Soooooo…I’ve needed to make a Costco run for a couple weeks now. We were out of sugar, salt, baking powder, peanut butter – pretty much all the basic building blocks of modern life.
Plus we were also dangerously low on coffee. Hel-LO, just found a little MOTIVATION…
But as usual, I kept finding it remarkably hard to actually get around to doing it.
It is, after all, not exactly a “quick” and/or “easy” trip for me. Everything is heavy, it always ends up taking a full two hours (usually more like three) no matter how carefully I plan the invasion shopping trip, and then I end up with a dangerously overloaded cart that creates a minor panic as I approach the checkout lines because, well, they see me rollin’, they hatin’…
Eventually it got to be so ridiculous that I once again tried to figure out how I could do the fax-n-pull thing. I mean, c’mon: They’re always telling me that I could and should just fax my order over, and they’ll pull it all for me, and then I just show up, pay and lug it all home. It would save a ludicrous amount of time and aggravation for me.
While I was clicking around looking for the instructions-which-do-not-exist for doing this, I stumbled on an interesting little bit of not-at-all-recent-news: Google Express offers delivery from…Costco.
…o rly…?
Now, I will admit right up front that I initially looked at the $4.99 charge for the delivery and balked out of pure habit.
…and then four more days went by and the coffee situation was looking a little desperate and the Denizens were whining about there being no sugar and I was using weird things in my coffee because, well, no sugar and I went fine.
It took me exactly sixteen minutes to put in my order.
And then two days later a large truck rumbled up, a burly gentleman wheeled five enormous boxes and two large bags up to the door, tipped his hat and roared off again.
It took me about an hour to get enough time between meetings to nick out to the front door and haul the boxes into the house.
It took considerably less time for the neighbors to have noticed that basically my entire porch was barricaded by enormous boxes.
They were congregated across the street chatting, and then my front door opened and I started hefting the boxes – which were very heavy, I might add – into the house.
All chatting ceased.
They stood there and watched me wrestling the things into the house.
Clearly dying of curiosity.
But probably a little afraid to ask.
I waved cheerfully as I hefted the last big sack into the house, and they waved back…somewhat trepidatiously.
Most of them have shared this court with us for a looooooong time now. They have seen me stringing brightly-dyed skeins of yarn out to dry, watched an enormous greenhouse start to be built aaaaaand then not end up being finished, they have been victimized by my better years of gardening (“someone is at the door” “OMG, don’t open it, it’s the crazy zucchini-lady again!!!”), they witness the continual stream of children pouring in and out of Homer the Odyssey every day after school (because I appear to have gotten a second job as a free taxi service for every kid in the neighborhood), and so forth and so on.
They know I’m completely insane, in other words. Oh, but in a NICE way, hahahaha…hahaha…haha…ahem…
They daren’t ask what in the world I just had delivered.
…but I know they are just dying to ask…
