You said you'd meet me there

[austin_dern]

All told bunny_hugger had raised $205 for the Capital Area Humane Society with the charity pinball tournament. She wasn't able to get over there the day after, mostly because we were recuperating from the event. Over the weekend we had other stuff to get to, including a meetup for a new Selfie League, more to be discussed later. The following Monday we had, yeah, another one of these, finals for our first Pinball Selfie League. Tuesday and Thursday she had classes again, and you see where this is getting to be an embarrassing little problem. She wrote a letter and a check to send them and discovered we're out of envelopes.

I leapt into my own ridiculous action. There's this small, old Office Furniture And Supply Store on Michigan Avenue. We walk past it going to our local hipster bar. It's got a sign about how typewriter ribbons and repair are available there. Good to know. They've got an extremely faded old poster for the Fisher Space Pen. It looks dusty. The interior seems to be mostly office chairs pushed up against each other. We can't figure how the place is still in business. And I thought, well, I'm charmed the place is still around. I should give them some business so as to help them stay around.

I entered. The bell on the door rang. A nearly concealed woman sat at an office desk, talking on the phone. I wondered if I could flee without falling over chair packings. She acknowledged me. I apologized, saying maybe I was in the wrong kind of office store. She wasn't sure what I meant. I meant to get a box of envelopes, not, like, desks and chairs. No, they had a selection of those things. A small one, maybe five shelves each six feet long. She picked up a box of security envelopes, one of maybe three they had there. That'd be what I would want anyway.

She --- she didn't ring it up. She started writing out a receipt, on the carbonless-copy pad like you get at the diner. She calculated the sales tax on a solar-powered calculator. She asked my name so it could go on the receipt too. I had figured to pay by debit card from our joint account, it being a purchase for the household and all. And their vintage sign said they took Visa and Mastercard. But somehow I felt like bringing a charge card into this would only make matters more confusing. I gave her a $20 bill.

She rooted through the cash register. It had a $5, and a bunch of singles, but not quite enough. She apologized and ducked in back to have a quick conversation with someone. She came back out with a $5 and I thanked her. I choose to believe they do most of their business with companies by way of purchase orders and invoices and that the petty cash situation is always a bit precarious. She encouraged me to come back anytime I needed office supplies. Anything they didn't have, they could get.

I'm honestly glad the place is there, and that I did my part to keep it going. I still can't quite believe it is, though, and I believe I now knew who provides office supplies to Conneaut Lake Park.

We mailed the check off in the morning post.

Trivia: George and Richard Cadbury established an export department for the chocolate makers in 1888. It had a staff of six. Source: Chocolate Wars: The 150-Year Rivalry Between The World's Greatest Chocolate Makers, Deborah Cadbury.

Currently Reading: Justice at Nuremberg, Robert E Conot.

PS: A Leap Day 2016 Mathematics A To Z: Wlog ... is it a word? Well, it is if you say it is, isn't it?