(re-run)
It started out as a regular Wednesday with my online Zumba class. Hurray! Today the link worked, unlike Monday. After class I walked Pepper through the neighborhood. Everything was wet from the early morning rain, lots of fall color left, and the sky was bright. The clouds were dissipating.
After the walk, I played ball with the other dog while I drank my second cup of fake coffee and picked up soggy dog poop. My wool scarf got in the way a couple of times when I bent over to scoop, so I took it off. I ate half a banana, gave Daisy her Prozac in a slice of it, gave Pepper her share, and then headed to my favorite thrift store to deliver much-needed paper bags and obviously, to shop.
But first, I pulled the mail out of my locked mailbox and discovered a royalty check for almost $1000. How did that not make my day better? It’s always fun to get money in the mail. At Wells Fargo, as I was depositing the check, an old man at the ATM shouted to his wife in the car, “I pushed the wrong button! I wanted $300 but got $3000 instead.”
“You’re kidding!” the wife shouted back.
“Now I have to go inside and deposit it back!” the man shouted.
All I could think of was that an old man wouldn’t want to be shouting anything like that at an ATM in a number of towns in the Bay Area a month before Christmas and how lucky we were to live in this one.
At the thrift store, I spent a whopping $20 on a variety of stuff, then drove home to take two of my adult children to lunch. We went to Togo’s and on the way, we saw a Latina woman selling flowers on a street corner and then saw an angry Republican selling Fuck Biden t-shirts at the bus stop. Okay, so my town isn’t perfect. How in the world could a guy set up shop at a bus stop and not be breaking the law? I’d seen Latino men hassled by police officers for selling strawberries on the same corner as the flower woman. Was no one going to report the angry Republican and his obscene shirts?
We ate inside at Togo’s since the outdoor tables were stored inside (because of the rain). I ate my leftover half sandwich from the day before while the kids ordered new sandwiches. I drank my thermos of cocoa, putting my hands around the ceramic cup I’d brought from home. It doesn’t take much to keep me happy, something warm to drink and relatives to converse with before they return to the East Coast to find a job.
Then we walked the Lafayette Reservoir, which wasn’t crowded at all.
But the biggest thrill of the day was this. I’d had sticker residue on my new bathtub for six months. The sitcker had said not to used Comet or anything scratchy on my new tub. Every time I cleaned the tub, I couldn’t get the residue off with Soft Scrub. Today I realized that the Neutrogena body oil I’d bought on sale at Costco, the one that I didn’t like because the pump dripped and the oil smelled like a the stuff they use to clean public bathrooms, could maybe double as sticker remover. I pumped some oil onto the edge of the bathtub and let it run down the side over the sticker residue. By golly, it worked!
I prefer my Palmer’s oil, even though it costs way more and comes in a much smaller container. It has a pleasant smell to it, and it sprays nicely, no drips.
FIRST DATE, WORST DATE EVER! 