Alladin's Cave.

Or, as some people call it - Costco's. We visited there today to purchase goodies for our annual Christmas party. I hardly know where to start, as soon as I enter, my senses are beset on every side by electronic wonders, TVs of tremendous size and unimaginable clarity, making my paltry 26 inch box look like a child's toy. Telephones that do everything except inflate your tires and cook your dinner, although I'm not sure if even that is true any more. Last week it may not have been true - but next week? Who knows?
Recorders that may record my life for all I know. Maybe I don't need to do that any more. I'm sure there is a machine that can do it for me, maybe better than I can. Even 3 D maybe old hat soon. When will 4 D arrive? Or perhaps it already did?
Cameras that record stills, movies, sound, all in 2D, 3D, 4D and 10D and all at 50% off.
The clothing is in piles that rival even my wife's in height! And they have almost as many shoes as she does! Impossible you say? Not so, I saw it with my own eyes - today.
Books, cookies, chocolate, of every imaginable flavor, from every country in the world. Surely even Aladdin would reel in his curly tipped shoes if he could see them. I bet they even sell curly tipped Aladdin shoes there.
Don't start me on the food. The food section is the biggest of all, by far. One hundred years ago, no even fifty years ago people would not have believed it. Heck I can't believe it, now! It is impossible to see it all, it is impossible to see even one tenth of what they have there.
As a child, when I went to the store with my mother she would ask for sugar and the shop keeper would ask "How much?" He would then weigh it, make a bag for it and hand it to my her. In Costco you have 20 or 30 or more different kinds of sugar to choose from. The same with bread, milk, cookies, crackers, honey, canned goods, frozen goods, dried goods, bottled goods and even some fresh goods! Do you want regular or organic, fresh or frozen, cooked or uncooked, small, medium, large, extra large, super size, giant size or just big?
And don't forget the pets. There is more variety of pet food than there was people food when I was growing up. Old Mother Hubbard would have had a stroke if she looked in there! Cupboard bare? No bone?
We gave my daughter a vitamin pill occasionally, thought we'd be good parents in case she wasn't getting every vitamin that she should!. If there aren't 5,000 different bottles of pills in the pill section I'll eat my hat.
Want to be clean? How clean can you be? We had soap. Later we had shampoo. Now you couldn't count the number of cleaners there are if you were there all day. Are we dirtier now? As I said we had soap, that's what my mother cleaned most everything with, including my sister and I and the floor and the clothes and the pots and pans. Now there are different cleaners for every article of clothing, every type of floor, every part of your body and on and on.
Can you imagine the number of chemicals in your house? We had one - soap. I bet you could find 500 different chemicals in any house nowadays. There are thousands of new chemicals invented every year and the EPA and whatever other testing boards that there are test at least a dozen of them! Is it any wonder that kids are sick more often in a month than we were in our first 20 years? Asthma, allergies, infections, you name it they got it. And they got a drug for it too. We had Aspirin, oh yes and a band aid sometimes. There are so many drugs nowadays that no one can possibly know them all, including the Doctors. In fact more drugs and medicines are found to be dangerous or banned every month than I have used in my whole life!
When Julia was pregnant with Sarah, do you know how many drugs and medicines she took? None. Not one, not even an Aspirin. When Sarah was growing up we gave her an absolute minimum, maybe some cough medicine, if the doctor recommended it. But we preferred some warm milk or honey in hot water. The medicines that we did have dried up and rotted away mostly. I can remember throwing away the medicines that she had as a baby and as a child when she left home and went to live on her own!
Enough already, time to go to bed. Goodness knows what this Blog looks like. I couldn't sleep so I got up to write something. it is almost 2.30am now. I think I'll try to get to sleep again.