Brownwood Christmas Under The Stars

Brownwood is gearing up for the first annual Christmas Under The Stars festival. You can read about it here.

I heard some discussion about this on the radio the other day, and interestingly enough, they will be serving Hot Dr. Pepper at this event. Yes, you read that right...not Hot Chocolate or Hot Apple Cider. Hot Dr. Pepper.


Ok, I'll pause for a second to let you recover

As it turns out, Hot Dr. Pepper is a pretty popular drink in Texas. I'd never heard of it before, but I found this recipe. Sounds good, I guess I'll give it a try.

Logistics

Amazon has disappointed me. Indeed, their actions have subjected me to great peril.

We order everything from Amazon. Ok, maybe not everything, but we do order a lot of different things from Amazon because we live in a small town in the middle of nowhere. Using Amazon helps us fight back against high local prices on a variety of items, including toilet paper.

Yup, we order our toilet paper from Amazon.

Amazon has a Distribution Center in DFW, so we can order and it's delivered the next day, maybe two. Amazon sells it in large jumbo packs, similar to what you might find at Sam's Club so we don't have to order it very often. And it saves us a little money.

At this point, you're probably asking yourself why I'm blogging about this.

Well, you see, a few weeks ago we started to run out of toilet paper. We procrastinated a little too long and suddenly we realized we were down to our last two rolls, one in each of our bathrooms. This wasn't a big deal because, Amazon always comes through and delivers in one or two days for us. So, we logged on to our Amazon Prime account and ordered our favorite TP.

The next day it didn't arrive. No biggie. It always comes by the second day. A quick check of our "inventory" revealed that we were still in the safety zone, but we'd need to step things up with our just-in-time (JIT) vendor to make sure we didn't run out of material for "production".

We checked the Amazon website, and to our horror, our toilet paper had shipped from Nevada instead of DFW. OMG! We issued orders to the kids to be extra conservative in their paper usage. Addi obliged us by unrolling half of the kids' bathroom roll down the hallway. Blast!

The next afternoon when I came home from work, this is what I saw in the bathroom:



I checked the kids' inventory and found that it was perilously close to the same condition. I ran to the computer, hoping and praying that by some miracle Fedex Ground would come through for me and deliver our stuff before we ran out. It turns out that our toilet paper was somewhere between Utah and Oklahoma.

What to do? What to do?

Hold it for a couple days? Unlikely.

Borrow from the neighbors? (Imagine what that would have been like... Hey Bud, can I borrow some TP?)

It was hopeless. Realizing that our JIT system had failed us, we finally relented, got in the van, and drove to the place I hate most: WalMart.

Ironically, once we re-stocked with a small 4-roll pack, our consumption dropped.

Two days later, our TP finally arrived and we now are flush with 43 rolls.

Hope's back

After a prolonged absence from blogging Hope finally had an experience today that drove her back into the blog sphere. You can read all about it here.. Here's a picture of her typing away on my laptop getting ready to post her story. This is all still pretty new to her and it takes her quite a while to type up a story like this.