Mamacita says:  We spent all day in Indianapolis, shopping, and had a great time.  It poured rain, quit, poured some more, quit, etc, all day long.  Apparently rain keeps a lot of people home, which was fine by me; the crowds were nonexistent today!

Except for one store in Greenwood which was overrun and besieged by about forty large families, each with at least five kids who were, well, just simply dreadful, and that’s a euphemism for what I really thought of them. Apparently these families all knew each other, and they had extremely LOUD conversations from one end of the store to the other.  These people were literally destroying this store, right before everybody’s eyes.  I’ve never seen such a mess in a store in my life.  Some aisles were so vandalized – that’s the correct term for what I saw today – it wasn’t possible to walk down them.  Mothers were just standing around visiting at the top of their lungs while their kids ran absolutely hog wild and tore the place apart.

I think that when a kid tears a box open and takes out the toy and plays with it so hard it breaks, the mother should have to pay for it.  Seriously.  I saw it over and over again, tonight.  Not to pay for it is like stealing it.  Nobody else could buy it after these kids were finished with it.  When an ADULT opens a box, tosses it aside, examines the contents and then leaves the whole mess on the counter, that’s just as bad.  Shame on these people!

The store was so understaffed; I think every employee was working a cash register, and if there was a manager anywhere on the premises, I never saw him/her.  It was a crying shame.

I’m not an advocate of spanking, per se, but it was a very good thing I didn’t have a bullwhip in my hands tonight, because I would probably have used it.  And not just on the dreadful children, either.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but not all mothers are good role models and not all children are sweet.  Some people are obnoxious twits and that’s a fact.  It has nothing to do with age; it’s a matter of personal choices.  Every kid I saw tonight in that store was old enough to know better, even if he/she was never taught so at home.  It was shameful.  Reminded me of piranha.

====

1.  A conservative is a man who is too cowardly to fight and too fat to run.  –Elbert Hubbard

2.  If you freeze to death, and end up in hell. . . wouldn’t you be really comfortable at some point along the way?  –Anonymous

3.  Love is something that you can leave behind when you die.  It’s that powerful.  –John Lame Deer

When we are asked further, what is conduct? – let us answer:  Three-fourths of life.  –Matthew Arnold

4.  Some people pay a compliment as if they expected a receipt.  –Kin Hubbard

5.  They that will not be counselled, cannot be helped.  If you do not hear reason, she will rap you on the knuckles.  –Benjamin Franklin

6.  Do not wait for extraordinary circumstances to do good actions; try to use ordinary situations.  –Jean Paul Richter

7.  Talking and eloquence are not the same.  To speak, and to speak well, are two things.  A fool may talk, but a wise man speaks.  –Ben Jonson

8.  Being considerate of others will take you further than any college degree.  –Marian Wright Edelman

9.  Confidence comes not from always being right, but from not fearing to be wrong.  –Peter T. McIntyre

10.  I may not know much, but I know chicken shit from chicken salad.  –Lyndon Baines Johnson

11.  To see what is right and not to do it, is want of courage.  –Confucius

12.  Friends are a second existence.  –Baltasar Gracian

13.  It is more shameful to distrust our friends than to be deceived by them.  –Francois de la Rouchefoucauld

14.  Instead of loving your enemies, treat your friends a little better.  –E.W. Howe

15.  He who does not punish evil commands it to be done.  –Leonardo Da Vinci

16.  One of the hardest things to realize, especially for a young man, is that our forefathers were living men who really knew something.  –Rudyard Kipling

17.  He that does not know a fool when he sees one is one himself.  –Baltasar Gracian

18.  Blessed is he who has it in his power to do evil, yet does it not.  –Marguerite of Navarone

19.  Nothing is more like a wise man than a fool who holds his tongue.  –Sir Francis de Sales

20.  Failure is instructive.  The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes.  –John Dewey

21.  Misfortunes one can endure – they come from outside; they are accidents.  But to suffer for one’s own faults – ah! there is the sting of life.  –Oscar Wilde

