Not Exactly a Brain Surgeon

I refuse to stand for this any longer! My own stupidity, I mean.

I'm a guy who doesn't do details very well. On the whole I am okay with who I am. But there's one area where I have lost patience with my lovable, old self. It has to do with groceries and lists.

As I have written previously (but am too lazy to look up the references which is okay because no one would bother to check them anyway, and I really don't blame you for being such a sensible steward of your time), I have a problem with groceries and lists. Almost invariably, I fail in either the making of that list or the shopping of same. It's not that it happens on occasion; it's that it happens frequently: so frequently that I'd pull out my hair if I still possessed a strand or two.

This time around, I managed to get all of the ingredients on the list for my Hamburger Noodle Casserole: pasta, beef, stewed tomatoes, cream of tomato soup, cream of celery, onions, and green peeper. Yup! They all got on my list. But they didn't all get home: namely, the green pepper. It was on the list; I just plain missed it.

I could forgive myself the occasional goofup, but we are talkin goofups plural. It happens over and over again. More frequently, it's that I don't get all of the ingredients listed in the first place, but it can be that I simply miss picking up an item that's on the list. Either way, it drives me crazy. I drive me crazy.

So, I made up some new rules. (i) Cuppa will double check the lists that I make, especially when I have copied the ingredients from a recipe. (ii) I will rewrite any haphazard list in an orderly fashion to make it more difficult to overlook something when I am shopping. (iii) I will take a writing utensil to the store and carefully cross out items as I place them in my cart. (iv) If I forget to bring a writing utensil, I will borrow a stubby pencil from the bakery department. (v) I will steal the dangblasted pencil if I have to.

Having decided on this protocol, I went shopping. This time, because we love our tender moments of togetherness, Cuppa came with me (isn't it touching?) and did the bulk of the shopping whilst I stared into space and did what I do best — gathered much mental wool. Towards the end of the expedition, however, she made a fatal error in judgment ... and left me to pickup the coffee cream, butter, and juice from the dairy-end of the store. I managed fine with the juice and butter, and the fact that the store was out of coffee cream wasn't my fault.

What was my fault, however ... was the buttermilk that I so sincerely added to the cart. Cuppa had written butter on the list, which you may recall I was able to obtain, but somehow my brain added another version of butter to the list — buttermilk. So you see, even when I don't forget to add items to the list and/or I manage to retrieve every ingredient on said list, I am likely to make up a new version in my head and add items willy nilly.

The thing is that although I will never be asked to perform brain surgery, I'm actually not all that dumb. But I sure feel dumb when I keep doing this ... over and over ... and ...