Cloud9Shopper

How easily new clothes get holes in them. I’m wearing a pajama set for the first time, I’ve had it on for not even an hour, and there’s already a hole in the pants! I paid $40 for this set; there is nothing I’ve been doing that would have already made the pants rip. I can’t sew either, and I’m not going to throw out brand new clothes. I’m thinking of getting fabric glue but clothes that are expensive and that new should not already have holes.

It only took me one shift today to learn that working retail during the holiday season is a special type to hell thanks to the following customers at the grocery store today: -The lady who bought over $400 worth of groceries and then decided not to buy at least 12 other things she originally had in her cart, including four gallons of milk and roughly eight jars of pasta sauce, and probably some other things I’m forgetting. Also, the juice from the turkey she was debating getting promptly leaked on my counter by the register. (She decided to get it.) Thankfully a courtesy clerk was nearby and she was able to help me make all the returns. The customer then decided she needed to pay with three different cards. -The lady who told me my conveyor belt was “gross” because I had had so much time to clean it (/s) with back to back to back customers. -Also, all the people who are picky about the bills they want for cash back. I have what I have, Carol; take it or go to the courtesy desk for change. None of these things ruined my shift or anything but why do all the worst people come out of the woodwork for the holiday? Maybe I should have put my notice in a couple weeks ago after all. 🤣 I was just overwhelmed at the time and impulse reacted. My manager didn’t seem to care that I retracted it; if she was mad she got over it in about four seconds.

I go to my mom’s for dinner almost every Sunday. She doesn’t force me or anything, and I’m not married and don’t have any kids of my own to keep me occupied. To be honest, I’d rather hang out with just my mom and stepdad than ever again have to go to a family gathering on my dad’s side of the family. Thanksgiving is usually 20 people, which includes people I don’t care about like my dad’s cousin, the cousin’s daughter’s boyfriend, and some very distant relative I barely remember or know but have to somehow pretend I’m happy to see before I see them again in several months or a year from now. Weekly Sunday dinner with a smaller group of family I’m actually interested in is way better for me.

I need to get rid of a few of my subscriptions. Hulu and Disney+ costs me $18/month now with subscription plus tax, but I still use Hulu the most so I am probably going to just cancel the Disney+ portion and keep Hulu. I barely use Peacock and Prime Video either. Actually, Prime hasn’t been impressing me on the shopping end lately…a lot of stuff is not two day shipping really anymore and seems to have the “we’ll email you when we have a delivery date” tag. That’s not acceptable for a $130 annual subscription with fast shipping a part of the deal. I’m only holding on to it because I bought stuff on Prime Video and don’t want to lose access to it.

Joan also dumped Mark (I think? or Keith) prior to letting Guy go, so she did the same thing twice to other men as Pascal did to her once! Crazy. I can see how Chock bothers people but he doesn’t seem all that overall terrible to me and Joan never seemed to indicate even non-verbally that he was being aggressive or trying too hard. She’s always been comfortable with him and said how safe she feels etc. I’m not saying they’ll be together in 10 or 15 years but they seem content for now.

Not gonna lie, one of my favorite things about S15 is that even though the first half was kinda “meh,” it was nice after Episode 3 when the show wasn’t all about Abby anymore and we could focus on other characters and the return of the old guard. I don’t love that she turned up again in Neela’s last episode but at least it was only for a minute or two and she didn’t eat the scenery.

I hate the episode where Abby gets kidnapped so I skipped it and went to the one right after. I was confused by the timeline how she goes for her shift, leaves early because she thinks she came back too soon, and then by nighttime she’s back at the hospital waiting for a patient transfer seemingly doing better and the kidnapping and whatever trauma she has is never mentioned again. Also a choice: bringing back the personal injury lawyer who worked with Mark in S4 to settle his civil suit and pretended to be a doctor. And in the next episode, Carter’s incompetent med student Henry also from S4 comes back. Did the writers just run out of ideas and plot for “most obscure characters we can find to make a reappearance”? Too bad they didn’t come up with a storyline to bring someone more interesting (like Hicks or Randi or any side character with some history to the show who is well-liked) but hey it’s S11 so I guess this is who we get. The plot about the patient satisfaction scores is giving me job-related anxiety…all this stuff about empathy and survey scores and using soft skills was my past everyday life trying to meet expectations. But now I get to teach others how to do those things. 🤣

It reminded me of Amy Poehler’s Hillary Clinton impression on SNL during the 2012 campaign. I hated the way Joan dumped Guy, but was not at all surprised she ended up with Chock. It was obvious from the time they went on the one-on-one date to Disney, and the editing made them seem like a couple who had been together for weeks already.

