A Certain Sense of Decorum

My dear husband had a plan today:  to take me to the fort to get my military ID.  Though he said it was so I have access to his military benefits, I think there's a more evil plan afoot:  this means that now I can go to the commissary without him.  As in, grocery shopping.

Homey don't play dat.

Every time we go to the commissary, I have a bunch of retired military guys asking me where inane things are, like apples.  Or cereal.  Or hamburger.  It usually happens 2-3 times during ever trip.  So yeah, I'm not anxious to go alone.  I will say, the service there is wonderful, the selection is great, and it's not crowded, as opposed to Kroger, where I only go when I have a death wish.  What is it with that chain, that every one of their stores is filled with frantic people who fly around, even in mid-July, like there's two feet of snow coming and the fridge is empty?  But I digress.  Grocery shopping is just too close to cooking for me, so I try to stay away from it whenever possible.

So, my Marine woke me up at 5:30am to go to the fort, proclaming his fact that if we didn't get there by 7:05, all of the parking spaces would be gone.  I promptly went back to sleep for 20 minutes.  By this time, he was threatening to throw a trash can at me, a la basic training, so I got up.

I hate morning.

So we jumped in the car and took off.  I was quite proud of the fact that I had remembered all of the documents that I needed, in order to officially be the officer's wife.  We got there, and lo and behold, there were plenty of parking spaces.  Jim made a point of saying that we needed to register the car with security, since we were visitors.  I said "do you know your license plate number?"  He just looked at me and shook my head.  I turned around and looked, then realized DUH, he gets a special plate with his rank on it.

I'm not good at this officer's wife thing yet.

So we went in, grabbed a number, and waited.  One of the clerks busied himself with asking what people needed.  I'm pretty sure he did this as some sort of sadistic gesture, because he asked, and then when the person would walk toward him, explaining why they were there, he backed off and said "oh, I'm not waiting on people.  I just need to know why you're here."  Really?  Pretty soon, one of the clerks called out "THREE," and ;the lady next to me went up to her counter.  The first guy, obviously a rocket scientist, said "I think you'll be next."  I'm not sure if he said that because a) we were the only ones left in the waiting area by that point or b) Jim was obviously holding the number FOUR.  Rocket scientist, I tell you.  His mother must be SO proud.

When they called our number and made it up to the counter, we found that amongst all the flotsam and jetsam, it also had stacks of laminated random cartoons like Bizarro and Dilbert.  I sat there reading them, thoroughly amused, and probably laughing way too loudly at a few of them.  I read a couple of them to Jim, who did not seem amused.  Pretty soon, the girl told me to sign my name (Jim leaned over and said "sign the right name, dear"), then go stand over by the curtain so she could get my picture.  She asked how I liked their Walmart curtain, which was a gray and white stripey-abstract print.  She went into a long discussion about how they had sent her to Wal-Mart to buy a background for the pictures because, as her compadre loudly announced "the white wall made the black people blacker and the white people whiter."  Well.  Isn't that special?  She settled on gray, which apparently doesn't do anything for anyone, because when I got my ID, it looks like a faded tintype, so you can barely make out the picture.  Oh well, it's good enough for government cheese, I guess.

Jim announced this afternoon that since I am now an officer's wife, I must act with a certain sense of decorum.  I'm not sure exactly what that means, but I'm pretty sure that it does not involve inappropriately loud laughter, and the cartoons on the counter were some kind of test.  If that's the case, I failed miserably.  If it requires much more of that, then I'm in trouble.

Hoo-rah.