Making a List, Checking It Twice

I will freely admit, my wife Trina and I are list-aholics. It seems like each of us has a list for just about everything. There is a Christmas list that we follow religiously. There is the inescapable honey-do list that Trina has for me each baseball off-season. There is even a list for us to get paper and pens to make more lists.

There is not one aspect of our lives that there doesn’t seem to be a list somewhere. The problem is, we make these lists then for one reason or another the list gets misplaced. I think the lost lists are just a coincidence but Trina believes in some list conspiracy theory.

I once suggested perhaps she should make a list of the different conspiracy theories she had for the disappearing lists. That did not go over very well and I soon found myself on Trina’s list and that was not a good thing at all.

Today the subject of the list was shopping. Not just any shopping though this was the Thanksgiving shopping list. This piece of paper listed every ingredient necessary to concoct the perfect Thanksgiving dinner.

Reading over the shopping list was like listing the credits to The Food Network. There were tasty morsels on every line. I swear I gained seven pounds just reading the list.

It is not merely having a list that I find somewhat humorous. It is the fact that Trina creates the list and categorizes it by store and within each store the items are listed by aisle number beginning from right to left.

Trina has grocery shopping down to a science. There are absolutely no wasted steps. You visit each aisle one and only one time. You begin at one end of the store and push your cart in a zig zag pattern from front to back. At the end everything on the list for that store should be in your cart.

It amazes me how organized Trina is when it comes to lists and especially shopping yet how unorganized the rest of her life can be. The woman cannot remember to take her cell phone with her when she leaves the house yet she has the store layout of four grocery store chains committed to memory.

I once suggested she was like the Rainman of grocery shopping. My arm still hurts when the barometric pressure changes from where she hit me. I meant it in the most positive way but I guess being compared to a guy that buys his underwear at K-Mart was not as big a complement as I thought.

So for now I watch from afar as she makes the lists and collects her bounty knowing there is no one on the planet capable of making a list quite like my wife.