Even though this was a Monday, and only nine days away from the month-end deadlines, I had to get to the bank and the supermarket this morning. I hadn’t been for a week, and I was almost out of money and completely out of groceries. Every day last week something had come up — sometimes good, sometimes not so good, but always at the time I would otherwise have done my banking and shopping.

So I had a pretty long list, and I hit the ATM first so I could recover enough twenties to get what I needed. I filled up the cart, too, without getting anything that wasn’t on the list. For a hundred dollars, you should come home with two or three cartloads of groceries, not just one, but that’s how it works these days. Naturally, when I went to check out, they had one register open, with a line. That’s not including the two express lanes that were open, with no lines to speak of.

I tend to shy away from personal contact with other shoppers. It’s hard enough for me to make nice with the checkers. But this guy behind me in line saw my cornbread mix and asked me if it was good. I said it was, for a mix (not sure what I meant by that, exactly). He asked if it was sweet. Sweet enough, I told him.

“Ain’t nothing better than good, sweet cornbread,” he drawled. I’m pretty sure it was a real drawl, too, and not something he learned in acting class. I allowed as how I couldn’t argue with him on that score. That’s about as friendly as I ever get with strangers, but as I was pushing my cart out the door, he noticed that I was using reusable green bags and called after me, “Thanks for saving the environment!” I gave him a wave as I escaped.

Tonight I made my Southwestern Soup. That wasn’t the plan, though. The plan was to make Thai Tango Chicken for the first time. A lot of the things on my list were the ingredients, like green onions and fresh cilantro. But as I was laying things out for the crock pot, I found to my dismay that I’d forgotten the pineapple chunks the recipe calls for. I know I thought about it in the store, because I remember when I was in the baking aisle that the canned fruit was in the next aisle over. Then I wheeled my cart right past the pineapple chunks without giving them a second thought.

So I’ll make another trip to the store tomorrow and delay my Thai Tango Chicken experiment for one day. I was going to make the soup tomorrow anyway; this little setback just forced me to do it one day earlier.