So… I had to go to K-Mart to fill a prescription yesterday, and noticed things were a bit… odd, compared to past visits. Granted, I avoid big chain stores like the plague if I can, so hadn’t been in there in a while, but considering it’s 10 days before Christmas the store was freakishly empty. The garden center off to one side, which usually gets devoted to holiday stuff this time of year, was actually being used for stockroom or for selling bulk items. (I didn’t go in, but could see that there were cases of water and toilet paper stacked up) There were sales fliers tacked to many shelves advertising a holiday sale with 50% off or more. Before anyone says “what’s weird about that?” what I mean is that they weren’t official K-Mart fliers i.e. glossy white paper with professional looking colored text but rather looked like someone had made up some ads on their computer and printed them on colored copy paper.

After I got my prescription, I stopped at Lowe’s to look for a small live tree — we don’t like the idea of killing a tree just to have it sit in our living room a couple of weeks so usually if we get a tree at all, it will be a live one. Some of you might recall Newton, who traveled all the way from Arizona to Dallas to NC with us. Newton was retired to the freedom of our backyard on London road the year before last; that poor  tree was definitely worse for wear after 4 years in a plastic pot, and we don’t plan on keeping the next one in a pot indefinitely!

Anyway, Lowe’s was pretty dead too; there were no long lines, few people in the aisles, and the outdoor garden center where the live and cut trees were was a ghost town. I thought it was shut down for the night at first, but the doors were open. I was the only living soul out there, most of the lights were dimmed, and I had the unsettling thought (OK, refer back to my previous post about the insomnia; my brain is working in stranger ways than usual) that some serial killer could jump out from behind the potted cypress trees, drag me down an aisle, bludgeon me to death with a fencepost, and do a little dance afterward, and be completely undiscovered.

Seriously, though; in the half hour it took for me to pick out our little tree, not a single person came out of the building to shop for Christmas trees, or for anything else in the garden center. The little stone pine I eventually chose and took home had been marked down twice and there was a 25% off sale that applied on top of that. I didn’t have to wait in line, which I think is a first for that place. I guess it could have been because it was a weeknight, but usually even on weekdays and when it isn’t the holiday season those stores are insanely packed.  It was a bit unnerving.

Only in the past few weeks have the powers that be actually admitted that the country is in a recession, (though they now also admit it’s been going on almost a year) and most people figured it out for themselves months ago.  Joy and I have been studying the economic situation hard for a while now, trying to determine our best course of action for the future, and from most of the sources we follow, the consensus is that things have nowhere near reached bottom yet. I think good things (maybe finally the end of the SUV fad?) as well as bad will come out of this necessary contraction, but regardless It’s going to be a rough ride. The title of this post comes from “may you live in interesting times” which is purported to be a translation of a Chinese curse (though I think the origin is unverified) and it seemed appropriate; we are definitely heading into some very interesting times.