How to: Make me want to inflict bodily harm on you

Aisling and I stopped by Kroger on the way home from religious ed classes at the church today. We needed to buy some eggs for the french toast I was going to make when we got home, plus I needed to go to the pharmacy and get some lancets for my blood glucose monitor's finger-poky device.

On my way back from getting the eggs (farthest point of the grocery, approximately fourteen miles from the front entrance), I spied a mother with her young child coming towards me. The little girl looked to be about four, and I'd say the woman was in her mid-twenties. They were both dressed in pajama-like garments, which are questionable for a pre-schooler, but just flat-out wrong for an adult, in my opinion. Has our society truly become so lazy that we can't even throw on a pair of jeans and a Colts sweatshirt for a trip to the store on a Sunday? Sheeesh!!

Anyway, as they approached, the mother began to cough, a loud, hacking, tickle-in-the-back-of-my-throat cough. Fortunately, they were still about twenty feet away from me, but still, with the coughing and all? COVER YOUR MOUTH, you cretin! Geez! This is the kind of thing you expect from fourth-grade boys, not from women of childbearing age.

I gave them a wide berth, scuttling around a display of tortilla chips in order to avoid whatever airborne pathogens the woman had just emitted with her unmannerly coughing, and went on to the pharmacy.

My transaction at the pharmacy took about five minutes, and when I left that area to go back over to the cosmetics-and-toiletries aisle where Aisling was looking at the eye shadows, I saw the woman and her child again, en route to the restrooms.

Having already tagged them as Germy & Company, I prepared to remove myself from their immediate vicinity again, but not before I had the chance to witness Germy purging herself of a series of violent sneezes, completely innocent of any form of mouth covering or -- as Kathleen Sebilius would prefer it, elbow covering, so that you get spit and germs and maybe some snot all over the sleeve of your coat that you just got back from the dry cleaner.

"AAAAAAAAAAAASHEEWWWWWWWWWW!!!! AAAAAAARRRRRAAAASHEWWWW!!! AAAAAACHEWWWWWW!!!!!!"

I was so grossed out by that, I actually looked up and grimly met her eye, giving her my best Teacher Is Displeased stony stare. Naturally, she looked back at me with that SUPER INTELLIGENT LOOK some people will give you, all, "Hunh? Whu'd Ah dew? Whatcher lookin' at me like that fower?"

I wanted to beat her senseless with a box of antibacterial wipes, but restrained myself. Because? It's Sunday and the Lord's Day and I think that would just be wrong, on the Sabbath and all.