A Trip to the Dollar Store
We needed one thing...We left with a lot more.
Today’s very uninteresting story1 is about a trip to the Dollar Store. I know, I’ve written about this in the past - but I have news - kind of.
You see, I went to pick her up at lunch time after her last day at her craft morning at our local craft place because she’s on February break and we had to do something with her - there’s only so much gaming one can do.
While she was crafting and making ice cream with chocolate and sprinkles, I was at home in my man cave on my computer realizing that boy, my monitor shakes when I type and my cheap standing desk is living up to it’s reputation.
So I asked google? How to make a monitor not wobble. It came back with a lot of answers that required wall mounting or wires or welding and all those options were not really worth it.
One thing I saw was to try and jam a door jamb inbetween the back of the desk and the wall. I went downstairs and rummaged around and found a door jamb and what do you know? It works! Less wobble.
For no wobble, I would need another door jamb. No problem, we can swing by on the way home. This should take seconds - Buy what I want, and leave.
I forgot that the child was with me and this was going to take much longer because she had to “look at all the things”. The front door display was half-priced Valentine’s day offers and of course, the next holiday: Easter.
“Ooooooo”, she exclaimed as she went to grab an over sized plastic egg from the display. I reminder her we look with our eyes and not our hands and she was okay with that. She doesn’t really want to get the stuff, but boy does she love to browse.
We managed to get to the stationary section with all the crayons and pencils and markers and the like.
She’s bigger now, so I had no qualms leaving her in the crayon aisle for a minute while I went one aisle over and picked up the thing I actually needed. (I actually ended up with two things, so this problem is probably genetic)
But you guys, I left her alone in the aisle to browse. This is kind of a big deal. 2
I know times have changed but we used to get pretty much left for dead in the toy aisle when I was a kid back in the day, so I didn’t feel to bad about having her out of my eyesight for a few minutes.
This doesn’t mean she was out of earshot. I had exactly zero seconds before I was back in the crayon aisle answering to “Hey Dad, look at this!” and back I went to look at all the interesting things in the crayon aisle.
We left the crayon aisle without crayons. I offered, and she replied: Nyeah, I have enough crayons”. She did toss a very glittery pencil case in the basket as well as a crayon sharpener and a crayon storage box and she was very excited with these organizational items - so whatever.
We almost, almost made it to the checkout but she eyed the K-Pop Demon Hunter posters so we had to look and comment on each one. Again, we didn’t need to buy them but we needed to know they were there.
It’s fun for her to browse and sure there’s lots of crap at the dollar store but it killed a good 45 minutes on a rainy day in February and that’s worth the price of a very glittery pencil case with matching sharpener.
Now she had very sharp and organized crayons and I have a monitor that doesn’t wobble.
We both came out of the dollar store with a win today. And only about nine dollars over budget.
Doing our best to stimulate the economy,
TH and Co.
It’s also a dollar store in a sleepy town on a rainy Wednesday. It’s not like I left her alone at JFK or something.