"They sell baby formula and they sell coffins. You literally buy everything you need from birth to death."

{March 2010}

After just a few short weeks of being engaged, Ashlee and I have hit our first big milestone. We are now Costco members. Getting a Costco membership is a big event. You would think putting the ring on her finger is when things felt official, but no sliding that black membership card into my wallet is when things starting feeling very real. It never occurred to me that we were a “couple” until I was loading our oversized cart with an equally oversized package of toilet paper... As a kid I always remember being in this store thinking about how great it would be to buy one of the 5 gallon buckets of Laffy Taffy's or a tub of red vine's they had available, but instead here I was as an adult buying enough toilet paper to stock every room in a small hotel.
The reason we got our cards was because Ashlee's Dad was nice enough to help us out and buy a bed for our future home. I have bought a bed before, but at Costco it is a little different. Instead of having someone wheel it to your vehicle you're in charge of picking it up the same way you would milk. We had to find one their cart/forklift hybrids and load it up ourselves. I knew king size beds were large, but when you're trying to maneuver your way though crowded aisles full of people in line for free ravioli samples it occurs to you just how large they are. To make matters worse, you know there is no room for error. You veer to the right and bump the display on the end of the aisle? You've got a bulk sized mess. Ashlee and I were laughing the entire time because we looked so ridiculous. If it wasn't hard enough to make it out of the store already, she kept asking if she could lay on it while I pushed it through the store, but I wasn't having it. Eventually, we managed to make it through the store and pay. After the cashier congratulated us on becoming Costco members we were on our way out. As we were approaching the exit to the door I was expecting the man guarding the exit to pull out a trophy instead of the usual Sharpe for the feat we had just accomplished.

Unfortunately, that isn't where the story ends. Taking a bed home on the freeway is an extremely stressful task. The entire time all that is crossing your mind is how the one item that seems to find itself on the side of the freeway all too often is a mattress. I guess giant squares and strong gusts of wind don't play nice. Having Ashlee at my side makes it even more stressful. She has a gift at finding things to stress about and she can take me from being calm and collective to worried out of my mind in under a minute. She almost had me worried enough to pull out the only fail proof way to transfer a mattress down the freeway... rolling down my window and securing it with my left hand. Luckily, we didn't have to resort to that and we ended up making it safely home. Thanks to that, Ashlee had a bed to sleep on, which is a good thing because she needed that sleep so she could be fully rested for our Costco trip the next afternoon.