It's Friday Night and I'm Allright!

Yippee - my three day weekend is here!

I've a full agenda - like - yard work and house work.  I haven't vacuumed since I removed the house from the market in February.  Things are decidedly dusty and it's time to at least do a token cleaning.  Sigh.  I tell you, the only way this house is ever going to go on the market again is when I'm carried out feet first!  I had it up to my forehead with constant cleaning and trying to keep a perfect house.  Yeah - just me and no staff, no husband or kids to help out.  Rush home from work and spend a couple of hours vacuuming and dusting and trying to figure out what to do with the day's mail (no clutter allowed, can't leave it on a countertop or, Goddess forbid, on the kitchen table!)

The weather has been good the past five days or so - no AC needed!  But it's now getting progressively hotter and more humid and by Sunday will be back to tropical dew points and in the high 80's.  That means - yep, you guessed it - the threat of severe weather on Monday, our "official" July 4th holiday.  LOL!  So many barbecues are going to be ruined - mark my words.  So that means I've got to hustle my butt tomorrow and cut the front AND the back, which is extra long once again because I never did cut it last week.  I'm getting decidedly lazy, that's not a good thing.

In my defense, I have been spending countless hours online doing genealogical research.  I seem to be uniquely suited to sniffing out the smallest details that leads to clues about a person's ancestors, or some additional fact of interest (only to a person doing such work), sometimes after real gaffes!  Well, enough of that.  I'm uber-busy with it and I've got notebooks all over the messy kitchen table filled with my scribblings and print-outs and some pretty damn good family trees going.

Knowing I did not want to trek to the Pick 'n Save tomorrow (grass-cutting day), I stopped tonight after work and with my few small groceries I decided for the first time to use the recently-installed auto-check out thing.  What is nice about it is that you usually don't have to wait in line and there is a cashier on duty to help out and also process beer, wine and alcohol purchases (must show ID, no exceptions, even if you are grey-haired, wrinkled and in a wheelchair). 

So, I push my cart to one of the thingies and decide to get my boxed wine out of the way first - an experiment, as it were.  I punch the start button and this mechanical female voice comes on and says SCAN FIRST ITEM.

So I scan the wine box and the machine beeps and stops.  The on-duty clerk comes over and I show her my id, she waves a card in front of the machine and punches in something and voila, the wine is accepted.  I pick it up and put it in a bag, then I put the bag into my cart.

The machine says PUT THE ITEM ON THE PAD.  I say I already did.  The machine says PUT THE ITEM ON THE PAD.  I say I already did, look see? It's already been on the pad and it's already in a bag from the pad and now put into my cart. The machine says PUT THE ITEM ON THE PAD.  I tell the machine to do something nasty to itself.  The machine says YOU ARE A BAD PERSON.  PUT THE ITEM ON THE PAD.  I once again tell the machine what to do - I won't go into details.  I wave the upc code of my next purchase at the machine glass eyes.  It refuses to accept  it. 

By now I've got steam coming out of my ears and I'm ready to tear the machine apart with my bare hands.  Such mechanical monsters must not be allowed to live!  We'll all end up like Arnold Schwarzenegger in "Terminator."  Egoddess, what a thought!   The young clerk comes back over and asks me sweetly if I'm having a problem?  I say yes, your machine is full of BLEEP.  She waves another card in front of the machine and it is magically restored to civility.

The rest of the time I'm testing the machine to see if it is actually recording my purchases and their prices correctly.  It does.  I finish  'ringing up' my purchases and swipe my debit card, get my receipt.  The machine says HAVE A NICE DAY.  I say BLEEP YOU, MACHINE.  I swear to you as I was leaving the machine made a rasberries sound at me.

Just wait until next time, machine. I'm bringing Mace, and will be fully prepared to use it.