Disappointing Orange

You know the feeling when you peel an orange and smell that citrusy goodness and take a bite of the first slice, ready for sweet juiciness, and to your disappointment you spit out or labor to swallow a dry, tasteless, almost wooly mouthful of what should have been a great experience? (Sorry about the long sentence; I'm still reading Dickens. He must be having some effect.)

My sister coined her own phrase a few years ago of experiencing "a disappointing orange" moment. Ben and I still use the phrase.

I so was looking forward to our Martin Luther King Day as a family yesterday. I started out in the right spirit of things, reading about Frederick Douglass online. Ben planned to study in the basement until midafternoon and then we'd go out to our local very awesome children's museum together.

While Seth took an early afternoon nap and Ben finished studying, I went to get groceries. Just a quick trip. Well what do I do but first thing lose my grocery list somewhere in the store. I tried to look for it--to no avail. So I tried to remember everything and chaotically went back and forth through the store as I remembered items I needed.

Finally I get to the checkout. I load up my groceries, pay, and grab the milk last thing and put it on the bottom rack. I swing by Customer Service to activate the iTunes card I bought Ben for Christmas. (I bought it at self-checkout and it didn't get scanned correctly for it to work I guess.) They tell me I need to pay for it again since I don't have the receipt. Grr. Never mind, I'll look for the receipt at home I guess.

Walk allllll the way to the back of the huge parking lot, put my groceries in the trunk, ready to go, just grab the milk. Uh, the milk? Where the heck is the milk?! I check all the bags I just put in the car. No luck. I retrace my tracks in the parking lot to see if it fell off the bottom of the cart. Nothing. "Well, we don't have any milk at home, so I might as well get some while I'm here."

So I walk allllll the way to the back of the store. Retracing my steps to see if it fell off in the store. Again nothing. How do you just lose a gallon of milk? Did I mention this was a "super" Walmart? Real super. The atmosphere there makes even typically pleasant things aggravating to me. Grab the milk. Stand in line again behind several people to buy the milk, again. So much for the quick trip.

Get home and put groceries away. Try to make some decisions about dinner and writing an important email before we leave for the museum. Now it's 4. If the museum would have been opened until 6pm like I thought, things would have worked out. But I check online just to make sure--5.

So we jump in the car (taking great care to buckle Seth in of course) and head over. A bit of construction, a few red lights, but we were going to make it in time for some fun at least. And then we got stopped by an accident up ahead. Five minutes we sat waiting to move and realized after some cars in front of us turned around that traffic was completely blocked by a tow truck and police car. Back tracking and finding another way to the museum would have taken us until about 5pm to get there. So we turned around and went home.

So that was our holiday together. Not awful: we had money to pay for groceries (even the extra milk), we weren't the ones in the car accident. Plenty to be grateful for. Just one of those disappointing oranges.

Epilogue:

Luckily, Ben made some really great homemade vegetable soup with pesto when we got home. And I read Martin Luther King's letter from Birmingham Jail outloud to him. That put us right in perspective.