An adventure—and a lesson learned

Jordan and I go grocery shopping on Fridays. She brings the transport chair that I almost never use and plops a basket in my lap, where it gets heavier and heavier. And we often run out of room. So today we turned it into an adventure—my first time to use one of those motorized grocery carts. I’ve been afraid to try, afraid I’d go careening through the store knocking down displays right and left. Well, first of all, it doesn’t go fast enough ever to careen. And second, I only nudged one display and dislodged one Bundt cake from a shelf—no damage done, though the store employee who came to right things was not cheerful about it.

I’m not quite ready to solo yet, but Jordan’s judgment was I did great for the first time. My goal is to be able to shop independently. Next lesson: get better at steering, so I can reach most things from the shelf. Seriously considering taking my grabber for things on high shelves. Lots of fun.

I know better, I really do—but I ordered clothes online from an iffy company that I thought I’d read warnings about before. New Chic offered really cute clothes at a terrific price, so I ordered through PayPal figuring I’d dispute the charge if I ran into trouble. It’s not quite that easy. The clothes take forever to arrive—probably because they are only made when you order, in China, and shipped, apparently by slow boat. Three items, each arrived separately. Two were way too small in the shoulders—I have had tops made in India with the same problem, so I sometimes think we American women are extraordinarily broad-shouldered—or at least I am from years of picking up babies.

The third item is an overall style outfit, knee-length, wide legs. Looks pretty good with a T-shirt, and I’ll keep it. But I’ll sure be careful about washing it!

I finally got a sales person who, thank goodness, spoke English. Turned out not to be a blessing. She was indifferent and inflexible about my options which were to keep the clothes and give them to someone smaller or return them to the plant in mainland China. My pleas that they’d sent the wrong size were denied. She insisted I ordered size 6. Believe me, I’m more realistic about my size than that. Again, I wonder if Chinese sizes don’t translate into English, or the other way around.

So today I had them all packaged up, address to tape on the box and tape to affix it, ready to return. Branch post office doesn’t carry forms to mail to China, and I fear it would be prohibitively expensive. I’ll bite the bullet, gives the clothes away, and pay for them. Costly lessons.

I guess life is still full of learning experiences, some good, some not so much so.