While it's still somewhat fresh in my mind...

In an effort to figure out when is the best time to shop at the Winco, I decided to do my grocery shopping after work tonight. And since I have decided that everybody but the Winco wants my money (well, the Winco wants my money, but not as much as everybody else), it's pretty much a quest I have to complete. Saturday and Sunday mornings there are pretty much all-Latin-all-the-time (not that there's anything wrong with that, I do enjoy hanging with mi gente) but sometimes the overabundance of kids is just too much for me.

So Friday night, after work. Dang it. Apparently this is when the crazies do their shopping (crazies gotta eat). Seriously, it was kind of scarey. You had Divorced Dad Patrol - this must be what they do on the weekends they can't spend at the bar: pick up their part-time kids and drag them all over the Winco. The kids are clearly not that fired up about spending time with pops, so consequently every single section except the Latin foods aisle was just a cacophony of screaming, unruly and decidedly unclean kids. Without a doubt the loudest time of the week to shop.

Not only were there the obviously child-support burdened, but seriously, every crazy person in Washington County had to be there tonight. They travel in packs. It's not terribly unusual to see a couple shopping for their groceries no matter what supermarket you are in, but this particular slice of the social structure clearly prefers to make an evening of it. Seeing only three on one cart was an oddity. It wasn't so much the physical deformity of it all, though that was the first give-away, it was more the crazy eyes. Crazy eyes looking at the soup labels. Crazy eyes fighting over onions. Crazy eyes looking in my cart. Looking at my hair. Looking in my normal eyes and making me look away. It got so that now and again I would spot a "normal" shopper and we'd both look at each other with the same kind of terror.

Of course I had the cart with the bad wheel, which isn't so bad when you push it at normal shopping speed, but I was so intent to get the hell away from all the crazy eyes that the banging from the bad wheel started to sound like gun fire, which, frankly, did not do anything to stave off the panic. I forgot milk, udon and cottage cheese, and I don't have to tell you I'm not that happy about it. They were also out of my good Cuban coffee, which never happens, and which means that I will have to make another grocery store run tomorrow somewhere.

Somewhere other than the Winco. I don't think I can handle it twice in one weekend.