Camel in the Parking Lot

[Martin Hash]

It’s Christmas, which I love, but it does come with the anxiety that comes from buying gifts. Number 1, never know what to get my wife, Gwynne. She never wears jewelry, she’s got plenty of clothes, and she definitely doesn’t want anything like a new vacuum. For my gifts, I just buy myself what I want and let her wrap it for me. For example, earlier this week we went to Home Depot to buy gift channellocks, and a battery-powered vacuum for me, then today we went to Harbor Freight to buy more tools, the real cheap kind that I’m used to, channellocks at a tenth the price. I was planning to take the Home Depot channellocks back.

Gwynne wanted to go to Ross Dress For Less. I don’t usually go there but Gwynne loves it because you never know what they’re going to have; it’s a weird store. In that theme, while we were parking we had to wait for the camel to move to find a space. You heard me right, there was a camel in the parking lot. Surprisingly, nobody was paying any attention to it; I haven’t been shopping for a while so maybe I’m out of the loop?

Camel.jpg

Inside Ross, we picked up whatever caught our fancy: an umbrella shaped like a pink wine bottle, an old-fashioned can opener, a bottle of pickled palm hearts and a can of dolomites. Mind you, these were intended to be Christmas gifts to our kids; like I said, Christmas shopping is difficult. Unfortunately, while we were distracted looking at some bric-a-brac, someone stole our shopping cart from right behind us. Why? Granted, he did get the last palm hearts and dolomites, but we would have given them to someone else if they really needed them. We looked for the culprit but they were sneaky enough to elude us, which is amazing because the store wasn’t that large, and the pink umbrella would have stood out.

Gwynne said the line was too long anyway but I hadn’t gotten her anything else for Christmas unless I gave her the extra channellocks, so I got another cart and retraced our steps. It was Ross so we couldn’t replace what we’d bought because there’s usually only one of things, but God must have wanted our first cart to get stolen because on the second pass through the store we found a 14-inch snowball for throwing at people for our 2-year old granddaughter, Mimosa toppers for my daughter, and nose hair trimmers for me. I decided to give the channellocks to my son so I still don’t have a present for Gwynne.

Chritmas Gifts.jpg