This story is actually most of a month old, but I was reminded of it today and thought it was still worth telling.
So we were at the mall trying to do some shopping, when Tim decides he needs an Orange Julius. Now, there -is- no Orange Julius in the mall. Actually, there's very little of anything in this mall. In terms of clothing, there's very little in petites, and all of it is would look just fine on a 70 year old. Most of everything else is geared at the 18-22 crowd, which I guess makes sense, considering where we are and all. Anyway, there's no Orange Julius. What we do have in the mall is a coffee stand. So I manage to convince Tim that a smoothie from the coffee bar might vaguely resemble an Orange Julius. Although I'm willing to drive to the mall in Roanoke for clothes, I am NOT willing to do it for an Orange Julius. Go figure. Life isn't fair.
So we're in line waiting for this smoothie and eyeing the various over-priced pasteries, giant muffins, etc that seem to be ever-present and ever-overpriced at these sorts of establishments. As usual, everything looks good, probably because everything looks fattening. Then we see this cake slice. It might be a pound cake, but it has this radioactive neon yellow frosting sort of spattered on top, under the layer of saran wrap that is protecting the cake slice from the rest of the world, or maybe protecting the rest of the world from the cake slice, in this particular case. It doesn't look good. We don't buy it.
Later on, still running errands, we're at Walmart. Yes, I know, Walmart is evil. Walmart is also the only place in town that stocks vegetarian salami slices, which are really the only type of fake lunch meat actually worth eating. So we go to Walmart with some regularity, at least for the fake meat.
To get to the fake meat at Walmart, you walk sort of through/past the bakery. I wasn't really looking at what was in the bakery, except that there was this radioactive neon yellow glow coming from one display. So we looked closer, and it was something that looked suspiciously like a pound cake, but with yellow frosting spattered on the top. I guess the frosting looked slightly more appetizing before being smashed into a piece of saran wrap, but we were still highly amused to see that the small $4/piece cake slice in the over-priced coffee shop had begun life as an $8/cake cake at Walmart. Somehow, that's just wrong. If I'm going to spend $4 for a piece of cake to go with my $3 trendy coffee-like drink, it had darn well better have a better pedigree than Walmart!
