Happy Happy Joy Joy. Ren and Stimpy has made a recent reappearance on TV and my kids are now watching the show I was watching in college. I remember when Billy West spoke at UMass in the early 90s and he had a standing room audience. I had a ball making a PSA cart for good old WAMH announcing the event. All my life’s a circle indeed.

I can even whip out my Christmas with Ren and Stimpy CD from back in the day. Or maybe I’ll wait until I have grand kids – you know it will come around again. Twice by then. Of course, by then CDs will be long dead, I’m sure. All the standard media will be gone – discs of all sorts, usb drives, even mass printed paper I bet. By the time my grand kids are wandering about I’m sure they’ll just get the personal bar code on their wrist scanned, payment will be deducted from their bank balance, and the media will be uploaded directly into their cranial storage drive.

Then again, bar codes? We’ll be way beyond black and white parallel lines by then I’m certain.

But I’m not here to talk about Ren and Stimpy or the holidays or being the Production guy for WAMH in the early to mid 90s. I’m here to talk about food shopping on New Year’s Eve. Yup. That’s my topic. Didn’t see that coming, did you?

I was at Shop-Rite picking up a couple of last minute treats on Friday morning (New Year’s Eve). As I left the store with my frozen cheese bites and avocados (the wife makes a mean guacamole) there was a family entering. It was a large family. Both in terms of size and density. There were many of them and they were all large. As they entered, one woman read the announcement by the door that said the store would close at 10pm. At the time it was about 9:30am…just for context.

So I listened to the ensuing discussion and pieced together the complaint of this family. They were here to purchase treats for their New Year’s festivities, which was fine. Their consternation came from the fact they did not feel they had adequate storage to purchase enough food and drink, and were planning to come back closer to midnight to lay in supplies for the duration of their partying – surely to last well into the morning. The thing was, they were concerned that they would have to come as earlyas 10pm for their last call of snack and bev.

This is not a big-people-eat-a-lot point. It’s the holidays – we all eat a lot. The only reason I mention the size of the family members is that they must have a homestead of reasonable size to accommodate 8 large people. But…not enough food and or beer? I mean, it was cold out. Let Mother Nature chill your Bud Lite for a couple hours. How much do you plan to consume between 10pm and 1 am that you are upset the store will be closed? I mean…damn.