yard ghoulishly to entertain the trick-or-treaters.

      Even that wasn't enough this year.  Besides the faux graveyard, besides the skeletons being projected dancing and prowling onto a screen in my darkened garage, besides the coffins lying occupied by scary dummies by my porch--besides all that, I dressed in a skeleton costume myself and sat quietly among the yard horrors.

       I wasn't trying to scare the little ones.  I'd see parents tugging on their little one's sleeve, telling them, "It's all pretend" as they viewed my macabre trappings.  But while the elders urged their progeny forward, they looked my way with an expression that said, "Don't scare my kid."  So I kept still.

      Then a large group of older youngsters approached, excitedly saying how much they enjoyed my Halloween decorations.  But one young girl couldn't keep her eye off me, not sure whether I was just another yard dummy or real.  A friend urged her to go closer to make sure.  So she approached, closer and closer.  Finally I had to move, so I flinched.

      That sent her fleeing towards the safety of the sidewalk, loudly alerting her friends that I was, indeed, real.  Panic ensued and the youngsters scattered like a frightened school of fish.  "I don't think all of them got candy," my wife handing out treats nearby deadpanned to me.  Hey.  Not my fault.

     Our grandsons had come over a couple days earlier, showing off their costumes to us.  We prepared their favorite spaghetti dinner for them;.  But I teased four-year-old Luke, saying he needed to eat his broccoli salad before he could enjoy his spaghetti.

      Very seriously, Luke informed me, "I can't eat broccoli."  His mother urged him to tell me why.  So Luke recounted, "I was at Keena's (his babysitter) and she gave me broccoli for lunch and I choked on it.  So, I can't have broccoli."  I guess it's either true or a good story.  Either way, he didn't eat broccoli with us.

     When we were shopping for this dinner at the local Wal-Mart, Wendy scanned the receipt for the  items we purchased.  Something did not seem right.  This Wal-Mart does not put individual price stickers on its grocery items so you have to rely on memory to determine whether you're being charged correctly.  Wendy swore that the six-pack of soft drinks she bought cost $3.50, not $3.98.

     She went back to the service desk to complain.  The service desk called for a price check.   A supervisor had to be consulted.  Finally, the store agreed.  They would give her 48 cents.  Not so fast though.  If there is a scanner error, which this was, shouldn't she by law get ten times the error?

     The clerk looked perturbed.  My wife hadn't asked to be reimbursed for a 'scanning error' so she wasn't given the penalty.  Wendy said she thought it should have been automatic, but she still wanted it nonetheless.  Another call to a supervisor.  More waiting.  More hoops to jump through.
 
     Big stores like Wal-Mart don't make it easy.  But when you get to be a senior, you don't make it easy on them either.  In the end, Wendy got the penalty and scored $4.80.  Boo-yeah, as I like to say.