I report. I deride.

Tuesday afternoon, at our local Kroger, I experienced grocery-store rage. 

Patience not being a virtue I possess in any readily-discernible amount, perhaps an episode of grocery-store rage was inevitable.

However.

What happened was this:

I had a limited amount of time to trot into the store and pick up four things -- which ended up being five on account of, pork loin was on sale for one ninety-nine a pound -- before I was needed at home.

It was the worst time of day for traffic, and you know how that is. But I'm not copping to road rage.

I buzzed around the perimeter of the store, making good time and arriving at the till with twenty-eight dollars and forty-six cents worth of necessities.

I pushed my cart into a line that looked short. As in, there was but one order ahead of mine and it appeared to be almost completely processed.

The folks being checked out were a lady of about sixty and a man who looked to be around thirty-five.

Caucasians, dressed casually but not fancy. Nothing about them really stood out except that the impression I got was mother-son. I could be wrong but you probably would have thought the same.

Mom needed to lose at least seventy-five pounds and seemed a trifle odd; I wasn't sure why. Nervous. Son was clean-cut and came across as normal in every way.

Yes; in my spare time, I profile complete strangers. Not maliciously but with mild curiosity. If you don't like it, you can always click out.

Because, having left my vocab cue cards in another purse, I had nothing else to do, I glanced at what the two seemingly healthy, unremarkable, vanishing-middle-class people in front of me were buying.

It was a large order. Mostly name brands, several fancy marinades and sauces for meat, et cetera. Nice groceries. A lot of very nice groceries, I noted.

Okay.

Then I was distracted when mother and son (let's just go with that version, why don't we) commenced to dither over whether either of them could make a Kroger-Plus Shopper's Card available for the cashier.

The scanning of which (the card; not the cashier) applies discounts to your purchase total.

It took basically three eternities for mom to locate said scrap of plastic on her keyring which was jammed with such scraps from stores all over town and even in other galaxies.

(I refuse to put those plastic things on me pirate keyring; step off, way off. My Kroger card had been sprung from my wallet and was even then in my hand in anticipation of actually having my paltry few viands checked out on that calendar day.)

At any rate, fortunes were made and squandered and the big-as-your-face iPhone18SDP (Super-Duper-Plus), yet to be invented, passed into planned obsolescence in the time it took mommie dearest to produce the Kroger plastic scrap.

In desperation, at one point I even offered my Kroger card for swiping.

The unpleasantly-plump lady acted as though my credit-card-sized plastic scrap was radioactive, declining to accept it with hand-fluttering and eye-rolling, no smile.

Okay.

In due time the planets aligned like such as that the cashier concluded his laborious scanning of the boatload of groceries and announced the total: Three-hundred-two dollars and change.

I thought, Mercy. That's after the Kroger-Plus card discounts.

An additional millennia (give or take) elapsed while the mom-son duo brought their payment source out into the light of waning Kroger day.

Meanwhile the cashier had begun -- and was taking his sweet time -- loudly lecturing the bag boy on proper procedure for packing up three hundred dollars worth of food. Much instruction about canned goods on the bottom, making for a good foundation.

I looked around me, silently seeking sympathy from fellow gridlocked customers. How many times have I winced when cans were thrown in on top of bread, and nobody said a word or thought anything of it?

Or when two jars of pickles and one strawberry jam were pitched into a single bag of plastic the ply of an anemic generic tissue, with maybe even a hole in the bottom, to clink and clank dangerously against one another?

But, okay. The teachable moment and all that.

Meanwhile the son had swiped what appeared to be a debit card and punched in his PIN and I spied a wee flicker at the end of the five-mile black tunnel that had become my existence.

So then the next thing I knew, the cashier was saying: That'll be eight oh one. As in, eight dollars and one cent.

What?

I thought, I thought they owed three-hundred-two and change.

I wondered whether, at the beginning of the check-out process before I queued up, mom and son had produced a stack of coupons that had been deducted at the end.

Were they extreme couponers? Was there a sneaky crew from TLC nearby, aiming their cameras at our checkout lane? I patted my hair and hoped my nose wasn't shiny.

But something about the demeanor of the mother-son shopping pair told me they weren't all that into reality. So what was the deal?

