When Good Sandals Go BAAAAAD

This morning I had to go and get some food and coffee stuff for a staff meeting that our university president would be attending so I decided that I would class it up a bit and go shopping at Target instead of Wal-Mart. I’m dressed in my nice “work” clothes and instead of flip-flops, my preferred footwear of choice, I have on my new Minnetonka sandals. The bad thing about any kind of grocery shopping at Target is that the grocery items are located clear across the store from the dollar bin crap stuff and fashion accessories and home décor and t-shirts and kitchen gadgets and a CD and a birthday card and toy for a very good nephew who is about to turn 7……. and so with time running short and not being able to pack my cart as efficiently as I could because I’m practically running through the store, I don’t have very much room to put the stuff in that I actually came in for. Normally, I would have just gone to the dreaded Wal-Mart to get whatever groceries, but I was supposed to be shopping for work and it just so happened that if I pulled a “Grinch stuffing his sleigh” and I shoved the bathroom rug aside a little bit, I could slip in a carton of “French Vanilla Creamer and Rice Milk for the president’s coffee, and balance the two boxes of Entenmann’s cakes on the top, the main reason I went “grocery” shopping in the first place.

As luck would not have it, there was only one carton of rice milk left and it was waaaaaay back in the refrigerator case and not a soul around to help me get it. Unless I had the arms of leading NBA shot blocker, Dikembe Mutombo, I was not going to reach that milk. However, that bit of knowledge and information did not stop me from trying, no siree. I was a project manager on a mission and I wanted to prove that I was worthy of my recent 2% cost-of-living raise. I was going to get milk for the president’s coffee even if I had to army crawl into the refrigerator case. And so I did.

What I didn’t count on is that my lovely new leather Minnetonka sandals would be so slippery. As I leaned into the case I sorta slipped out of my sandals and launched myself headlong into the case. I got my hands on the carton (yay!) but only because the freezer door hit me in the butt (boo!) and propelled me forward that extra half inch (yay!)

In spite of the angry protest put up by my knees, I backed out of the refrigerator case, now as fresh as a refrigerated cucumber. I put my sandals back on and turned just in time to see a very puzzled looking stock boy with a semi-load of rice milk.

As I left the store with a cart full of “groceries”and rice milk, it was raining lightly. I’m not exactly the prissy type, so I decided to make a sashay for it. When you have on good sandals, you don’t run, you sashay. Unfortunately, sashsaying in good sandals on damp pavement may cause you to spontaneously enact moves seen only at the conclusion of a figure skating program.

I did not know that I could do the splits.

Let me tell you those French judges are tough! I only got a 4.5 for my amazing routine :-( Technical difficulty alone should have earned me a perfect 6.