Hell Spots

After last night's post about how I've become a twice-weekly blogger, I throw a third blog post in today to mess with everyone's minds!

Today I took Hutton to speech therapy. (We were ten minutes late, but left the house on time, or what I thought was on time. Apparently the 50 cars piled up at the light ahead of me this morning thought the same thing!) After we dropped him off, Harrison and I headed out to "run errands". I headed down the street to a certain green mermaid coffee joint and played my mystery woman game.

Afterwards, with a hot coffee in one hand, and a sweaty toddler palm in the other, I headed to my car to take some notes. Then I headed to the other green mermaid coffee joint, diagonally across from the first store, in the same strip mall, mind you, to do my second shop. (It would have been really cool if there were another of the same store inside of the QFC grocery store, next to one of the green mermaid stores, but alas, the Seattle's Best got that spot. Oh, and by cool, I mean insane. But hey, these stores all seem to stay in business, so more power to 'em!)

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After all the coffee shopping, followed by a brief run into the QFC grocery store, which ended in a screaming Harrison being dragged out yelling, "More shopping!" (yeah, that's exactly what I love to do with screaming toddlers - grocery shopping!), I headed to pick Hutton up from speech therapy. When we got to the car, I stepped in some very well camouflaged chewing gum -- white spearmint gum stuck on the white parking stripe. As I attempted to scrape my now minty sandal on the pavement while getting Harrison in his car seat, I cursed the flibberty-gibbet smurf-tail who left the smurfing gum there.

I continued to stew on this when I got into my own seat and tried to wipe off the gum with a baby wipe. Why do people (or smurfs, in this case) put their nasty used gum in places where other people will encounter it? What is so hard about finding a scrap of paper, wrapping your used gum in it, and throwing it away? Did these people not realize that used gum is considered litter? Yeah, it is in my book! Now, I compost lots of stuff at home -- I just got a free worm bin, so I can do food scraps and dog poop now! Yippee! -- but I don't throw crap on the pavement in parking lots, knowing it will decompose eventually. Yeah, it does, but in the meantime, nobody wants to step in it. Same thing with dog poop. It will decompose eventually, but when you leave it by the side of the road, even on rural suburban ones like the one my family lives on, someone may still step in it. And stepping in dog poop sucks. I know. I've done it, the boys do it a lot, and I've cleaned up lots of shoes.

Anyway, back to the gum. When I was little, I would often just swallow my gum if I didn't want to chew it anymore. And believe it or not, it doesn't take seven years to digest. It doesn't digest at all, just goes through your system and come out later on. I'm sure it can cause some people problems to swallow gum, but, even if you can't swallow gum, please don't leave it on the pavement, or underneath a table or desk somewhere. That's just nasty. And I think there's a special spot in Hell for people who leave gum around for others to step in. Hmm. Maybe I should move to Singapore, where gum it outlawed. Nah, I actually like chewing Big Red after coffee. I just take it out and throw it in the trash afterwards. Yeah, can you believe I go to all that trouble?