New Dish Towels

I kept putting “buy dish towels” on the grocery shopping list.

A pile of leaves under a tree.

I stop to take a picture because
I have stepped on huge leaves
and I want someone else to witness
the size of these leaves.
Note the yellow one, midline on the left.

But going to the grocery store is not the best place to buy large dish towels.

So buy new dish towels kept getting moved from list to list, but never being purchased.

Rebecca doesn’t like shopping.

She really doesn’t like shopping.

She would rather mark papers than go shopping.

Going shopping is the only place I see her get a bit grumpy and that grumpiness falls upon her the minute she gets in the car and turns on the ignition key.

I had not only been asking her to buy new dish towels. I wanted a table where I could put up my computer and never have to move it. Steve has fixed up her office with a new table and screens and it is a place I would love to work, but I am third in line. The office belongs to Rebecca. Alex likes to use it when she is gone. That puts me third in line for that space.

So Rebecca and I went to the thrift store, not wanting to spend that much money since I am not going to be in Victoria for long. The amazing dark wood dining room table with beautiful lathed legs that was there was too heavy and too long for her (just right for me), so she headed to Canadian Tire for a utility table that can be taken down when I leave. Well, every house shoujld have acollapsible utility table. Or at least could have one, though ours didn’t.

I take my glove off of my hand and 
put it beside the yellow leaf that is mid-line
in the picture above.
I really want someone to see
how large the leaves are in Victoria.

Now Rebecca and I popped back in the car and headed into a Canadian Tire, she knowing that the trip would not be totally useless, since Steve needed a small wrench to fix the tap on the kitchen sink which finally became so broken it had to be propped up by a sponge. That can happen in a house where adults, some of them less gentle than others, reach to get at the water. So we bought the wrenches for Steve, two of them since we didn’t know if he needed a four inch or a six inch wrench. The wrenches were ½ price so it was like buying only one and can a man go wrong with too many tools?

Then we stopped by the isle with the utility table which was chosen more for its colour than for its size. On a roll, we headed to the laundry basket isle, for yes, either the handles or the sides of most of hers are broken. While we were on that isle, she also popped two clothes hampers into the cart for the boys, hoping the hampers will potentially become a home for clothes that are now often on the floor.

She has known she needed a medium sized blue recycling bin for pop cans and glass jars but has just never been in the vicinity where she could buy one. By this time we were pushing two carts, not one through Canadian Tire. No wonder shopping makes her grumpy. On the isle where we should have been able to pick up a George Forman grill there were none that would do. She needs one and her grill like that goes into use at least once a day, maybe more. So we failed on that point.

Small joys, I know. At least for me, since I was getting new dish towels. But maybe not such a small joy if I think about the fact that I need one or two of those close by me or someone else needs one when they go to tidy the kitchen, which is done about after every meal.

No trip ends at the till where the credit card is tapped. At least our time with these new items didn’t end there. We had to go to you tube to figure out how to open the black 5’ x 3’ utility table. What did people do before they could go to goggle to find out instructions on how to do things. Oh I know. Maybe the instructions used to come with the table.

And thus endeth Rebecca’s bi-annual shopping trip. And it was she, not me, who signalled that she was grumpy. Really grumpy.

Arta