Monday 27 Feb 06

Florida weather is finally warming up. My mother works 4 hours today volunteering at a thrift shop for a hospice, so she drags me along and i go shopping at the stores in the area. At Big Lots i find, incredibly, another bottle of a nice shampoo that i bought here on my last trip 2 years ago. i left it behind when i went back home but mom & dad don't remember finishing it off and were getting weary of my constant worrying over where the bottle might be. Hey, call me Monk! Welcome to my world of obsessive-compulsive behavior! A poor abandoned bottle of shampoo bugs me! I mailed my computer down here, it should be in tomorrow...but i also mailed down here a 15 lb box of post-its and a 10 lb box of playing cards just so i could have some of the things i obsess over without having to carry them on the bus! (both boxes had a few other things in there, like my complete beatles cd collection, fun to play while reading their biography, and the box set of a tv show, Nowhere Man, and my digital camera).

I was looking for a 50th-birthday present for my sister, my mother was suggesting a bottle of wine, but i found a nice fired-clay pot with a half dozen little cacti in it at Kmart. i wanted to pay for it with travellers checks--remember travellers checks?--but the cashier was too new to know how to process them. she got a supervisor who told her to get my drivers licence and write it on the check...but unfortunately i had left my licence back at the house! the trainee cashier eventually used my mother's licence number and accepted the checks. i'm pretty sure her supervisor would have sent me away, even tho the checks were already made out to Kmart and countersigned, which i think would have ruined them even if i came back later with my i.d. i thanked the cashier for trusting me and she said, "i could tell you're honest, you're with your mother!" incidently, one of my travellers checks jammed the check-stamping machine, and the cashier had to reboot her cash register!

i finally got to visit with my sister for a family birthday party, with her parents, in-laws, only daughter still at home, and me. She had a celebration the previous weekend with her daughter, a "Girls Only Weekend," and then through this coming weekend she will be with some girlfriends as part of her husband's birthday present: he bought the girlfriends' plane tickets down here. so i really won't get to see much of Kris until next week. her birthday cake was the chocolatiest cake i ever had. i could not find any cake in it, it was all fudge and frosting! nobody could finish a piece! i like chocolate but it was too much even for me. Kris got Mother and Mother-in-law to take some home but we don't think anyone will eat any of it!