Easter, Anger, Canoe

First off: Easter was fun. Delia got a big basket of mostly toys from the very wise Easter Bunny who knew that she would get roughly forty-seven thousand pounds of candy from other sources. Sure enough, at egg hunts on Saturday (Grandma's) and Sunday (church), she got her fill of magic beans (her far superior name for otherwise ordinary jelly beans), chocolate foil-wrapped goodies, and the like. Someone fed her a chocolate-iced cupcake at the fellowship hour afterward, which she very sportingly ate in the manner of Henry the Eighth, even wearing a delightful goatee afterward. I will post the photo as soon as it makes its way to me. Last year she ate a cupcake no-hands-style, a photo of which ended up in the church newsletter. The tradition lives on!

Today J went to look at a canoe from an ad on craigslist. The seller was not home but someone else showed her the canoe, which she agreed to buy and offered to leave money down on it while she ran home to get the other car, some tie-downs, etc. No need, said the fellow.

We showed up at the house as planned only to find the canoe being loaded into somebody else's truck.

She jumps out and says, "I told the guy I was coming for it."

"Yeah," said the seller, "but you didn't leave any money." (In snotty tone of voice, as if this was the stupidest thing ever.)

"I offered to leave some but he said I didn't need to!" she protested. "I told him I'd be back with the other car. He said that was fine."

"Well, why didn't you bring the other car in the first place?" says the snotty jerk seller. (WTF does that have to do with anything?! We showed up at the exact same time as the other guy!)

"I was calling from work," says J, and gets disgustedly back in the car. We drive off angrily.

You know, that would have been a totally different experience if he'd just said something like, "Oh gosh, I'm sorry for the miscommunication but the guy that was here was supposed to take a deposit for it if you were going to have to come back later." Like, would that have been so damn hard, Mr. Jerkface Seller? He was so snotty I'm glad he didn't get our money for his stupid canoe.

So we drove on to a large, well-known local retailer and purchased a nicer and larger (and new) model of the canoe from them. Last year's model, virtually identical to this year's, but on clearance. J has this kind of luck where we show up to buy something and find it's on clearance, often not learning this until it has been rung up. We call it Secret Sale. Also, because we bought a boat, all boating accessories were ten percent off, so we got paddles and life jackets. All told we spent about 200 dollars more than we would have spent for the other boat -- but a) we got a nice new one, b) it has backrests and other niceties, and c) we didn't hand our money over to a total dickwad.

We even got the baby her own little paddle. And an adorable life jacket. Far cry from those ugly orange ones we had to wear as kids!