People who come up to a register to ring out their orders and then are not ready to pay. I had a mother and son in my grocery line last night who not only decided to come up with $500 worth of groceries 10 minutes before close but then took almost 20 minutes to find their card! Thus holding up me, the cashier, two courtesy clerks who had to do the money audit, and the closing store manager. Does this lady act embarrassed or apologize profusely for what she’s doing? Oh of course not. When the manager finally told her she has to figure out what she’s doing, she continued to protest “oh I just had the card!” and “It took me so long to shop for all of this!” like she didn’t have all day to come in for her two carts worth of groceries. (She and her son also had a young child with them at nearly 9 pm and did a whole “where’s the card? I gave it to you; check your pockets!”) I will say that most of the time when my customers realize they forgot their card, they come back in pretty quick and ready to pay. (Mostly because they left the card in the car or they only live less than five minutes away.) And I probably would have been more forgiving had she only bought three or four things. But the audacity to load up on $500 worth of groceries and not be immediately ready to pay while holding up a closing staff…this is the kind of thing that makes me wish “the customer is always right” would just die. She also then decided after finding her card, that instead of apologizing profusely and immediately paying and leaving, that she needed lighters and proceeded to want to argue to pay cash after registers had already been counted. I would have told her no at that point. Sorry, store is closed. Time to go home. The dollar store is open till 10 or you can come back for lighters tomorrow…

I really only liked Luka in seasons 6 and 7. S8 is where he starts to go downhill and then S9 and on I just can’t stand him. What stands out most to me now about Cleo/Michael Michele is how she seems to only have one facial expression. Even when she tried to portray Cleo as flirty and sexy with Benton, she sounded bored. I honestly couldn’t believe they got married at some point between S8 and the end of the series. I feel like they’d have a dead bedroom, for those of you who get the Reddit reference. S6 is my favorite season, but I’d put S7 and S8 in beginning of the end territory. I’m slowly working my way through some of S11 (and skipping a lot of it) and the Christmas episode, outside of Chen’s story with her father, is completely uninteresting and dull. There’s just no camaraderie or upbeat moments like there was in Christmas episodes of earlier seasons. Also…I wasn’t that sad that Chen left and we never heard about her again. I was either neutral to her or annoyed with her. I really only liked her during her adoption storyline in S7. I’m also irrationally annoyed to see Neela working at the hospital again. She really didn’t deserve an internship after what she pulled. Elizabeth’s last episode still upsets me that she wasn’t written off better. The writers owed her more than what she got, but her speech to Carter about how she feels like she has nothing at County anymore with Mark and all her friends gone/moved on is poignant. I remember reading another take (this was well over a year ago) about how it summed up how much the show had changed, and that seems about right. Every once in a while I think about starting back at the pilot and watching all the episodes again for a fresh take, but ultimately I feel no desire to do so.

I can’t blame Pascal for bailing after Joan said how much he reminds her of her dead husband. Who would want that following them around in a new relationship? I didn’t see the first season of The Golden Bachelor but I like Nancy more than Joan and think she would have been a good choice for this season.

I really do want to enjoy cooking! And for the things I’ve mastered, or crockpot recipes, I do fine. I also like to bake and tend not to fail at that as much. I just love seeing photos of good food on Pinterest and wish I could be one of those food bloggers LOL. (It will likely never happen, which I’ve accepted; doesn’t mean I don’t still fantasize about it.) I like looking at kitchen gadgets, all of that. Just that for some reason, my efforts tend to come out not so great. The comments of a food blog will have everyone raving about how great a recipe is, they’ll put it in their rotation, even their cousin’s neighbor loved it, but I just don’t get that hype. I haven’t thought about watching a recipe video instead but maybe that would help.

I feel so dumb right now. I was trying a new recipe tonight and completely read it wrong. I saw “3 cups of rice” but by the time I REREAD and saw “three cups of cooked rice” it was too late. I was wondering why I had an Everest mountain full of rice when I went to put it in the pan with the other ingredients. (I was trying chicken fried rice.) And of course the meal completely tastes like mush and is likely going to go to waste. I have been living on my own for five years and I still can’t cook and occasionally botch recipes because I didn’t read enough or had a hard time with the instructions. (I have some favorite meals I have down pat but tend to struggle with anything new so I guess saying “I can’t cook” is a semi exaggeration.) A couple weeks ago I messed up a pasta and couldn’t blend the ingredients of a sauce and it was all chunky and basically inedible. I also got a multicooker last month and am having a hard time using it for pasta and rice because I’m not measuring right and the cooker never seems to stop, just cooking forever because I mismeasured. It is so beyond frustrating. I like to have leftovers for lunch….and well…thank goodness I’m stocked up on soup because I keep having to put things in the garbage.

The fact that as an adult I’m still having to do the “group Halloween costume” routine at work. Why can I not just pick my own costume? Why do we all have to match or dress in the same theme? I’m almost 40 years old; I don’t want to go digging through picked over shelves for a costume because my team decided on a theme two days before Halloween. I worked at a company a few years ago that also did a team costume. Why are some adults still so obsessed with matching? I participate because I want to have good social cred at work but I don’t enjoy having to buy something I will promptly shove into the back of my closet never to be seen again. I see this with other things too, like wedding parties with coordinated “getting ready outfits” and groups that go on cruises wearing matching t shirts so everyone knows they are on board for Sally’s 60th birthday party. I mean to each their own, but I don’t get the point of this whole childish “matching outfits” thing when everyone I work with is well into their 30s or 40s. Didn’t you all outgrow this when you were six? Just let us decide whether or not we want to dress up as individuals and move on.

The editing also clearly seems to be showing that Chock is the winner. The way she ran up to him in Kansas, how relieved and happy she was when he came back to the mansion after his mom died, how she feels safe with him…at this point I’ll be surprised if she picks Guy or Pascal, or nobody. I wonder how the whole “are your feelings fading?” conversation from the preview will go.