I've made a reservation for this new restaurant on March 1st - to celebrate my return to the sweet life. A cocktail, wine, dessert. Yea! Actually, I'm not really even looking forward to it that much, I'm pretty neutral. So weird.

I've been doing a mini renovation in the bathroom and am disappointed in the lack of fumes related fun. Are they making fumes less toxic these days? Trying to deter those glue sniffing crack babies? Oh well.

 

I have only just grown to accept that I have actually not eaten sugar for over 3 weeks. I actually did it. I have another week before I'm calling the experiment complete, but holy crap! 22 days almost completely sugar free. I haven't craved sugar at all - it's bizarre. If it were to be averaged out, I bet I've eaten at least a candy bar a day for my entire life. That's over 10000 candy bars! But I haven't even craved one once these last few weeks. I'm so baffled. The only time I've even thought about candy is when I want a snack and can't figure out what to eat. Normally I'd eat candy but now I have to think. I've been as happy with apples and grapes as I was with chocolate. Maybe I have a brain tumour or something? How else can this be explained? Even the cheating I've done is ridiculous. The Princess gives me this look like I'm a moron when I refer to it as cheating. I've had a miniscule sip of his coffee which had sugar in it. I had ketchup on my cheeseburger. I had about a 1/4 teaspoon of egg salad which was made with store bought mayonnaise which has sugar in the ingredients. A sip of tea that had honey in it - when I accidentally picked up the wrong cup. The biggest one was a glass of wine when I was out for dinner - which I mainly had so I wouldn't have to explain why I wasn't having one. I'll definitely have a sweet something on March 1st, unsweetened hot chocolate doesn't really have the same kick as the real stuff. Neither does sugarfree peanut butter.

 

Alright, nobody wants to say it, myself included, but I'm going to anyway: there are too many retarded people working at Walmart. It isn't a bad word, it's an accurate one. They're not 'slow', they're not 'alternatively abled', they're retarded, and they can all be found at Walmart. Maybe this is a good reflection on the local economy, that the only people left to work at the Walmart here are bused in, and hey, good for them being independent and all that. But how many is too many? At first it seemed kind of neat and heart-warming or something that people with compassion and crap might feel, and then it seemed trendy because so many seemed to have hopped aboard, and now it's just freakin' weird. There are so many retarded people - alright, alright mentally handicapped people working at Walmart that it feels like Walmart must be doing something really wrong. I mean hey, pink is the new black, and mentally handicapped is the new illegal immigrant underpaid worker. But that completely surpasses a plausible low, right? Even for Walmart?

So the Princess and I enter Walmart and the 'greeter' is busy saying hello to another customer. This takes some time. We're five metres away and she proceeds to chase us down so she can greet us. She sprinted a good 4 metres! Well, her sprint was more of a shuffle really, but a damn fast shuffle none the less.

Between the Princess and I we walked by or had some degree of interaction with: a greeter, a stock boy, the photo guy, two men with undisclosed jobs who seemed to be following each other around, a custodian, and three cashiers. Nine employees, and only one of the cashiers and the guy who seemed quite ready to shoot himself at the photo centre were clearly not mentally disabled. Mentally handicapable? Seven out of nine. That's what, 77 percent? That's a high percentage of retarded floor staff. How is that not at least a little bit fucked up?

Maybe this is indicative of the leaps and bounds mentally handicapped people have made in our society, and that's swell, I hear you. They need jobs; Walmart has jobs. But so does the grocery store and all the other big box retailers, so why the concentration at Walmart? Were they recruited somehow? Is it alright if they were? I want them to have jobs and independence and all those vaunted quality of living things, but I tend to be suspicious of Walmart and this makes me think that someone should be looking into it somehow.

Oh and by the way, for some unknown reason our cashier 'finished' checking us out after only processing half of our items. And since she didn't know how to fix that, we had to pay for the two sets separately. Of course we had to figure this out on our own because while she wasn't mute, she did not speak any discernible language. And she forgot to ring through the spackle. I saw it in her hand, I saw her put it down and ring a different item through. I wondered about this and dismissed it. And ... no spackle.

 

It's the end of day 4 and I haven't been craving sugar at all yet. Weird, eh? I thought I would be scratching at the wrong side of a locked door by now, having barricaded myself away from candy, but not at all.

The first couple days I was really tired and lethargic, sleeping a ton. That's begun to subside but it was really unexpected. I had to pee more often than usual as well, but that too is going back to normal. I wonder what's going to happen next? I wonder if I'll want as much candy as I used to when I can eat it again? Another weird thing is that I'm not hungry at all. I eat, of course, but it's mainly because I know I should rather than because I feel hungry.

So, 4 down, 25 to go.