I’m a big fan of navy blue and tan. Anyone who saw this website’s old color scheme can testify to this. As can anyone who’s ever seen me.

Jeans aren’t really my thing, so, except in the summer when I wear khaki shorts, I almost always wear khaki slacks. Comfy. Good looking. Me like. And one of my favorite shirts has always been a navy polo, a perfect combination of my favorite color shirt (navy) and my favorite type of shirt (polo). Riveting? Yes.

In other news, Wal-Mart last year implemented a formal dress code in lieu of their old blue-vest format. Three guesses what the dress code entails. The first two don’t count.

Three out of the last four times I’ve gone to Wal-Mart (an activity I try to avoid, but moving from the Giant Truck Stop to The Oasis several weeks ago complicated things) I’ve found myself happening to wear my favorite combination. On one occasion I was just there to kill a few minutes before an appointment, so upon realization I was able to book it out of there (and boy did I walk fast). But the other times I had to find merchandise and stand in line, all the time hoping - praying - that no member of the Walton masses emerged to try to get me to help them.

I got lucky.

This seems to be a pattern with me, though. Twice in the last five months I’ve gone to Best Buy wearing a long sleeve dress shirt colored primary blue, giving me a variation on the store’s uniform that made me happy I was wearing a jacket that I could cinch tightly. I half expect to walk into a Circuit City two months from now and found I accidentally wore one of my red work shirts from there that I shunned even in my last eighteen months of employment there (black polos are your friend). Though that could be fun.

I’ve always been a magnet for those seeking assistance. Once in a K-Mart back in 2003 I was stopped by two different people in separate areas of the store asking for help even though I was wearing (yup) a navy polo; K-Mart’s color is bright red. Late last year I was stopped in the Wal-Mart electronics department, as well, where a very embarrassed lady apologized to no end for interrupting my shopping experience. Oddly enough, that day I wasn’t rocking the navy and tan, though I doubt very few people if quizzed could actually tell you what the Wal-Mart dress code really is. They just track down anyone young and apathetic, a thought which saddens me after re-reading the earlier sentences of this paragraph.

The guy was clearly obsessed with anime.

She patiently snipped his bowl cut, a style he should have left in his elementary school days. But, then again, that’s where he still was, obsessing about Pokemon and various other less popular fringe entertainment in a way that implied the entire store was hanging on his every expert word. It’s one thing to like a kid’s cartoon; nothing wrong with that. It’s another to sit in a Great Clips and preach – loudly – to an apathetic hairdresser about the crime of cutting down “700 Japanese episodes to 500.” She couldn’t care less how violent you claim the original version of the show is, and your description of a particular snake-like Pokemon being decapitated – and how one of your female friends keeps a picture of this to show people who make fun of her interest in the cartoon – did not help your case one bit.

All because the poor woman, in an unfortunate attempt to make conversation, quipped that thanks to her kids she never gets to watch much television other than Spongebob Squarepants.

It’s cute to ask the lower middle-aged, Hip-Looking-For-A-Mother stylist if she has the internet. ‘Cause not a lot of people do yet. But when she reacts in the affirmative, don’t expect her to remember the name of some random anime character that you want to dress up as when you go to sci-fi conventions. She already told you it would take a LOT of gel to spike up that horrid cut of yours. Don’t push it.

I’ll be the first to admit I’m a geek. A huge one. But this was just sad.

Overheard at Joe’s Pizza tonight:

Kid: Guess what I learned in class today!
Father: What?
Kid: Amisare Waswere.

(pause)

Father: Amazon Weather?
Kid: Nooooo, Amisare Waswere!

(pause)

Kid: Amisare Waswere!

The father’s still not getting it.

Kid: Am Is Are Was Were
Father: OOOOOOHH. Oh. Oh.
Kid: Mom! Amisare Waswere! A verb is when you, like, do something!
Mother: Like Amisare Waswere.
Kid: Yeah!

Party at the lake, and Peter’s got a new camera. Uh-oh.
(Clicking the picture make go big.)

[1] “Are you taking our picture? Is he taking our picture, too?”
[2,3] Little one hesitates. Big sister doesn’t.
[4] Eating sand.
[5] Baby blue eyes.

Who these people are

I’ve talked on here (in previous versions of the website, at least) about the amusement our small town newspaper, the Sparta News-Plaindealer, provides. Not that one expects perfection, or anything close to it, from a weekly rag hidden in a town of 4500 well served by two regional chain papers (one of which owns the Plaindealer,) but it’s rare to find such golden examples of irrelevance, particuarly in the columns highlighting news in the smaller communities.

From this week’s edition:

I saw my good friend [name omitted] at Gas Mart on Sunday on her way to church.

Congratulations.

I would tell you that it was the coldest day of the year, but that would not do the temperature justice. Besides, this is the Windy City, so the wind chill is far more important - and horrifyingly cold. The day started with negative temperatures at O’Hare, and while the afternoon sun did what it could to warm that so when we departed into the city after 4:00 PM, not even the heart and soul of our solar system can defeat the mighty force of the Chicago Winter.

At least it wasn’t snowing.

Germans like pickles at Christmas. I learned this in Daley Plaza, where the German Christkindlmarket was setup in tents so tiny and unheated that I think the German blood was hardly flowing. So many figurines; so many pickles. No penguins, though. One tent was slightly warmed: we took our food in there, as I found that a jumbo hot dog was just two hot dogs stuck on one bun. Fascinating, these Germans, with their brown mustard and those hot dogs that are like double hot dogs.

