A jeopardizing library trip

Today I had a lovely morning and afternoon of sleeping in, going for a run, drinking coffee, and reading Life of Pi and making Spanish flashcards outside. Where I live, Jeopardy is on at 3:30 in the afternoon. I love Jeopardy and try not to miss it whenever I'm home. I came inside at 2:40 and had two options: either continue working on my Spanish flashcards go to the library. I figured I'd have enough time to go to the library before Jeopardy; after all, it's just down the road. I changed and left within ten minutes.

On my weekly trip to the library, I like to get a few movies and an occasional book. Since I'm rereading LOP right now, though, I only needed movies. Typically I choose one in Spanish, one drama, one comedy, and another from one of those sections. I found a couple Spanish films quickly, grabbed a random Johnny Depp movie as my drama, and ventured over to the comedies. Now there is a plethora of variations among comedies. There are romantic comedies, cheesy cliché comedies, dark comedies, satires, slapstick comedies, intentionally stupid comedies, unintentionally stupid comedies, vulgar comedies, and comedies that are really not even funny. I avoid most of these. Somehow, though, the comedy genre still produces pretty great movies. Without comedies, we would be lacking the touching humor of Dan in Real Life, the wittiness of Stranger than Fiction, the ridiculousness of The Princess Bride, and others like Night at the Museum, My Fair Lady, You've Got Mail, Up, Shrek, other Disney movies, PS I Love You, The Darjeeling Limited, Juno, Hitch, and many others. Today, somehow, nothing seemed appealing. I scanned all the titles, first from T to Z, then L to S, then backwards from K to A. Nothing. I finally settled on Big Fish just because it's Tim Burton.

In the middle of my hunt, I had utilized the library computer for the online catalog system. I didn't realize I had left my keys on the desk.

Just before I grudgingly selected Big Fish, I had checked the time--3:11. I had 19 minutes until Jeopardy. No problem. After making my last movie decision, I wandered over to the self-checkout. I have no idea why anyone would wait in line when they could use the self-checkout. For some reason, today there were lines in both places. After waiting, I scanned my card…and it couldn’t find my account information. I tried again. Success! I checked out one item. Good. I put the second item over the sensor. After a long delay, rather than continuing with my transaction, it printed my receipt. Bewildered, I gave it a quizzical look, scanned my card a second time, checked out one more item without issues, then it did the same thing again, so I switched to a different computer. The same thing happened. Frustrated, I separated my three already checked-out items and their three individual receipts from the couple other ones and awkwardly carried them to the regular check-out line. There were two ladies working. One was preoccupied with a family who was doing something long and complicated that involved both ends asking and answering an absurd number of questions. The other woman was in the process of checking out an enormous stack of children's books. I glanced at the clock on the side of the counter--3:20. The latter finished first, the mom and her three daughters walked away, and I proceeded. Before I made it to the counter, the alarm beeped, and the mom returned. She and her girls had three bags of books, so two of the daughters had to separately walk to the sensor and back to see whose books it was that set off the alarm. With children that are respectively about three and four years old, this is never a quick, simple task. Once they figured out whose bag it was, the contents had to be emptied on the counter and counted. 3:25. I'm normally not impatient about these kind of things, but this was Jeopardy that I was nearly missing.

Once it was my turn--for real this time--I explained to the lady what had happened, and she figured out the item giving me problems was none other than my Johnny Depp movie. Darn you, Johnny Depp. She checked out everything with only minor difficulties. While waiting, I realized I didn't have my car keys. As I frantically left to hunt for them, she called out, "Oh wait, did you know you have a CD on hold?" I had no idea, nor did I really care. I just wanted to watch Jeopardy. She made me check both sides of the reserve section, but my search was futile. As a last resort, she looked in the room behind the counters and found it, then had to check that out, too. Fortunately, I located and retrieved my keys quickly, as it wasn't the first time I had left them there. I drove home, making sure not to rush too much. Upon arriving at home, I discovered that Ethan had closed the garage door, forcing me to run around the house to get in.

And somehow, though it seems all forces were acting against me, I made it home in time for Jeopardy.