Housefrau Fieldtrip: The Grocery Store!

Hateful, hateful places.

For a good long while, the LP had taken over grocery-shopping duties. I was prone to grocery-store mishaps: buying twenty pounds of potatoes, coming home with a cartful of hair products and no food, abandoning the half-filled cart in the middle of the store and crying as I drove home.

But now that I’m frauing the house, I figure it’s back on my list of duties.

Today was my third grocery-store outing since I started this whole not-being-a-productive-member-of-society thing. The first two went surprisingly well. I bought actual food, I managed not to yell at anyone, and I even remembered by Sooper! card. (When did all grocery stores start requiring a membership card to get ten cents off a head of lettuce? What are they doing with that information? There’s a sinister plot afoot, I tells ya.) In fact, the only problem I ran into was getting to the register and finding that my total bill for a week’s worth of groceries for two people was several times more than the monthly electric bill. I tend not to look at prices in the grocery store—they’re groceries, for chrissake; how much could they possibly cost? A fucking lot, apparently.

Today’s fieldtrip to the ingredient stores started at Vitamin Cottage—like Whole Foods except way smaller, way cheaper, and way crappier. It was fairly successful, although the people there are nutballs. One stocker yelled “Hi!” to me after I had passed him and was halfway down the aisle. Another worker was actually wearing a tie-dye t-shirt; didn’t anyone teach him not to embody stereotypes? And the other shoppers were exceedingly weird. Parking their carts in the middle of the aisles and then wandering off—not down the aisle, mind you, but to entirely different parts of the store. One woman followed behind me most of the time I was there. Each aisle I stopped in, poof, there she’d be, stopping her cart behind me and staring (really, really, staring) and the shelves. She never put anything in her cart.

Anyway, I got my cart to the check out, shamefacedly requested plastic bags instead of having canvas ones with me, and proceeded to dig through my purse for my car keys. Not there. More digging, more nothing. Uh-oh.

I got my groceries out to the car, and there I found my keys: dangling from the ignition. Lucky for me, I had also left all my windows down! The fact that no one hopped in and drove off while I was in the store for an hour is a testament either to the quality of my neighborhood or the crappiness of my car.

At any rate, it was now time to go to the regular grocery store to get all the things the health food store was either out of or doesn’t carry. Like apples.

Would you like to know what’s wrong with everything in the entire world, especially grocery stores in white-trash suburbs in the middle of the afternoon? Old people. And children. And old people who have children with them.

At least no one spoke to me or looked at me or followed me around the aisles, and after an agonizing search for oat groats and being laughed at by the produce guys for not knowing the difference between lime juice and key lime juice, I got out of there.

So that was my big housefrau day. I bought groceries. If you include the time I spent making a list, preparing my hair and face for public consumption, shopping, and putting things away, I think it took me right at about four hours. In fact, I got home just in time to start dinner.

I have no idea what to cook. Maybe we’ll order out tonight.