hudebnik

A month and a half ago shalmestere and I attended a wedding in Massachusetts, which meant packing for a weekend away from home. So I grabbed some undies, socks, toilet kit, dress shoes, suit and tie and threw them into an overnight bag.

When we got to the hotel that night, it occurred to me I really ought to try on the suit, which I hadn't worn in years, and found that the pants didn't close around my belly. Really didn't close, even sucking in my gut. Fortunately, there were spare buttons sewn to the inside of the suit, so I decided to add a button two inches over from the one that normally anchors the front closure; with a jacket over it nobody would know it wasn't closed properly. But we didn't have sewing supplies with us, and the hotel front desk didn't either. So I whipped out my phone and looked in the immediate neighborhood for things that looked like drugstores (or even a sewing store, although I didn't think that was likely), and saw a Costco. I had never been to a Costco, and was under the mistaken impression that it was a chain drugstore, like Rite-Aid, CVS, or Walgreen's.

Anyway, we drove to Costco in the morning and walked in. Immediately I felt as though all my senses were under assault. The store was huge, the piles of stuff were huge, the individual boxes of stuff were huge, the crowds were huge, and there was almost no organization by category; the only way to find anything specific was to walk down every single aisle. We walked out an hour later with about $200 worth of things we hadn't known we needed, but no sewing kit. So we found an actual chain drugstore, bought a $2 sewing kit, returned to the hotel room, I moved the button, we went to the wedding, it's all good.

Except that now we had Costco membership cards. Once you've paid for a membership in something like that, you feel a certain obligation to use it. So yesterday, in the course of an expedition "out the island" (returning a kitchen appliance that was the wrong size, dropping some surplus clothes at a thrift store) we stopped at another Costco. And again I felt as though all my senses were under assault. We walked out with $500 worth of stuff, including three or four items I had known we needed and a whole lot of meat (which wouldn't have occurred to me, but it made shalmestere happy). We were unable to find a number of seemingly-basic things we wanted: Costco has enormous quantities of everything, but surprisingly little selection. And almost none of the meat fit into our already-stuffed kitchen freezer, so it's in the "cold zone" of the fridge; we'll have to use it up fairly quickly, so we have a protein-heavy week or two ahead of us. And we still need to go to a normal grocery store today.

We've been talking idly for a few years about putting a small trunk freezer in the basement. There's an obvious place to put one, but it requires (a) moving other stuff out of the way, and (b) having an electrician install a power plug there (which shouldn't be a big deal -- it's right under the circuit breaker box -- but there's no power outlet there now). So that project is under discussion again. Costco, of course, has trunk freezers, but only one model, and I really didn't want to buy one without doing steps (a) and (b) first, not to mention the usual Consumer Reports research before buying a home appliance.

Anyway, I think I'll take a pass on the next Costco expedition and leave it to shalmestere.

So Friday evening we flew to Roanoke, VA, the nearest airport to the farm where my brother mankoeponymous was getting married. The wedding had a "burning" theme: part Burning Man, part fire-dancers (which has been a good deal of my brother's social circle for the past ten years or more), and since shalmestere and I are old fuddy-duddies who have never been to Burning Man OR (intentionally) danced while carrying or wearing anything that was on fire, we were a little dubious. But everybody was very welcoming, and it was a good chance to see a bunch of my family: my mother, two aunts, an uncle, my step-sister, a step-nephew, my half-brother, and my father. My mother and father, I gather, were halfway through introductions before they recognized one another; I guess they hadn't seen one another since my wedding, exactly 22 years before.

The bride had been in a pep band in college, so a marching band playing Queen's "Crazy Little Thing Called Love" accompanied the bride and groom to the space where the ceremony was to take place. (I played pipe-and-tabor, while shalmestere played sopranino recorder; I don't think anybody heard either of us. There was some confusion over what key to play the piece in: my brother sent out sheet music, but it was band score in which all the instruments are in different transpositions. Anyway, it was very spirited and peppy.) The vows were largely about recognizing that both parties are fallible human beings, that it's better to argue fairly and constructively than to not argue at all, that the only certainty in life is that things won't go exactly according to plan, etc. etc. During dinner, about a dozen twenty-and-thirty-somethings testified, passionately, in alternation about how wonderful the bride and the groom are. After dinner, we bid farewell to a bunch of relatives, watched a slide show of alternating kiddie pictures of the bride and the groom, and returned to our hotel before it got dark enough for fire-dancing (see "old fuddy-duddies", above).

Between Saturday morning and Sunday morning, we got to drink some good milkshakes, eat some good barbecue and Southern biscuits-and-gravy, and visit the Roanoke city zoo, which is on top of the mountain in the middle of the city (nice views of the other mountains that surround the city on all sides). It's a small zoo, where one can see pretty much everything in an hour, so it fit nicely between brunch with my mother, step-sister, and step-nephew and our afternoon flight home.

A bizarre but enjoyable weekend.