Quicksand

While we're all collectively waiting for me to put the latest pictures of Digby into an online photo album, let me tell you how my simple task for the night--picking up a few groceries--became much more complicated and time-consuming than it needed to be.

I am a wildly inefficient grocery-shopper. I start with the good intentions of grabbing everything quickly and checking out that eventually deteriorate into a desperate scramble to find what I need before the store closes. To begin with, I find that supermarkets are not organized in the most intuitive fashion. Maybe this is because my mind functions differently than most store managers or perhaps it's because of my irrepressible engineering instincts. Either way, about halfway through every trip, I find myself longing for the ability to google the store inventory for the availability and location of its contents. I realize that this is sad. Since I have no idea where anything is, I end up searching for things as they appear on the list provided by my wife, which leaves my frozen goods decidedly less frozen by the time I leave. On top of this, I am shopping for a pregnant wife with very specific desires and for myself, with little time and energy for cooking during the week. Needless to say, I escaped relatively unscathed, although exhausted. As I bagged my own groceries (unheard of where I come from) with tears silently running down my cheeks, the cashier doubled my coupons and wished me a good night.

However, I would like to leave you on a more cheerful note. Although there are scientific studies supporting and condemning nearly everything these days (I am reminded of Kevin Guilfoile's Morning News article), I happen to like the results of this study and I will raise a glass to it. Cheers.