A Girl...

How To Spend 3 1/2 Hours and $600 at Costco and Leave Empty-Handed But Utterly Fulfilled (Awww)

For your reference: It takes exactly fourteen days and a fourteen-mile drive at freeway speeds in the pouring rain for a tire with a slow leak to be rendered as flat as my chest in the fourth grade. And it takes three and a half hours and $600 to fix it. The tire, not my chest (which for the record took five years and not a penny over forty grand).

Apparently Simon's tires were too bald to be legally patched, so last night we went to Costco to get four new ones. There were several cars already in the queue and we were told the job would take a couple of hours. I set the countdown timer on my cell phone for 8:15. And then we set about entertaining ourselves in the vast warehouse wasteland.

We played the electric grand piano, we rode the recliners, we pulled the measuring tape all the way out and sucked it all the way back in, we kissed in the tool shed, we gave each other massages on the massage table (and received a proposition from a customer wanting to get in on the action).

We watched the tvs, played on the laptops, hid in the plants, made the cd trays on the computer towers go in and out and in and out, and had a dinner of cheese pizza, polish sausage, soft-serve ice cream, and Diet Coke (because the scales in Aisle 5 said our softdrinks should henceforth have one calorie and one calorie only).

We even contemplated snooping through the newly developed photos which they leave right there out in the open where anyone can see them, but I didn't want to risk getting kicked out when we had nowhere else to go. Shortly after taking this picture of my cell phone countdown from the cushy lap of my Buttkicker recliner we were told by a guy in an official looking vest to stop taking pictures, and that's where the real fun started.

We moseyed back into the Tire Center to check the status of the car. The guy who'd told us the car would be done at 8:15 (and who had a thumbnail two inches long and yellow and he's a witch--burn him!) was no longer there, so we asked Manager Mike if the project was nearing completion. "Oh. No. We have to do one more car before we'll get started on yours. But don't worry--we'll stay open after Costco closes, so you can come back and hang out here!" And when, you ask, does Costco close? Why, at 8:30, of course! In a mere fifteen minutes! YAAAY!!! I mean, BOOOO!!!!

In the end we spent an additional hour sitting on stacks of tires (and getting our bums stuck in stacks of tires) while watching the jumpsuit monkeys who were supposed to be twisting Simon's lugnuts instead perform for each other tender lipsynch serenades to Jewel songs. Um, guys, this big window we're standing in front of--it works both ways.

At long last we rolled away on four new Michelins and congratulated ourselves on having resisted buying anything besides the tires (Gilmore Girls season two! frozen cream puffs! DeWalt circular saw kit! Buttkicker recliners!). And how did we do it? How did two grabby consumerist pigs like us resist the tractor beam of the materialist machine? Two words. Two little words Simon dropped quite casually over the weekend. Two sweet little words that made me want to design and sculpt and fire in a kiln a big pink piggy bank the size of Wisconsin. Two words: nest egg.

A penny saved is a penny earned is a penny that can later be used to whitewash the picket fence. Consider me spent.