Fatigue

Pardon the paucity of blog entries of late. To tell the truth (and shame myself), I'm just too damned tired to think about much of anything at all.
Yup, it's EASTER WEEK again!
Longtime readers, as well as those EVERY SINGLE ONE of you who pile into grocery stores this time of year and buy everything in sight, then bitch because it's all gone...
Deep breaths, Ken. Start over.
Easter, you know? The time of crosses and chocolate bunnies is also, inexplicably, the busiest week of the grocery year. Thanksgiving is a pale imitation. Christmas comes close. But Easter--which never meant a thing to me beyond a perfunctory trip to church and some little chocolate eggs scattered around--means a whole hell of a lot to just about everybody else.
This year, it's the usual lack of holding power that vexes me, but it's compounded by a change in my schedule and added responsibilities.
Yup, yours truly is officially a keyholder now. That means I close the store on occasion, in my case on alternate Wednesdays (I also work Friday evenings). That wouldn't be much of an issue, except I work every Thursday morning and alternate Saturdays as well. By the time I get home on Wednesday nights, it's ten o'clock. On Fridays, eleven. And I'm up at ten after five the next morning.
To make matters worse, we're moving to what they call "summer hours"...how much you wanna bet they wind up permanent?...closing an hour later through the week, meaning I'll get home at eleven on Wednesday nights--and that's if everything goes well. Any delay closing the store and--because of the vagaries of Grand River Transit--I'll be home at midnight. Even assuming I can fall asleep immediately (a dubious proposition), I'd be getting five or at most six hours of sleep.
Cry me a river, I hear you saying. I'm lucky to get that much sleep on any night of the week.
Yeah, buddy, that's you. I'm not built that way. I'm tired just thinking about it.

Every grocery chain tries to outdo all the others when it comes to holiday flyers. (Well, not every chain: the high-end stores, like Loblaws and Sobeys, don't have to flog every last item in their stores to draw customers in, relying instead on quality and selection--which is, after all, what people care most about at holiday time). The discount banners, like us, have to try and peel people out of the full-service stores, and there's only one way to do it: price. So the usual suspects are on sale--you'll find frozen vegetables, ice cream, and Pillsbury Crescent Rolls--on sale almost everywhere, not to mention cream cheese, half-and-half, and so on and so forth--but then they had to put Fruitopia and Five Alive chilled juices on for 97 cents. Cue the gnashing of the teeth and the banging of the head. That's a full time job, keeping that stocked.

So I come home and think "blog? Blah." And it'll be like that until Easter Sunday.

Until then....