Maelstrom

Began today with more cleaning. I washed the windows, vacuumed, and cleaned out the air conditioner. (Mom suggested my allergies may be at least partially caused by mold being spread by the air conditioner, which is in the window year-round. Besides, I hadn't cleaned the filter in a while, and though it wasn't that hot today, it was humid enough to still need it on.)

Work was fine for the first half of my shift. The weather was merely cloudy and humid when I rode to work, but by around 4:30, dark clouds had begun to gather. I didn't really see too much on the front end, but I heard thunder and lightning, and I did see torrential rain - crazy, heavy, cats-and-dogs rain - out the front windows and front lobby windows. The rain was so heavy, water actually seeped up through the tiles in aisles 1, 2, 3, and the front exit! All had to be blocked off in order to clean the puddles, which didn't make for happy customers.

(The lights did blink once, but thank goodness we only lost the computer for a few seconds. It could have been a lot worse. There was a leak in the ceiling in the hall between the back storage area and the back lounge room. I had to walk the bike very carefully around that! There was a huge puddle in the storage area, too.)

I went out to Fat Jack's Barbecue in the Audubon Commons Mall to celebrate the end of my long work week. (Tomorrow will be my first day off since last Wednesday!) They're in the midst of reconfiguring their menu, probably trying to add more for dieters. I decided to try one of those "light side" items, a Fat Pocket Sandwich...i.e, shredded barbecue chicken and vegetables in a pita with your choice of dressing. Alas, the filling didn't stay in the pita nearly as well as it did in a large sandwich bun. After a couple of minutes, I finally dumped the rest of the filling in my wax-paper-covered basket, topped it with the honey dijon dressing that came on the side, and called it a Pulled Chicken Salad. (The rest of the dressing was used as dipping sauce for the pita.)

There were still some puddles left when I went back to the Acme to do this week's grocery shopping. It was worth dodging the mess. There's a lot of great sales this week. I picked up a big box of Acme Toasted Oats (our generic Cheerios) for $.99, two packs of flat, soft rubber hair bands for $1.29 each, a can of tuna for $.88, Acme and Dannon Light Yogurt for $.50 each, and Acme whipped topping for $1.00. The whipped topping is for a pudding pie I'm making for my cousin's birthday party tomorrow.

A woman and her two daughters mentioned traffic on the Black Horse Pike was really bad when I was at Fat Jack's, but I didn't believe them until I headed home...and saw it for myself. The line of cars headed for the shore stretched to the Collingswood exit, probably not helped by the bad weather and all the mess it likely caused. I was sooo happy the side of the road I was on, the one going towards Philadelphia and Camden, was a little busy but nothing nearly as bad as that.

(Other than a downed tree limb next to the house that I dragged to the backyard, everything seems to be fine at my apartment as well. It doesn't look like we lost electricity or anything like that.)

And after all the fussing over my schedule last week, I barely got any hours this week, just 19 and nothing later than 7. That's fine. In fact, that's kind of what I was expecting last week. I know we don't get good hours in the mid and late summer. Getting all those hours at once is great but really overwhelming (and it didn't help that I got it last Friday, which was mostly just bad to begin with).