off-target

Miz Susan and I make a thing out of Sunday mornings. Drink some coffee, eat a little breakfast, choke down our handfuls of prescription and over-the-counter drugs, check out the Sunday paper. And sometimes the Thursday, Friday and Saturday papers if the pace of the week has gotten a little too frenzied for us.

There's not much joy for me in the Sunday paper between late-October and early-March. I've fallen away from following football and hockey and never was much for basketball in the first place so the sports section doesn't hold much allure. Think about it, a quick check of high school boys' swimming results (to remind me of just how bad I was, even 40 years ago) and three sentences on Joe Crede's free agent deal with the Rockies don't chew up more than three or four minutes. The Sunday obits page has gotten gigantic but that doesn't take long either. Once I've confirmed that I'm not featured among the recently departed, there isn't much left but to scan the news sections to confirm what terrible shape the world, country, state and neighborhood are in with an occasional rowser from Michelle Bachmann. After that, it gets down to arm-wrestling with Susan over the advertising sections.

We use the grocery ads to plan out our dinner menus for the week. I'm partial to the Cub ads but Susan, even if she won't always admit it but usually does, hates the place. She'll come up with almost any excuse as to why I shouldn't go there. Like, "Oh, it's OK hon. I was gonna stop at the coop, Trader Joe's, Kowalski's, Widmer's and Baker's Square after school tomorrow anyway." Right. She even thinks that Target qualifies as a full-fledged grocery store and yesterday somehow sweet-talked me into going there instead of Cub. I think that it was the turkey breast that Target was advertising at 79¢ a pound (half of Cub's price) that she used as Exhibit A. Made sense to me.

Our trip to Target last weekend was a disaster. I had this horrid grim feeling almost the whole time I was there. It was as if I knew that a bunch of the other shoppers were serial killers and that they were all feeling the itch again. Nobody actually threatened to kill either of us but I repeatedly got cut off and run into and forced to do long detours to bypass aisles that looked more like cart storage areas than retail spaces, all of this so many times that I started to get the creepy paranoid feeling. To top it off, somebody made off with our cart full of 45 minutes worth of middle-American consumerism and Miz Susan's favorite winter gloves which had probably originally been bought at Target. We were so thrown off by that disaster that we couldn't reconstruct what we needed (yeah, our list was in the stolen cart, too) and ended up forgetting half the stuff we'd come to buy.

Shrugging off that recent defeat, I headed for Target with my list in hand and my mouth watering at the thought of 79¢ a pound turkey breast in the crockpot. I'd also been given an auxiliary to-do list, most of which centered around service issues for the Chevy Tahoe at Holiday. Which was mostly a ploy to get the car washed. Who in their right mind washes a car when it's 8º outside? But, what the hell, there are certain standards we need to make a pretence at maintaining and I love being inside the car when it's getting washed. I was deprived of so many things as a child.

Target pretty much overwhelms me whenever I go with a long list of must-haves. I've been reduced to tears of frustration and shame while looking fruitlessly for square cotton pads for makeup removal. This time I got most of what I needed without having to double back over the entire store more than four or five times. It was the two-pack of re-usable lunch totes that nearly did me in this trip. I asked like five different redshirts where they were and I actually got what turned out to be helpful advice but it took me about four passes through the bargain section back by the seasonals before I found the damn things. And when I got them home, I got chewed out for not buying them in patterns rather than in basic black and purple. Sigh.

Oh yeah, the turkey breast. They hadn't gotten their shipment in, something about their distributor being out. Distributor, schmischtributor. They own the distributor, for God's sake. I was told that the shipment was on a truck due for arrival later that night. Check back tomorrow. Which I did today from work. Still no turkey breast at 79¢ a pound. Sigh again. Walgreen's didn't have the special Anniversary Edition of Uno back in stock either, another of the hopeless grails that I've been assigned by this sadistic woman I live with.

You can probably guess where this is headed. After Miz Susan told me in no uncertain terms not to, I stopped tonight at Cub out in Brooklyn Park for their turkey breast. It was more expensive than Target's alleged turkey breast but at least it was in stock. And I wasn't about to miss out on hot turkey sandwiches out of the crockpot on Wednesday night.