Are You Afraid of Seinfeld?

It’s only been a day since I last posted, and already it’s time to gather around the campfire for another tale brimming with Y2K references.

Submitted for the approval of The Midnight Society, I call this story…

The Tale of the Celery Stalker

*tosses Coffeemate, aka midnight dust, in the fire*

My day began with a trip to the periodontist slash flaconer (…and not the other way around)’s office for an update on the hole in my otherwise dazzling smile. Dr. G-O and I have agreed that the implant seems to have firmed up over the past month, and we will give it two more months. At this point, what’s left of my dental work is purely aesthetic, and I’ve kind of gotten used to my current look: thankfully, I have enough chompers to chomp with.

Curiously, the film of frost on the shingles of the houses I passed on the way to this appointment evoked a desire to cozy up with a bowl of homemade soup. My dental situation last fall was dire enough to make pureed soup a dinnertime staple for the remainder of 2024. Although my meal options have broadened, I have good memories of most of the soups I made. Anyway, this year, I’m tough enough to deal with chunks of vegetables and pasta floating in liquid. I’d settled on this recipe for Minestrone soup. The author of this recipe claims it’s delicious, so it must be true.

I’d already had a bunch of the ingredients on hand, including just enough carrots pulled from the withering garden. I planned my shopping before the lunchtime swarm of high schoolers. To further avoid interacting with people, I took my stuff to the self-checkout.

And this is how I met my celery stalker.

As I was about to be done scanning my items, the woman manning the self-checkout zone confronted me over the three ribs of celery I’d just loaded into my backpack. Millennial wage earners operate on the principle that they’re not getting paid enough to give a shit. This woman, however, had what she probably believed to be integrity. She was bothered by my mis-coding of these three ribs of celery.

Suppose this sycophant thinks it’s worth her time and energy to reprimand me over celery, she’ll have to do so in an accessible way: in writing. There’s no way I’m putting effort into lip-reading this silliness.

Yeah, she went that far. Why wouldn’t she? Save On probably gave her a pin to commend her for 20 years of service, and she couldn’t tarnish that by letting some riffraff get away with using the wrong code for celery.

I’d already paid and packed my groceries when she returned with a note explaining that celery stalks had a different code. I’d pulled my ribs off a bunch and used the standard celery code, as it was priced by weight anyhow. I also split bananas into bunches: does this make me a radical?

“Maybe you ought to remove that stick of celery from your butt.”

“I’ll keep that in mind for next time,” I wrote, in hopes of appeasing her.

She expected me to get my card refunded for the three erroneously coded ribs of celery and repurchase them under the proper code so that Jim Pattison, noted Billionaire Goblin, doesn’t starve.

While I’d have liked her to explain how a rib of celery increases in value when it leaves the bunch, I decided to save my George Costanza-esque histrionics for my blog readers. Instead, I signed off with, “What a strange hill to die on,” and walked past her as she continued her meltdown, attracting the attention of nearby shoppers.

She was about to have a bad time with the teenagers who were about to flow in from Oak Bay High.

I messaged Alexa, giving her a rundown of my experience.

“Omg. 😳😳 How does she manage everyday life if a few stalks of celery trigger that reaction?”

Unbeknownst to Alexa, her following message read as if she’d been possessed by George Costanza:

“It’s all the SAME CELERY.”

On a lighter note, one of the things I bought and paid for accordingly was a can of Ocean Spray smooth cranberry jelly. I’d spent enough time thinking about it yesterday to pass up the dollar canned jelly deal.

I also baked a plum torte using plums plucked from the backyard trees. Not to discredit my baking skills, but this torte wasn’t as pretty as the one I made two years ago, so you get to see that photo instead:

If you enjoyed reading about my produce procuring problem, you might also like:

The Tale of The Mango Madwoman

I declare this meeting of the Midnight Society closed.