But first, can I say? The puppy is monster-sized now. Every time I stop by my parents’ house, Jasmine M. Puppy has gotten huger. At the start of February I already thought she was massive, if fluffy:
Monstrous, right? Can’t possibly get any bigger than that? Already the world’s largest ever puppy? Aha, but this is before she got groomed. I talked to my mother the day after Jasmine got groomed, and I asked her how the puppy looked, and she said tragically, “They groomed her like a poodle!” (Which is what she is.) And then my mother said, continuing tragic, “I feel like I took my sweet little innocent daughter and they made her look like a tart!”
Yes, tart. That was what she said. My mother used the word tart to describe the grooming done to our five-month-old puppy.
Notice that she does not look at all tarty. She just looks lanky and huge. That koala bear toy in the top right of the picture, the toy that is not quite as big as her legs, used to be as big as her whole self. She is still extremely adorable and when I see her I still lapse into baby talk and insist on snuddling the baby on my lap cause she’s a baby wid her puppy face and I loves her cause she got a lil puppy nose. Actually, for serious, with the new grooming job, her nose now looks comically large. Her eyes are not normally squinty, but this is the picture that best shows off the enormousness of her enormous puppy nose.
Can you tell I want to kidnap this puppy and keep her forever?
Anyway, this is why today was glorious. First? I noticed that nearly everything on my grocery list was toiletries, and instead of going to Horrible Wal-Mart in my car, I walked with my feet to the drugstore and bought my toiletries there. And then? I discovered that Home Depot carries the good contact paper, the kind that I use to cover my paperbacks, the kind that Horrible Wal-Mart has recently ceased carrying, and so I went to Home Depot and got four rolls of the good contact paper. FOUR. ROLLS. I will be able to cover so many paperbacks with this contact paper, thereby protecting the covers and keeping them all acid-free.
Then? As I was driving home from the library where I went after Home Depot because it’s sort of on the way home and I wanted to pick up Female Chauvinist Pigs? I got a call. My grandmother wanted to give me a TV. And then she gave me a TV with its digital converter thing, and y’all may not be aware of this, but it turns out that there can be these things called channels. Channels. That come to the television by magic on regular schedules. It’s crazy.
AND THEN–
Look, I know that this sounds like way too much good fortune for one day. Skipping Wal-Mart, and then getting loads of the good kind of contact paper, and then getting a free TV with a digital receiver thing, all in sunny 65-degree weather. But there’s more.
Then I went back to the massive book fair that there has been since Thursday. (I took Thursday off so I could buy books.) (I have been saving up money for this since December.) Usually, on the last day of the book sale, sometime in the afternoon, they put all the books on even more sale, and everything becomes half-price. So I picked up a bunch of books I wouldn’t have wanted if they weren’t half-price, and I carried them around waiting for the book sale people to announce the half-price thing was started. They didn’t announce it, and they didn’t announce it, and I asked book sale people about it, and they didn’t announce it and they said they might not do it.
After a lot of waiting, and using my wiles to convince the people at the collectible books table to let me store my enormous bag there while I went and looked for more books (I did this by saying “But I bought a collectible book the other day. I did! I spent an unreasonable percentage of my saved-up money on it! Please? Please? Please? Please? Please?”), I concluded they were never going to half-price the books. I sadly took all my books out of my enormous heavy bag and sorted them into piles of Books I Wanted Anyway and Books To Put Back. I cannot emphasize enough how sad I was about this. And no sooner (this is true) had I sorted the Books To Put Back into piles by what table they had to go back to, at that exact moment they half-priced everything.
Check it.
I got the most beautiful copy of Paradise Lost ever. It is all with the gold-tipped pages, and the William Blake illustrations. Its beauty is remarkable, and it was $30, which is, in case you are wondering, more than the cost of all the books on the left-hand pile put together. All the books in the left-hand pile put together cost $22.50. Truth. And do you see those two very pretty sets of the Chronicles of Narnia? Those are for my sisters. And how I got a better copy of The Charioteer than the one I currently have?
Now I’m sad that the day is over, because all the rest of the days of my whole life are going to be such an inevitable letdown. I shall go now and watch television channels while covering all my new books with the good kind of contact paper.