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- 25 bottles of bubble bath
25 bottles of bubble bath
December 7th, 2008 by witherow
This Saturday was the annual Greenville Christmas parade. As is tradition, Bob Jones University builds and mans a float for said parade. And as is tradition, it is my department (specifically, my boss) who must spend weeks ordering giant light bulbs and setting up the amplifiers and building snowmen out of liquid foam and pretty much building the set from scratch.
So these past couple of weeks we’ve all been helping out how we can. This year’s float featured artificial snow machines, and so I was sent to Wal-mart to pick up the “snow” ingredients as well as a few other items.
We needed four gallons of each of three ingredients. The distilled water was easy. You just go to the bottled water aisle (OK, why do we even have a whole bottled water aisle? Are there really so many ways to put water into overpriced bottles that we need dozens of varieties??) and pick up four jugs of distilled water, each containing one gallon.
Next on the list: isopropyl alcohol. That wasn’t so easy, because Wal-mart didn’t have gallon jugs of that. The largest bottles they had were quarts. And they were all on the bottom shelf. Of course. So, glancing over my shoulder at other customers and trying to look casual, I got down on the floor and proceeded to load 16 bottles of isopropyl into my cart.
Last ingredient: bubble bath. Specifically, Mr. Bubble bubble bath, because Mr. Bubble bubbles are the best for snow. Or so I was told. (Incidentally, when my boss was giving me the list of things to buy, he just said to get Mr. Bubble. Which somehow I was confusing with Scrubbing Bubbles. Which is like toilet cleaner. Which made me wonder why we would be shooting it at the children riding the float. But thankfully he set me straight and thus averted several awkward lawsuits.)
So I find myself in the bubble bath aisle. Mind you, I never have had a bubble bath in my life, so I have no idea where to look for the venerable Mr. Bubble. Having come to the end of the aisle, I happened to turn around and—lo and behold, yea verily—Mr. Bubble. In teeny tiny bottles.
All in all, to make four gallons, I had to fill my cart with 25 fluorescent green and bright blue and hot pink bottles of bubble bath. (If anyone from the Greenville Wal-mart is reading this, um, you’d better go restock the Mr. Bubble shelf. Because I took it all. Every last one. It was almost Grinch-ish of me.)
So now I am wheeling around a cart filled with an army of Mr. Bubbles with reinforcements of isopropyl, and I realize how poorly I have planned because I still have several things on my list. And wouldn’t you know, all of the items are spread randomly throughout the store.
I lug the Mr. Bubble to the garden center to find charcoal for the snowman faces. I lug it to the hardware section to find staple gun staples. I lug (and in case you were wondering, it was heavy and made the cart really hard to navigate) it to the Christmas section, the craft section, and finally the produce section to get carrots for the snowman noses.
And as I was lugging, I tried to come up with things to say if anyone asked me about what seemed to be unconventional purchasing habits.
Things I could have said (with recent input from a few of my friends):
1. It’s for my swimming pool. It’s going to be WICKED AWESOME!!
2. Well, my family’s coming to visit, and I read bubbles are good de-stressers …
3. Bubble bath stock … that’s where the real money is.
4. Bubbles bubbles bubbles bubbles! My bubbles! (this one would work best if paired with a slight facial twitch)
5. Bubble bath? Aw man, I thought this was vanilla extract …
6. The Reedy River will never be the same. Ah-hahahahaha!
7. Bubble bath? Um, what bubble bath?
Disappointingly, no one asked, though I did get an odd look or two. And no burning cars crashed into my trunk on the way back to campus (which I had wondered about, seeing as my trunk was filled with rubbing alcohol and charcoal. I would imagine a fiery crash could result in a gigantic flare-up, possibly an explosion, and the distinct possibility of little flaming bubbles in the night sky. Hey, don’t you ever wonder about stuff like that?)
Thankfully, there were no exploding cars and the Mr. Bubble made it to the parade safely.
If you accidentally got on this page because you Googled “bubble bath,” “Scrubbing Bubbles” or “exploding cars,” thanks for reading. You may go back to your surfing now, hopefully somewhat entertained. Check back again some other time. Tell your friends.
And I hope you find some really wicked awesome pics of exploding cars.
Posted in Uncategorized | | | 2 Comments
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on December 8th, 2008 at 6:27 am
Emily, You are hysterical. Thanks for providing me with a Monday morning laugh. I looked in the wonderful Greenville News for a photo of the float and didn’t see one. Out of the 200+ photos or so. I was disappointed.
on December 13th, 2008 at 7:15 pm
There were a few pix. I put them up on Facebook, although that was probably illegal and will likely get me fired and banned from future floating.
Here: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=88010&l=4d715&id=544676292