Football, Celebrities, and Instant Rage
It's been an eventful Saturday. We arrived at the local soccer pitches at 9:20am, expecting half an hour of warm-up before a 10am kick-off for both Miss 11 and Miss 12's teams. Turns out we got the times a bit wrong. The first match started ten minutes after our arrival. Oops.
I did my best to watch both matches, but inevitably heard cheers from each pitch while walking back and forth, and could only guess at the final scores as we made our way out of the park, and back into town.
While walking up the high street with two girls in football kit flanking me, a minor television celebrity from a few years ago crossed the path right in front of us with her little boy, and quietly snuck into Starbucks. Although I am not impressed by celebrity in the slightest, I will admit to doing a double-take. I always forget that a number of well known personalities live around the area, and given that I rarely make it into town (other than grocery shopping, or walking here and there with the children), it's only natural that I rarelysee anybody of note.
We continued on up the high street to the supermarket, and bought a number of things for the children to eat for lunch and dinner. I asked them along the way what they might like, and a chorus of “PIZZA!” came back – I think mostly driven by the absence of my other half, who had gone to visit her Mum for the day.
After putting our items through the self-checkout, it decided to completely lose it's mind, and claim that I hadn't put something in the bag (they weigh your items to make sure you don't cheat the system). If anything goes awry, a light starts flashing above your checkout, and a helpful member of staff is supposed to wander over and correct the errant machinery. Only there was no helpful member of staff standing nearby. It turned out the guy that should have been watching over the self-checkouts was chatting up the girl working on the cigarette counter. After perhaps a minute of the checkout bleating at me in it's robot voice, and the light above flashing continuously, he finally noticed. For the first half of that minute I experienced a massive flash-fit of anger, but then I realised “what's the point of getting angry about this? how important is one minute of my day, really?”.
I've noticed that lots of people get angry over the tiniest of things these days. For some people it's waiting in traffic, for other's it's waiting in queues. I just wonder what is so earth shatteringly important that being held up for a minute causes such annoyance. It's like everybody is in a mad hurry all the time. Not good.
Needless to say we finally got home, I cooked the pizzas, and we then set about doing nothing for the rest of the day. Of course when I say “nothing”, I actually mean filling the washing machine and tumble dryer up three times, clearing two sink fulls of washing up, re-installing the desktop PC the kids use, and playing SkyRim for an hour with our eldest. I'll write about SkyRim in a separate post. I “helped” her for an hour, and was left physically shaking.
I should really stop writing now. I want to get up before 6am tomorrow to watch the Grand Prix from Japan.