Today was my usual Sunday rest day...with the usual not-even-aerobic grocery shop, laundry-a-thon, and Shoebox cleaning. I also took Ja'Narah to the Family Fun Center where we went in some crazy 4-D (the 4th "D" being "Damn nausea-producing," I think, whoa) movie/ride thing and played a lot of completely mindless games that she loved. Of course, the batting cages (which were the only thing I wanted to do) got closed and I had to settle for a distant second Skee Ball, but the kid had a blast.
Anyway, on the way to meet the kid, I had the privilege of enabling a future triathlete. I went to Speedy Reedy to re-stock the Perpetuem, get some laces for the new running shoes, and hit the sale rack (holy crap, shorts for $14 and a sports bra for $9...I'm broke, but had to do it--total steals). As I was lingering around, I heard a newbie triathlete grilling the worker-bee about all things triathlon in the back of the store...I had to smile as I heard her say "Danskin" and then smiled even more as she asked him a continuous stream of classic questions like, "so when you get out of the water and go to your bike, do they let you wear shoes?" She had a very un-engaged husband in tow who was aimlessly wandering around and unable to offer any assistance whatsoever. The adorable newbie, Maggie, a woman in her mid 50's I'd guess, went into the changing room unassisted with a wetsuit and was soon barking out questions audible to the whole store. As she continued wriggling into the wetsuit, I had flashbacks of my first wetsuit fitting in that very same changing room and had to enter the conversation by yelling toward the back of the store, "If you feel like a sausage, you're doing it right!" and continued to smile as she kept asking questions to all of us while I rifled through the sale rack. A few minutes later, the voice from the changing room called out again, "I heard a woman's voice out there...can you help me?" and I was beckoned into the changing room to help Maggie. She had way too much of the rubber around her ankles and I explained to her how to pull things up, that you can't have the crotch too low, and demonstrated with my sweat pants how you must pull up the slack in the legs. I also discussed with her the importance of body glide and she had clearly done some research as she said, "I've heard you can also use PAM spray..." She struggled around a bit more and told me, "that guy told me it's like pulling up pantyhose and this is nothing like pantyhose!" a statement with which I agreed although it's been YEARS, thank god, since I was anywhere near a pair of pantyhose. I gave as much advice as I could, but she gave up and never got the suit all the way on (though I'm pretty she bought it). We seemed to have bonded and she referred to me as "my new best friend, Ruth, as she continued to wander around the store with her nice non-triathlete husband holding the growing number of expensive items she was accumulating. The whole thing made my day...almost as much as Ja'Narah hitting the "200 tickets" jackpot 4 times on one of the games at Family Fun Center, rendering a small mountain of tickets that were redeemed for a small basketball and a very valuable basketball-shaped gumball machine. Sundays still really suck, but this one had a couple of bright spots.
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