I snuck a peek at the big-screen register total -- at Kroger everyone and their Aunt Mildred's vegan, gluten-free cousin's blind pet ocelot can see exactly what you've purchased and what it costs -- and the answer was revealed.

Right at the bottom, in capital letters:

EBT TRANSFER

Oh. Okay.

Mom and son are likely still stashing into an already-bulging pantry their two-hundred-ninety-four dollars worth of groceries bought for them by the government. Wait. The taxpayers.

And yes; that makes me mad. I freely admit it. Judge, don't judge. That's your prerogative. It won't change anything.

And no; I don't know the specific circumstances surrounding the subject never-missed-a-meal woman and her grocery-shopping buddy who may or may not have been her son. I don't have to.

If you walk into a market under your own steam and walk out with over three hundred dollars worth of food that you yourself didn't have to pay for because you have a government-issued welfare card to swipe, there is something wrong. I don't know what it is in every case, but something is rotten in Denmark.

A pastor friend tells me that select folks in his congregation receive so much government aid for food, they can hardly use all the food they get. They give some of their primo groceries away for lack of space to store it.

They even swap food items amongst themselves for other goods and services.

They think nothing of it.

My daughter, a single mother who works her tail off to provide for herself and her child and who as a matter of sheer principle is not on welfare, was offered milk at the store by a woman as, side-by-side, they wheeled their carts out to the parking lot.

The woman had received more milk from welfare benefits than she could possibly use before it spoiled.

Don't tell me people are hungry. I don't believe it. Millions who could work but won't, have become fat and lazy. Victims? No. Feckless puppets duped by a lie? Yes.

They are willing accomplices, thieves, criminals, colluding with a corrupt and abusive regime, sluggish parasites who don't know or care that they've been assigned by those in power a minuscule value, and that merely as tools.

It is immoral.

And do not tell me that the majority of those who receive government benefits either need or deserve them. On his best day, having slept in the house and dined on turbo-charged Wheaties for breakfast, that dog will not hunt.

If fact if you have convinced yourself of that, I feel sorry for you. I don't know how you can be so naive and survive in this cruel world.

Forty-eight million people -- up fourteen million from 2009 -- in America receive what we once referred to as food stamps, which current mode of delivery is the doppelganger of a credit/debit card -- just like the ones used by actual paying customers who have worked for the money -- so as to remove the last vestige of a stigma from those who are shamelessly on the take.

What has happened to our country? Barack Hussein Obama has happened to our country. Food-stamp president? He's the coffin-nail president.

God help us. God, please help us.

TG said I should write to my congressman about what I saw. I plan to do that and I hope The Honorable Joe "You Lie!" Wilson has an appetite for the authenticity and intensity of my grocery-store rage because somebody needs to do something.

And that is all for now.

=0=0=0=

Happy Thursday

Ralph and Ree and Mari, welcome. We've been expecting you.

I'm not particularly enamored of the month of January so, good riddance on that score.

Although I will say, at our house we kept so busy this past month, I barely noticed January. Our weather has been perfectly beautiful, so there's that.

TG did have a birthday. In light of same, let us commence with some rant and rave reviews.

The birthday was a week ago Sunday. TG was surrounded by females -- me, Audrey, Erica, Dagny -- and although we technically are not a family that is big on fawning, we girls did more than right by him.

Our kids had pooled their racehorses and bought their dad quite a dapper suit for Christmas. I'd done rather less for him than usual. Maybe less than he expected. He'd cut out his own tongue, though, before he'd complain.

Complaining is MY department, so step off.

But I sometimes deliver big. For TG's birthday, I pillaged an online after-Christmas clearance at Ralph Lauren dot com. Among other things I picked out a Polo Golf outfit and a bottle of Polo Double Black.

Wow, guys. You should see the gift boxes those items came in, free of charge.

They're sturdy but elegant and understated in midnight blue with RALPH LAUREN stamped on them in gold. They have nifty matching grosgrain ribbon that's stretchy, reaching around the box corners.

In no universe or language could these boxes be described as flimsy or half-baked. They go all the way to gorgeous, where they set up camp and settle in.

The purveyors of affordable luxury at Ralph Lauren are not stingy with snow-white tissue paper or embossed gold stickers or big creamy personalized vellum gift cards either.