So cooooold.

We gathered under the clock at Marshall Field’s; State at Washington. That’s not an activity to reenact a year from now, since Federated, in its infinite retail wisdom, is stripping the Chicago landmark of its name; God forbid the Second City not have a Macy’s. That day it was still Field’s, though, and even in the horrid chill, as the winds whipped around the building and made everyone on the east side of State Street question their sanity, there was a large crowd admiring the Christmas decorations, particularly the window displays, decked out with an animated holiday story. Kids marveled at the moving puppets while their parents worked the camcorder with numb hands, watching for icicles dripping from the lens.

Inside there was WARM. WARM throughout the giant hall that greeted you upon your entrance from State. WARM in the elevator. WARM on the seventh floor where patrons dined on twenty-dollar hamburgers while the Sprinkle Fairy came around to make their hair sparkle, and warmth on the eighth floor where we gawked down at them from, claiming to admire the giant Field’s Christmas tree but in reality more concerned with that man’s toupee. And is that child in the pink pants dead?

The WARM made you happy. We (Emily and Author) just had to dance, briefly, because the WARM compelled us to, even if the lady at makeup counter next to us (who most certainly didn’t notice this time of year) would frown upon such activities. Buy some rouge already, or go back into the cold.

People apparently go ice skating in negative wind chill temperatures; another failure of our public school system, I suppose. Expectations were for small crowds on this rink along the west border of Millennium Park, just off of Lake Michigan, but the Windy City crowds were not discouraged by the chills. Emily’s bum ankle kept us off this death trap, so we watched the others, including the Indian Kristy Yamaguchi, who impressed us with her twirling skills as well as the ability to not fall on her own ass, something not shared by many of her ice mates. We held purses and skate bags as friends passed by, some with cameras held shaky on skates, other with guardrails they would not let go of. All of them cold. None of them with hot chocolate, as we possessed, our second cups of the night. Not nearly enough.

Chicago at night is magical. Just west of downtown, taking in the skyline is always majestic, but at night, walking from the CTA station over the Eisenhower, it was magnificent, all of the buildings screaming with light, some of them alit in Christmas red and green. The snow here, absent in uber-plowed downtown, reflected those colors, and renewed my love for this city. As fun as it is in the warmth of summer, it may be even better in the damn cold, granted that no more than five square inches of skin is showing at any time.

First posted two years ago, I resurrect for you my Letter to Future Day After Thanksgiving Shoppers. Note for my own protection that this was written not about the patrons of my current employer, but my former one, our competition. Our customers are angels!

An open letter to future Day After Thanksgiving shoppers (specifically, a loud but vocal minority of them):

Arriving five hours before the store opens does not assure that the product you want will be there to be purchased. The ad says “minimum six.” That means we may not have more than six. If you’re seventh in line, you may just be screwed. Deal with it. What you wanted was a piece of crap anyway. Come back to the department and we’ll show you something that doesn’t suck.

Arriving five hours after the store opens all but assures that the product you want will NOT be there to be purchased. Did you see those long lines that the news copters showed this morning while you brushed your teeth? Those people weren’t lined up for tickets for Supertramp. Ask me to “check in the back” one more time and I shall promptly introduce you to the back of my hand.

Please do not give me that look when I tell you the other offers we have to go with the cheap notebook you’re purchasing, particularly anti-virus protection. When you return three months from now to have us remove a virus because you weren’t smart enough to buy Norton to protect your sad, cheap computer from your Kazaa addiction, please remember that we warned you this would happen. Remember in August when everyone got the Blaster virus? That was actual news, not a made for TV movie. I know you have trouble telling the difference sometimes.

Yes, you do have to get in “that line” to check out. Yes, it is very long. Thank you, I went blind for a second and could not tell. Now, I know the concept of the day after Thanksgiving being a busy shopping day is foreign to you, and you did not expect there to be more than, oh, four or five people other than you in the store, but this is your problem, not mine. I have a brain.

I know the line is moving slow. Lines that snake through three aisles until it’s made it halfway to the back of the building tend not to move at lightning speed. This isn’t helped by you, my friend, who feel the need to wait until you are at the register to tell us that you’d like to use our financing even though you were informed earlier that it had to be taken care of elsewhere. And yes, we will have to call the bank to verify your payment; checks numbered “105″ are not usually considered reliable. Meanwhile, asking us to “open more registers” is kind of useless considering every register in the building is in use. Contrary to popular belief we do not possess magic invisible cash registers.

That you know of.

Also, managers do not have a magic powder that enables cash registers to work at double speed. Asking them to speed up a line will not result in people walking as if they were in “fast-forward” mode. Unless this manager is a magician, that is. This is rare.

Yes, you have to take a number to talk to a salesman. Wait, what am I saying? There were only ten people that came in before you. Let’s screw them over and grab people at random. To hell with the idea of “first come, first serve.” You’re loud and boorish, so of course we will help you first. Duh.

Two guys walking out of work this morning:

Guy on right: How can you call dibs? It’s a two player system!

Guy on left: Yeah, but…

Guy on right: And you have two controllers. And it’s a two player game.

Guy on left: But I have dibs.

Selling a laptop to a girl going off to college and her doting mother:

Me: What exactly will you be using it for?Girl: Pictures and music. And burning CD’s. Watching some DVD’s.

Mom: And schoolwork.

Girl: …maybe.