Today, my husband and I did some grocery shopping. Not the garden variety “milk, eggs bread” shopping, mind you – but hard-core “stock up shopping.” I made a shopping list, gave my husband a (small) portion of it, and took a lengthier portion and started grabbing…and schlepping. He had the cart, so I went out to the farther reaches to grab stuff – and bring it back. All the while he was grabbing things from the first aisles of the store (since I know the layout of Aldi pretty well, I made up the shopping list according to the store layout as much as I could).

“Grabbing and schlepping” was not as easy as it sounds considering a few things – one, we’re still in “pandemic mode,” with masks, social distancing and directional arrows on the aisles. Add to that store employees sometimes blocking aisles you want to traverse with pallet jacks loaded with merchandise they’re stocking, which can cause you to take a long detour. Customers blocking the aisle can do the same thing (bloody lollygaggers)!

By the time he was nearly done picking up his shopping list items, our cart was already almost stuffed! We converged when we were in the farthest aisle, which contains frozen/dairy items, and we split up to grab different things. He found some frozen pizzas, I grabbed some frozen chicken patties, and I grabbed some hard seltzer…we looked over our lists and our overly stuffed cart, and we decided we were done. I’ve actually given some thought to trying to get a side hustle job as an Instacart shopper, though I wouldn’t want to use my own car to make deliveries (I would work in-store). It might be fun to shop with other people’s money! Vaccinations first, then…maybe! Raise that minimum wage to $15/an hour and yeah, baby!

I loaded up all of the items on the belt as fast as I could (my husband’s fingers were achy and arthritic). I felt like one of those old Kessel grocery store TV ads in reverse. For those of you who didn’t live in mid-Michigan during the 1980s and early 1990s, there was a chain of grocery stores called Kessel, which were owned by Al Kessel. He would periodically appear in TV ads and would throw various sale items into the shopping cart. My husband and I dream about one day going into a grocery store and doing that same thing – only with really, really inappropriate items – adult undergarments, hemorrhoid cream, condoms, women’s antifungal creams – and throwing them in the cart. Or throwing oversized items into the cart on top of eggs, bread, etc.

Maybe nobody viewing us doing this would get the joke, but that’s…OK!