In fact I imaginary-expected to discover toothy-grinned, twinkly-eyed, eternally-tanned Ralph Lauren himself on my doorstep, thanking me for my purchases.

And knowing me, I would have been tempted to say to a multi-millionaire: Here, please! Please take more of my money! Buy another twelve-thousand square-foot cottage in Newport!

There's genius in that, if not a whole lot of common sense. 'Merica. Doing all I can to keep it classy.

In semi-conclusion, the whole thing was better than I expected, and I expected a lot. Does that happen to you all the time? Because it doesn't happen to me all the time.

I Ralph Laurened another upcoming birthday as well, so there. Catch me if you can.

Preparedness is my motto.

I was prepared with food too. I made the Pioneer Woman's Sour Cream Noodle Bake the day before -- I guess I'm all about brands -- and had the casserole ready to pop into the oven to heat through as soon as we got home from church.

Crusty bread and a salad, and you can be not only there, you can be deliriously there, smugly there.

Except, I worried -- seriously I do believe I lost sleep over it -- that my Sour Cream Noodle Bake wouldn't be as good as expected. That was because, after I made it, I read some reviews of the recipe on Food Network dot com.

You may or may not want to do that after you've already made a recipe and stashed it in the garage fridge for a birthday dinner the next day.

Lots of people who reviewed it described Sour Cream Noodle Bake as NASTY! No better than HAMBURGER HELPER in stroganoff flavor! Yikes. I had nightmares. So much was on the line.

I fretted, something at which I am even more adroit than present-buying. Erica told me to keep calm and soldier on (this was in Sunday School) and I had no choice but to obey.

Even so, to my computer screen at Food Network dot com the night before, I had audibly hissed: Goodness gracious, sakes alive, people. Take it DOWN a notch or ten why don't you, it's only NOODLES.

And I don't know what you were expecting me to say, but the meal was GOOD. Actually it was DELICIOUS to our palates, which I freely admit are tuned less to sophisticated cuisine than to food that is tasty, plentiful, and made from scratch with quality ingredients.

In quasi-conclusion I am giddy to report that our Sunday lunch in honor of TG's birthday was far better than I expected it to be. Booyah.

Caveat: When/if you make this dish, you will want to season your ground chuck (I use ground sirloin) as it browns. Be generous with the kosher salt and coarse-ground pepper. I don't know why Ree omitted that.

I'd put my homemade spaghetti sauce up against hers too. But I digress.

For dessert we did not have birthday cake. Instead, Audrey made a recipe cadged from my blogging buddy Mari.

And I will tell you, if I could do only one part of that birthday dinner over, it would not be Ree Drummond's Sour Cream Noodle Bake, successful as that endeavor proved to be.

That honor would go to Maribeth's Chocolate Streusel Bars.

I do believe I may have rhapsodized on this blog at one time or another about the scratch-made fudge that was one of many singular culinary achievements of my late grandfather.

The taste and texture of these streusel bars is uncannily like that of homemade fudge -- the old-fashioned kind that does NOT contain marshmallow fluff or chocolate chips. The kind nobody makes anymore because it's hard to do.

Mari's recipe for Chocolate Streusel Bars (skilfully executed by Audrey, who inherited her sweet tooth from me), may not have put me smack-dab on the map dot that was Papaw's mind-bending fudge, but it put me in the neighborhood.

I wasn't expecting THAT.

Promise me you will try this dessert. It exceeded my expectations, and I already knew it would be great. I am not one to pin a lot of flowers on things, so trust me. This one is well worth the effort.

So then TG opened his gifts and his cards and we all rested for awhile.

In actual conclusion, I regret to say that I did not take pictures that day. I cannot do everything although I fully realize I create that illusion.

Early last week however, Sugarlips came over and she was wearing this dark blue dress I bought for her at TJ Maxx, and she looked so darling -- wow, THAT was unexpected -- that I made her sit for some pictures.

She wore a special dress for her Papaw's birthday and soon I will have them pose together -- she in that dress, Ralph Lauren Baby, a gift from an old and dear friend -- and he in the suit his children bought him for Christmas.

I know you can't wait. But you'll have to.

And that is all for now.

=0=0=0=

Happy Monday ~ Happy Groundhog Day