He'll get a Starbucks card after all

A couple of weeks ago I went to Starbucks to buy a coffee card as a birthday prensent for a colleague's birthday. Unfortunately the Starbucks near work had a computer problem and couldn't encode cards with dollar amounts--two days in a row. After trying for a second time unsuccessfully at the Starbucks I decided to buy him a clock from a nearby department store instead. Thank God I gave him the gift receipt too.

This week the colleague called to tell me that the clock doesn't work and he tried to exchange for a new one. He ended up getting bounced from one department to another in the store because nobody knew where the clock had come from. Finally someone directed him to the greeting card section. Well I could have told him the clock came from the greeting card section if he'd asked.

In any case, there were no more clocks for exchange, so he got a refund. "I'll try to find another item with the money, " he said. I laughed. "I didn't want to give you a gift and create an administrative burden on you to go to the store every day in search of an appropriate item. Tell you what, my first choice was a Starbucks card but that didn't work. So go get yourself a new Starbucks card with the money and you would have gotten what I intended to get you to begin with."

Real life is stranger than fiction. I kid you not.

My little "vegetarian"

After church today, I was broiling hot dogs for lunch. When I announced lunch was ready, my six-year-old said she didn't want hot dogs. She said, "It's meat, which means that it is animal's flesh. I don't want to kill animals and I don't want to eat animals." I said, "What do you want to eat instead? A salad?" She said, "Yes, a salad."

Meanwhile, her nine-year-old brother, decidedly a carnivore, was saying, "But you can't eat so many animals that they do extinct anyway." To which the six-year-old replied, "I still don't want to eat animals. Animals are cute."

By the time I finished washing some Boston lettuce and tearing it into a bowl, my little vegetarian said, "I think I'll have some hot dog first before eating salad."