One Hour Photo

     Sorry for being late on this update, dear readers. I  was out of town for the week of spring break, Princess Consuela Bananahammock (as always, names have been changed to protect those that claim to be innocent) and I took the kids to Grand Forks, North Dakota to visit some old friends we don't get to see nearly enough. The second winter in NoDak sucks every bit as much as second winter here. (I find it ironic that I posted a blog about the weather in Montana only to immediately go visit someplace that turned out to be worse.)

    While we were out of town for that break, we had some renovations started in our home, and I returned to find the house torn to pieces and without access to indoor plumbing of any kind. Over the last few days, we have slowly been putting rooms back together, and the renovations are almost complete, but the last room to be finished is the laundry room. (long aside here. A quick google uncovered that the goddess of laundry, actually the goddess of cleanliness in general is Hygieia. [Her name is the source of the word 'hygiene'] So from now on, when you face a mountain of laundry, you can shake your fists at the heavens and scream "DAMN YOU HYGIEIA!!") 

Nothing says 'Hygienic' like feeding a snake on your lap.

    There is a perfect storm of laundry in my house right now. With the laundry room out of commission, four full suitcases of dirty laundry, and a week (or two) of procrastination on my part before leaving for NoDak, we are very nearly out of wearable clothing. (I am, in fact, at this very moment wearing basketball shorts as boxers because I have no underwear.) None of this has anything at all to do with the story I want to share today, just explaining why I'm so late posting this.   

    This particular event happened a few years after Princess Consuela and I got married. One thing that anyone who knows Princess Consuela will tell you, is that she likes to take pictures. Like lots of pictures. Of everything. She was taking pictures of her food before it was cool. 

    In late 2009, we were living in Havre Montana. Princess Consuela was doing her clinicals at the hospital, I was taking a few courses at the local University, but mostly just being useless. The princess had been contemplating getting her digital pictures printed for several months. (This was during that nebulous time with cameras when people would still print most of their pictures they wanted to keep, not just shuffle them from device to device forever.)

Gone forever is the dramatic reveal in the darkroom.

    At this point, we had been together for 6 years. That's six years of road trips, barbecues, birthdays, holidays, new outfits,  basically anything you could imagine, captured as ones and zeros on her hard drive. (to this day, one of her greatest fears is losing all her photos in a computer crash) One fateful day, Princess Consuela decides the time has finally come to have all of these pictures finally printed out, so that she can make a full encyclopedia's worth of photo albums and scrapbooks.

    So she does some internet searching, and she discovers that the local Walmart has a feature where you can upload your digital pictures directly, and pick them up printed from the store. (convenient right?) So Princess Consuela uploads all her photos to Walmart. Literally thousands of photos. Every. Single. One. Then she clicks the little box that says "One Hour Photo" and hits 'Submit'. No extra charge, no file size limit. Just arbitrarily promised to be ready in an hour.

    At this point, I can only imagine the photo department Walmart employee losing their shit. I don't know who put that button their website, but mistakes were made.

    We didn't show up at the store 60 minutes later, demanding our photos.  We watched some TV, we had a dinner out. Perhaps three hours later we walk into Walmart, ready to grab a few groceries and pick up these photos. But as we walk in, we are stopped by a young woman. She places her hand on my shoulder gently and says, "Your order isn't ready yet."

    This woman wasn't wearing a Walmart vest, she didn't have the khaki pants and blue shirt, nothing that indicated in any way that she worked there. My mind went blank trying to think of who this woman was, how she knew me and how she knew I had ordered anything at all. But slowly, it dawned on me, Oh! This must be the woman who works in the photo department. She recognized us because she has been staring at us for the last three hours. She knows us, man.

    

Your order isn't ready and you should go.

    Another hour later, we headed home with our photos, laughing all the way home about the poor woman whose night we had inadvertently destroyed. 

    I will try to get next week's blog out on time. In the meanwhile, I've got lots of laundry to do. DAMN YOU HYGIEIA!!