Bad Manners and Brimstone

The products are there for people to buy. There's no shame in taking what you want or need. Sometimes I will leave the last of something for someone else because it makes me feel good, but it definitely isn't wrong to take advantage of a good sale price! I've taken the last of something more than once. It happens.

About carrots: f the retailer doesn't want people to pick certain colors they should sell them in sealed multicolor bags.

I occasionally run into a similar situation at work. If you don't know anything about email that's OK! There's no shame in not knowing something, I'm paid to help you and I enjoy helping you. Just please take mental notes of what we're doing and don't keep coming in every week and telling me, oh, darn it, I can't remember how to log into my email, I'm so stupid, you'll have to show me again!" And then give a little chuckle as if that self-depreciation excuses you from remembering the simple procedure we have gone over twelve times already.

Edited to add that I meant the metaphorical "you," not anyone in this forum!

I think offering any other suggestions or help at this point would give them the idea that you are admitting you damaged their car, when there wasn't any. I agree with Jem to let well enough alone. I'm sorry this happened to you--maybe the couple has a lot of stressors in their life and are taking it out on you. That's no excuse, of course, but perhaps an explanation.

My late mother used to make a delicious coffee cake that we all loved. Recently I found out that she had been simply following a recipe on the box of Bisquick but doubling the topping. Mmmmmm, it was good.

Quote

What a trial to go thru. Thank heaven for your strong, oak door.

How was Halloween? Quiet I hope.

Sorry for late reply - very busy here!

It was blessedly quiet. I didn't hear more than one group of children, and even they I think were just waiting to be ferried to a Halloween party. Drizzly weather may have helped discourage children from coming out,, but in any case trick-or-treating has been heavily discouraged over here by schools, police, and every other kind of officialdom for years. It was only introduced from the USA a couple of decades back, and nothing similar was ever traditional in southern England.

The American tradition seems to be a very mild and genteel descendant of the traditional northern English 'Mischief Night', in which, well into living memory, children roamed the neighbourhood stuffing combustibles up drainpipes and setting them alight, shooting porch light bulbs out with catapults, smashing the (glass) bottles of milk on doorsteps, pushing lighted squibs through letterboxes, tying fireworks to dogs' tails, rigging devices to front doors which flung ashes when the door was opened, removing garden gates and throwing them into ponds, and many similar merry pranks. In 1948 the Chief Constable of the city of Leeds advised householders: 'Take off your gate and hide it. It may seem a bother but it's less bother than picking it out of a pond later.' This mayhem was eventually suppressed; but there is a deep-rooted streak of recreational vandalism in the British character, and nobody wants to encourage it to re-surface.

Oh, my. That makes TPing people's houses look good by comparison.

My husband is a bit obsessed...

You say that like it's a bad thing.   

Whenever a now-ex-friend would visit me she would change my bath tissue so that it hung next to the wall instead of outward. It was too small a thing to get excited about and I would just always switch it back when she left, but it was a red flag I didn't heed. Midway into our friendship she started showing me how to do things that I had been doing ever since I was, well, an independent adult, as if she felt she was my teacher, and my (silent) irritation grew. When her husband started doing the same thing to me I realized that was the way these people related to the world and that it made them feel superior to others including me. It was hard to break off the friendship because I really liked her otherwise, but I couldn't stand the idea of them looking down their noses at me "teaching" me things.