22.  She wears her clothes as if they were thrown on her with a pitchfork.  –Jonathan Swift

23.  Elegance is good taste plus a dash of daring.  –Carmel Snow

24.  You can’t have everything. . . where would you put it?  –Stephen Wright

25.  Experience: the wonderful knowledge that enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again.  –Anonymous

26.  It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed.  In this life we get nothing save by effort.  –T. Roosevelt

27.  Changes are not predictable, but to deny them is to be an accomplice to one’s own unnecessary vegetation.  –Gail Sheehy

28.  Surely we can more shrewdly judge a youth’s character and ability by what he sets himself to do and carries out, under proper guidance, on his own initiative, than by his fulfillment, however brilliant, of a standardized task.  –Robert Silliman Hillyer

29.  Education is something you get when your father sends you to college.  But it isn’t complete until you send your son there.  –Washington Journal

30.  Have no fear of change as such, and, on the other hand, no liking for it merely for its own sake.  –Robert Moses

31.  When you cease to make a contribution, you begin to die.  –Eleanor Roosevelt

32.  Education with inert ideas is not only useless; it is, above all things, harmful.  –Alfred North Whitehead

33.  It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.  –Tom Robbins

34.  All we are asked to bear, we can bear.  –Elizabeth Goudge

35.  The sun will set without your assistance.  –Talmud

36.  Have courage for the great sorrows of life and patience for the small ones; and when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep in peace.  God is awake.  –Victor Hugo

37.  Our enemies come nearer the truth in the opinions they form of us than we do in our opinion of ourselves.  –Francois de la Rouchefoucauld

38.  The greatest fool is he who thinks he is not one and all others are.  –Baltasar Gracian.

39.  People exercise an unconscious selection in being influenced.  –T.S. Eliot

40.  Conversation is not a search after knowledge, but an endeavor at effect.  –John Keats

41.  The sure way to be cheated is to think one’s self more cunning than others.  –Francois de la Rochefoucauld

42.  Responsibility is the thing we dread most of all.  Yet it is the one thing in the world that devlops us, gives us manhood or womanhood fiber.  –Frank Crane

43.  A decision is the action an executive must take when he has information so incomplete that the answer does not suggest itself.  –Arthur William Radford

44.  The first duty of a human being is to assume the right relationship to society – more briefly, to find your real job, and do it.  –Charlotte Perkins Gilman

45.  People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come into the mind of others.  –Pascal

46.  Just because it’s common sense doesn’t mean it’s common practice.  –Will Rogers

47.  Never regard study as a duty, but as the enviable opportunity to learn to know the liberating influence of beauty in the realm of the spirit for your own personal joy and to the profit of the community to which your later work belongs.  –Albert Einstein

48.  You cannot make yourself feel something you do not feel, but you can make yourself do right in spite of your feelings.  –Pearl S. Buck

49.  Faith is to believe what we do not see, and the reward of this faith is to see what we believe.  –St. Augustine

50.  It is one of the beautiful compensations of this life that no one can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.  –Charles Dudley Warner

==

I think that what I witnessed today in that store was mob mentality.  Mob mentality, piss-poor parenting, grammar so bad it brought tears to my eyes, bratty kids taking advantage of the adults’ lack of attention, and grown women so intent on finding a bargain that they left a path of destruction behind them with every step.  Shameful, every bit of it.

Oh, add to that an invisible store manager too cheap to hire enough help.

Usually, this store is tidy and clean, and the customers are just ordinary, nice people who know how to behave in public.  I wonder what was wrong tonight?  Because, I mean to tell y’all, these people were nuckin’ futz, and the store was so torn up, it will take a crew ALL NIGHT to get it looking halfway decent again.  It was so wild, I kept watching the door waiting – and hoping – for the cops to show up with vans, load these people in, and take them away.  Where, I care not.  Just. . . AWAY.  Brrr, nasty.

Sadly, the two Kitchen Collection stores in the outlet mall are going out.  Silver lining:  everything is 60-90% off, including all the Pfaltzgraff.

Yeah, it was a good day.  Barring the crazies at A.J. Wright’s, that is.  If they hadn’t had complete sets of 400-count King sheets for (are you sitting down?) eleven dollars, I would have taken one look and run back out, screaming.

Instead, I got my sheets, came home, and did my screaming on the internet, for all the world to hear.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!

I feel better now.