The Dollar Store, and Lifting Up Out of Squalor

I was on my way home from Installment #1 of "Lift Ourselves Out of Squalor" (LOOS), in which I will be helping a friend, who in turn will be helping me, in the project of gaining some semblance of order and lack of squalor in our houses and grounds.  (Doesn't "grounds" sound fancy?)  I'm the sort of person who works around things that normal people would fix.  Like, if a lightbulb goes out, I stop using that area and move toward a different light like a moth.  If a sink starts dripping, I turn it off at the base, and stop using that sink.  And so on.  (The only thing I have going for me is that I'm not very aquisitive; I'm not a hoarder.  Oh, and I don't have a million cats.  That's two things, if we're counting.)  I like to call this being flexible, but it's leading toward squalor, and I'm super excited to have a buddy in lifting ourselves up out of this condition.  But that's not the point.

The point is that I went into a Dollar Store yesterday, which is the weirdest idea for a store ever; I was slow to grasp it.  Nothing is labeled with a price, of course, because you don't need that.  So I kept carrying things up to the cashier, asking "How much is this?"  And the answer was the same every time.  "A dollar."  What was kind of sad, now that I think about it, is that she didn't stop to explain:  every single thing is a dollar, you can stop asking, fer crissakes.  She just kept answering until I figured it out on my own.

It is the oddest organizing principle for a store.  It doesn't have a normal theme, like food, building materials, or clothing, but around a price.  Are people sitting at home, thinking, sheesh, I'm all out of things that are a dollar.  Where could I go? Oh, I know!

I was so amazed by the whole thing that I wandered around with a basket and threw stuff in it.  (After verifying the price with the clerk.)  It was almost like that coma I fell into in Target one day 10 years ago.  You know the one I mean.

What I bought:

• A small square plastic box with 100 toothpicks in it.  I think this is a good deal, if you need toothpicks.  Which I don't, but still.  If I had mini-marshmallows, I could build a model of the periodic table.  
• Six foil cake pans.  They came in groups of two, for guess how much?  Yes.  I think this is a terrible deal, but I need them to make special stuff for my bees, so money is no object.  I spent $3 on these 6 pans.
• Two rolls of parchment paper.  I love parchment paper for all the obvious reasons, and would have bought it even if it were $3, because that's how I roll.

I've been thinking about the dollar store ever since I left, and realized I need to go back, because I was so distracted by the price that I didn't really notice who else was shopping there or what they were buying. 

Duplicate universes and so on.

Things I don't know about.  In most cases, the internet could explain.

1.  Duplicate bridge.  I could look it up.  But first, let's think about it.  Does everyone, at different tables get the same hand?  I get why that would be an interesting way to compare skills, like playing golf on the same course or something (to throw in something else I know nothing about), but my questions are more practical.  Do you create decks that are in the same order, and then deal?  Or does someone set it all up ahead?  Okay, I'm going in for answers.   

Real field work!  In a pretty place!

The answer:  you deal, and then after the game, hand your intact hand to the next table. Now that's brilliant, and so much easier than my vision of some lady sorting decks of cards to match each other.  Duplicate bridge, it turns out, is a low stakes version of the twins separated at birth experiement.  (The twins turn out the same, I think.  It's mostly nature.  But you knew that.)

2.  How to animate well enough to make a short film of the refugee situation out of chanterelles and paper boats.  Do you ever wake up with a vision of something, and you get super excited, and it takes a while for you to remember that you don't have any of the necessary skills? I hate that.  I just tried to make a paper boat, and even that was challenging.  But I've got all winter...

3.  The Berenstain Bears Conspiracy.  Here's the deal:  Everyone seems to remember that it was called "The Berenstein Bears", but it's really "Berenstain."  This is used as one more piece of evidence that parallel universii exist.  

The symptoms of parallel universes include ghosts, deja vu, dreams, and people waking up one day to find things are just ever-so-slightly off. (Doesn't that happen every day?  Or is that just me again?)  Back in the old universe, where we grew up, it was spelled and pronounced "stein", but in this new world, it's "stain".  When did it change? Or, did something supernatural happen?!! (Insert scary music.)

I have the same concern about the color "chartreuse", which I thought (as did everyone else I knew, come on, fess up) was in the magenta family until about a week ago.  Ok, maybe 10 years ago, but still, well into adulthood.  It's lime green in this universe.  

Do you like the quarter, for scale?  That's a
whole lot of muskox.

Things that are making me happy today:
1.  This poem, sent to me by my daughter.  
2. This book, which is charming stories about insects written by my new obsession, Jean Henri Fabre.  Painter, writer, scientist, he loved  bugs and mushrooms.
3.  A gorgeous pile of qiviat, which is the soft inner hair of a musk-ox that was hand-collected in the
arctic by Ms. Pasta, and given to me this week.  I'm pretty sure it's one of the softest things I've touched, and spinning it is sort of like being on drugs.
4.  that exciting new find in South Africa, Homo naledi.  Oh to be a young, skinny, brilliant, non-claustrophobic paleontologist. 

And this just in!