"Off to the Races" or "Eat my dust, you old biddy!"

In which your humble narrator realizes that he's in a competition with a mean old lady, proceeds to calmly to glorious victory and offers her a heaping helping of loser pie.

I took the children to Target yesterday morning to buy all the things that I forgot to buy at Target on Sunday. On Sunday, we had been at the Midway Target (Targhetto) which is nice enough and close to our home. But Targhetto is always out of things and also it's full of a bizarre mix of annoying, urban, boutique liberals and poor people*. This makes it our natural habitat since we're poor, urban crabby-liberals who wish we had the cash to shop at boutiques.

But on Monday we went, instead, to the suburban paradise Target where everyone is glassy-eyed and dead inside and all the little girls are named "Ava." We collected our stuff and walked to the check-outs. We were proceeding along the mostly closed registers back toward the end of the store where we had parked when a mean old lady with flaring nostrils came up on the inside track to ace us out from the first open register. She scooted in ahead just as I was starting to turn the cart and stood stone-faced as if we did not exist.

But then, sweet vindication! The other old lady in front of the mean old bat had 147 coupons and was clearly paranoid that the 18-year-old cashier had malevolent designs on her social security money. We scooted down to the next lane and proceeded through check-out as the mean old bat started fuming, abandoned her lane and trotted down to the express lane, nostrils flaring violently all the merry way. We concluded our transaction just as she finally made it to a register. We just had enough time to cut her off at the front door and made it out into the parking lot before her. But did I pretend that she was not there?

No, gentle reader, I smirked at her.

*It's probably the only place they see each other.