J. Palmer

I’ve been in retail way too long. I read a really short, nothing of an article which spoke about someone who bought a bunch of seeds from a Dollar Tree for pennies; later, the grateful customer brought the store manager some vegetables that were grown from those seeds. It’s a nice little story, I guess, however my unfortunate first impression was that the manager broke the rules.

“Pennied” items aren’t supposed to be sold, but destroyed and tossed out, as the company has written those items off as a loss, and the penny sale value assigned to the items are a placeholder in the books, not an actual price. Further, I’m not sure it’s necessarily true in this case–though it might be–but various items, such as seed packets, are not inventory owned by the store or company, but items that are sold on consignment; it is very possible that the manager technically cost the company additional money by selling the seeds–assuming they were rang through the register by the UPC and not manually keyed as something untraceable.

Do I really care? No. Really, my feelings on the situation are, great for the customer, and awesome to hear the seeds were used rather than tossed in the trash. I just hate that my mind went to the stupid business side of things–and that’s the point behind me writing about it.

I dunno.

I hate retail.

I had a dream the other night that I wanted to make notes of, but too much time has passed, so many of the details are now fuzzy. It was an odd wannabe apocalyptic sort of thing, I guess. Something about a monstrous, gusty and tornadic storm. For whatever reason I was near my parents house–but their previous residence, which they were still occupying. I roll down the main driveway in some sort of open vehicle (like an old Jeep with the top removed?) and park under the tree at the corner of their drive and the main driveway. I hear their voices, though I never see them–Dad’s somewhere in the garage monitoring radio traffic, and mom’s somewhere in the house watching the weather on TV. I wander around the yard, making sure things are tied down or placed up against the house or down by the fence. At some point, as the gusts get CNN or Weather Channel reporter in a hurricane strong, I take note of the indigo colored sky turning near black and the rate of pea-hail increasing; it’s at this time I announce that I should go home, as I’d better go look after Ashlee and the children. Mom yells back in reply that they had arrived there a few minutes prior, and then yells at Rhiannon to get back in the house; I look over to the driveway as I walk back up the hill on the left side of the house, and see Rhiannon running back to the house. Right after I make my way through the threshold of the backdoor, a woman in a nightgown calls for me outside. I turn ’round and head back out. The woman leads me to the parking area down the drive, and tells me she’s not sure if the storm is really over or just beginning, and that some odd things are happening and have happened. I push past her as we pass (my? dad’s?) truck and look to the left and take notice of one of the oddities as she calls it out as an example. She says that a lot of the animals are somehow living, yet dead, and apparently cannibalistic, and that it seems to be a fear response. I see a creature bovine in size, though I cannot identify it, void of skin, biting at a the flank of a smaller version of it, while another small one bites at the flank of the larger one. I turn my look away and keep walking down the drive toward the barn while that woman’s voice fades into the distance. And then, I woke up.

Hello, blank screen. I don’t know what words I want to populate you with. Perhaps there aren’t any words that’ll do. Maybe this morning is one where you’re just meant to be blank. Maybe. But I doubt it. You’re likely meant to be filled with a great number of words, so many that you scroll for what seems to be infinity. The problem is that I simply cannot think of anything worth wasting your time to display, as my words today simply don’t feel important enough.

I can’t remember whether it was Junior or Senior year English–I think it might’ve been Junior; but I once had a teacher that had us keep a journal for class, and our task was to write in that journal for the first five minutes of class. Some entries were prompted–as you might guess–while others were more of a “free-write”. Knowing that there are the occasions where one may face a block and not be able to come up with a topic on their own, we were instructed to do something similar to what I led this entry off with–just something somewhat random and perhaps nonsensical to get the creative writing juices flowing. I kind of wish I still had that journal, thinking back on it now, as I wonder how many pages look like this, and I wonder what sorts of odd things I wrote in order to pass the time.

I also wonder how many thoughts were interrupted by running out of time.

I wonder whether any of it would have been worth looking back on.

I wonder whether any of this will be worth looking back on, one day.

I wonder whether any of it matters.

I wonder why I even bother.

Well, I did have some time to do some journaling this morning, but I got distracted looking at an auction. Now, I’ve only enough time to write these few sentences before I leave. I really wish I had more time on my hands.

Oh, well.

Didn’t sleep all that well last night, apparently.

Took the big kid back to college, yesterday.

Had a chat with the youngest big kid the evening before, which didn’t really resolve anything, I don’t believe; it did, however, lead to an unfortunate disagreement in viewpoints between Ashlee and I. Yay. I’m an asshole.

Did some thrifting, both yesterday and the day prior. picked up a couple of cool little things. Unfortunately, a couple of the things we picked up are a couple more things that will require me to find time at some point to repair them. Yay. Additional projects.

The yard needs mowed and I still need to repair the fence. I can’t remember if I mentioned it, but the storms we had the other day took down a section of fence. The vines gathered enough water weight that they pulled it down; so, no, the dog got loose from being able to walk across the fence, not jumping it.

As usual, I have no desire to go to work, because there’s an ever growing list of things that I need to attend to here at home. Frankly, I’d rather skip work just to be lazy, because the thoughts of all the crap I need to do is kind of starting to stress me. That would be incredibly counter-intuitive, though.

Part way kicking my ass over not picking up an old mobile CB I saw for fifteen bucks when we were thrifting; it was a small 40 channel Midland, and had a matching speaker. I decided not to get it because there wasn’t a mic, and I didn’t want to waste additional time and money hunting down a replacement microphone. I probably should’ve picked it up, anyway.

I really can’t think of any other thoughts I want to mention right now, and time is running short, so I guess that’s it for this post.