fish poop air and a new appreciation for trunk space

today, we decided to brave the weekend crowds and scooter to the local wal-mart (wo er ma). we were in need of some household necessities...and also curious as to whether they might have christmas stuff.

we also wanted to get a humidifier, because it's so ridiculously dry here in the winter (seriously...you forget to moisturize one time and you're sorry).
D got to the display first and yelled over the sea of carts and heads..."you want one with a fish in it?" 80% of the humidifiers on display either had some type of Disney/princess/little bear theme, or was in the shape of a cute animal with bear ears. and they had fish swimming around in the water. at first, the novelty was fun (and as a marketing gimmick, it works...people were buying them left and right)...until i started thinking about the fact that fish have to go poo. and the poo gets in the water. and then the water is spewed into the air of your home. so if you keep a fish in your humidifier, you're breathing fish poop air. ick. and the fact that, by design, the water in humidifiers gets used up (example below...the water's really low in this humidifier, so the fish has to stick to the bottom of the tank to stay alive). with so many humidifiers on display and only one salesperson, i'm sure more than one fish has met its death by humidifier-water-shortage. poor fishies.

anyways, turns out they did have christmas stuff (yay!)...albeit fake and slightly gaudy (boo). but we settled on a baby fake tree, ornaments and two stockings for our first christmas in chinar. doesn't compare to our real, delicious-smelling pine from home despot last year, but it'll do.

and then we realized that we had a lot of stuff...a baby tree, a bunch of new guest towels, a humidifier, paper towels and TP, assorted miscellaneous household goods, groceries...and a scooter in a pear tree. we debated for a few minutes whether i should just taxi home with most of it while david scootered, but then we got determined.

somehow, i'm not really sure how, the two of us got all THIS...

home on THIS...

good little scooter. needless to say, we have a new appreciation for cars with trunk space.