Yesterday afternoon, we went to the Home Depot in Tramonto.

I needed a few more spotlights to highlight some of the interesting walls Ethel is building; she wanted some new flowerpots for the front porch.

This is how Ethel's SUV looked when we got home:

                   

The back seats are laying down, so the cargo area is completely open. The car is filled to the gills right up to the front seat, where I had my left elbow resting on the 5 gallon base of that queen palm you see hanging out the back, and my feet were on top of a paving tile.

We had to get a Home Depot guy to help us figure out how to get all of this stuff into the car; it took a long time, and much mulch was spilled in the name of efficient transportation configuration.

I don't know why this trip turned out like this; I don't know how two flowerpots and three 20 watt spotlights turned into a major moving event. I suspect that it has something to do with a complete lack of proportion; it might also have something to do with Ethel's inability to make a shopping list.

When one's wife does not make a shopping list, then there are three possible results from the shopping trip:

1) She gets exactly what she needed - nothing more, and nothing less (if you believe this one, you ain't married).
2) She forgets everything that she was supposed to buy for her husband; if this is a drive to the hardware store, then she forgets the tools (but does see the most darling little nicknacks and doodads). If it's the grocery store, then she forgets what she was supposed to buy for supper that night (meaning that he gets to take her to dinner, or eat something brown, breaded and broiled on a cookie sheet).
3) She goes crazy and buys everything that she needs, used to need, and might need in the future - especially those nickdads and doonacks.

(One good way to insure option 3 is to be broke at the time).

I'm grateful, though, that Ethel is not a clotheshorse. When you buy a plant, then you've at least bought something that has a market value. There is actually something THERE, and its value doesn't have too much to do with whether or not it makes you look fat. So there's not as much of a sense of having "wasted money" when one buys things at a hardware store.

Having never been married to a clothes horse (N.B. - it's possible that a woman who is that concerned with appearances would never have married me : ) I have no hard data to go on, but I have seen a Progressive Insurance ad in which a woman finds out that she's going to be saving three or four hundred dollars, and she says (hold it....wait....wait for it....):

"That's a pair of shoes".

There's a field of study called "quantum physics", and one set of notions in quantum physics involves the idea of parallel universes - universes much like ours, but that differ in some way along some set of probabilities or natural laws. I'm not smart enough to study quantum physics (I have to look up how to spell it) but I'll bet that there does not exist, in any alternate dimension or set of dimensions, a universe in which Ethel would come home and say "Honey! I got this great pair of shoes, and they only cost four hundred dollars!"

(N.B. - I'm not smart enough to understand economics, either, but I think I understand enough about the whole "supply and demand" thing to have some glimmer of an idea that, if they keep printing dollars just to give 'em by the truckload to folks who lost their last hundred billion, at some point the dollars themselves won't be worth very much, in which case it is entirely possible that a reasonable pair of shoes might cost four hundred dollars. But, in THAT event, we won't have the four hundred dollars anyway, so it's a moot point).

Anyway, if Ethel goes to the store and brings home four hundred dollars worth of plants, then at least they've got a year guarantee, unlike clothes. And she didn't spend it on cell phone overuse, buying "lunch for the girls", or a drunken weekend in Vegas. So I don't really have any beef with that.

But what did bother me was the assumption, after we got all of that home, that somehow I was responsible for "the mess in her car" : )