Saturday afternoon a bug must have crawled up my ass because I decided it was okay to venture forth to Wal-Mart, the place where people walk three-abreast down tiny aisles with the sole purpose of pissing me off.
My original purpose for going there was to find some sort of container to hold the cat food. Since The Great Rat Hunt of 2006 I haven’t really felt comfortable with leaving the bag in the bottom cabinets and the upper cabinets are just too small. So that left me buying the medium sized bags of food and leaving them out on the counter, which quite naturally hurts my supreme decorating sense. I’ve just never been able to reconcile the shiny blue bag of cat nuggets with pretty Cuban pictures and apple green cabinets.
Not to mention the fact that now that the cat food sits within reachable distance of The Demonspawn, I spend a lot of my time shooing them off the countertops. Don’t ask me why it’s even tempting because it’s not like their special red bowls ever fall below the half-full line. Maybe they need the exercise or something. Or maybe they’re just throwback cats and I got the dank end of the kitty gene pool. Whatever the reason, it’s damn annoying to come home to a brand new bag of cat food that they’ve managed to claw, pull and swat of the counter. And they don’t just leave it there, either. They spend days in cat time chewing a hole in the bottom because again, IT’S NOT LIKE THERE’S READILY AVAILABLE FOOD IN A BOWL LESS THAN THREE FEET AWAY.
I started off in the pet aisle because I was absolutely positive that someone besides me had experienced this problem. I mean, they make automatic litter scoopers and electronically enhanced, free-flowing water bowls. Surely someone, somewhere has animals that find it amusing to attack their food bags.
No? Okay, then. Moving on to the next aisle.
A couple of rows over I found some of those glass food containers that people like to leave out on their countertops, usually filled with festive colored pasta or decorative rice. Those things always bother me because at what point do you need to change out the contents? Is it just one of those things you learn upon becoming a mother? Change out yellow and red pasta every two years! Clean rice container every three!
I thought about getting the biggest size, a five gallon monstrosity with a stainless steel lid, but decided I wasn’t really that keen on displaying multicolored brown nuggets so prominently in my kitchen. I mean, I love my cats and all but I don’t LURV my cats.
One aisle over had shelves full of all kinds of Rubbermaid containers and storage units, most of them of the design that lets you slide them under your bed for easy-breezy storage. Only my bed is like eighteen feet off the ground and it’s not the type for a bed skirt, meaning my see-through Rubbermaid storage container would be very see-able upon walking down the hallway. Again, not really the look I was going for. Plus, I’m lazy enough as it is so imagine having to pull some fugly plastic box from underneath my bed, open it (my arms, they are so tired), get a scoop of cat food (is it over yet??), walk to the kitchen (I’ll just stop here and take a nap) and finally drop it in the bowl. And then I’d have to repeat the process because there are two cats, two cats who must have separate bowls for separate eating.
At the end of that row I decided if I didn’t find what I needed in the next five minutes I was definitely headed home. I was out in public on a Saturday and I’d already passed three people (two men, one woman) who apparently found deodorant on the Optional list of personal hygiene. So it was with much elation that I made it to my last and final row, confronted with all sorts of containers that would most definitely suit my purpose.
Trash cans! Trash cans, everywhere! In every shape and size and finish! Small metal and red, oval plastic and yellow, flip top, step top, no top, hurah! So I purchased the medium oval brushed-metal step top, complete with removable black bucket (with a handle!) for easy cleaning.
On my way out of the store I was so pleased with myself for finding a solution to the food storage issue that I swung by the pet aisle again. Now that I had a nice sealed and relatively unmoveable container I figured I could again start purchasing the more cost efficient Giant Bags o Cat Nuggets, the kind that most people assume are dog food they’re so big. But apparently you haven’t met Llama, The Fat One, the cat who can eat through an eight pound bag of cat food in like two weeks. So I grabbed the chicken-n-rice formula and placed it in the buggy, merrily making my way to the checkout lines.
Where I stood for twenty minutes behind some crazy bleach-blond hair lady with five children, all girls, who’d apparently taken to mommy’s Sun-in over the summer because ALL OF THEM had three inch roots. Not so terrible, maybe, except the oldest was maybe nine and the youngest was pushing four, all with beautiful waist-length hair that their dear sweet mummy had irrevocably screwed up.
Once Roots and her seventeen kids had checked out (all five girls got some kind of white stuffed puppy in a pink carrier, very Paris Hilton-esque) I moved forward and handed the checker my boxed trash can and my giant bag of food. She scanned the trash can and handed it back to me, where I placed it right back in my buggy. Then the bag of cat food. Same process. Scan, hand back to customer. Only something happened on the transfer and the bag kind of caught on the plastic bag dispenser.
No worries, I think. I lift the bag up and over the edge of the buggy and drop it in the bottom, WHERE IT EXPLODES.
Not just a little leak. Not just a few brown nuggets on the floor. No sir. That bag ripped from top to bottom, side to side, spilling all sixteen pounds of multi colored chicken-n-rice flavored crunchy kibbles ALL OVER THE WHITE LINOLEUM FLOOR. There wasn’t anything I could to do to stop it, or even slow it down. So I just stood there, hand on my debit card, watching it bounce over sixteen square feet.
When it was done I just looked at the checker and told her she’d probably need to take that item off my ticket.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
My oh my. It must have been a festive Wal-mart checkout aisle, with colorful cat food confetti raining everywhere.
I have been telling you for years that walmart is the devil. they know that you have been spending more on cat by buying the smaller bags and therefore visiting you local walmart more often and they saw that you were doing something about it and THEY SAID NO! bastards. I told you so.
carl: i should have been em-bare-assed but instead I was just wicked annoyed. p.s. quite enjoyed the new pics of the Cute Bitch
lilleeee: i agree with you. but they are so cheeeeeeap. and i am so pooooooor. or i will be if i move to that new apartment :)
Post a Comment