When Beautiful Girl came along, I made The General do the grocery shopping, so his solution was to make best use of the world wide wonder and do our grocery shopping online. It is amazing. For €4, I can have someone else push a trolly, fill crates and have a nice man bring it to my door. I don't have to deal with wonky trollies, other people stopping suddenly in the middle of an aisle or label feed errors on weighing machines.
So, what was different about this afternoon? Well, since the General is off doing General-ly inspiring things today, and Beautiful Girl is sick of the sight of me, needs must, and off we went to Dunnes for a wander and some spuds. Won't I ever learn? I really hate shopping centres on Saturday afternoons, particularly when they are miserable, grey, liable to bucket down on you without a moment's notice, Saturday afternoons. *Sigh*.
The centre we went to is the nearest one with an underground car park (essential given the aforementioned weather) but it's pretty old, so there are no baby accoutrement friendly spaces that I could find. I ended up getting lucky and finding a space beside a pillar so we had an extra bit of space on that side, and no one had yet parked on the other. Small mercies. After unloading the wheels and manhandling the car seat out of the back and onto the wheels (a major victory in itself), off we went.
Those flat escalators are not the wonder I alway thought they were. Beautiful Girl tried to run me over more than once when I didn't have my full weight pushing her against the forces of gravity and wheels on a slope. In addition to dealing with a runaway buggy, some aul fella decided to tell me I was completely wrong to have a mini mobile in front of her to play with - apparently it was getting in her way! I wouldn't mind, but I had only put the bloody thing on the seat this afternoon to try to distract her in the car. So, helpful advice ignored, off I went in search of a basket, which were all for some reason at the far end of the store. I eventually found one with two functioning handles and traipsed off to find the potatoes. Thankfully I didn't have much to get because the arm was about to fall off me by the time I headed towards the checkout. A word of warning - if you ever see me in a shop, check which till I headed for, then go the one beside it. You can be sure that if I've only one person ahead of me buying only bread and milk, and there's a queue of 14 people with two trollies each, they will be finished before I will. The people in front of me always seem to pick up the only item in the store's history that doesn't have a working bar code and the price has to be made up by a committee of EU Commissioners. Seriously. But, at least I could put the arm-breaking basket on the conveyor belt, and Beautiful Girl seemed to forgive me for my horrible behaviour in putting her new toy on her seat, so we made faces at each other to pass the time.
When the world of the bar code and the till-operating-key-keeper was finally reset spinning on its axis, my 4 items sailed through the zapper and we were away again. I briefly attempted to have a look in a clothes shop, but the rails were so close together that even people without a buggy were finding it hard going so I abandoned my quest for clothes that don't have vomit on them. Again with the travelator but this time I was stopping the princess chariot running over perfect strangers as we gave gravity a hand by travelling in the same direction as she was going. People were very clever and gave my car a nice wide berth in the car park, so I was able to get her ladyship and all her trappings back in with relative ease, and I escaped the subterranian assault course without nobbling any pedestrians.
And as my parking ticket was spat out at me for the third time and I pressed the help button and listened to the disembodied monotone, I was very happy to remind myself that I will be doing my full shop tomorrow from the safety of my couch and a nice man will come to my door on Monday afternoon with a smile and enough food for the week.
Now the kettle's on and thank God one of my four items was a sticky bun...
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