What you need to buy before getting snowed in

The weather people are telling us that this rain we're having right now? It's going to turn into snow overnight. A lot of snow. Big, piled up bunches of it throwing itself heedlessly down from the sky, unmindful of the fact that I have to teach Sunday school tomorrow morning and tomorrow night is the youth group's Christmas party....Mother Nature is such a bad hat.

Having heard of this incoming weather system well in advance, I and three million of my fellow townsfolk all went to the grocery yesterday. I totally enjoy peering into other people's shopping carts as we all stand impatiently in line, shifting from foot to foot, anxious to get home and hunker down.

When I go to the grocery before a big snowstorm is forecast, here are the things I expect to see in people's carts: milk, bread, eggs, soda pop, beer, snacks and toilet paper. Since I was at Aldi and they don't have a great selection of beer, I didn't see so much of that, but the snack and cookie aisle was taking a severe beating, the milk supply was decimated and the eggs and bread were noticeably lighter on their respective shelves. But the one thing that was just about gone? Toilet paper. Aldi usually has pallets of toilet paper stacked up about waist-high, but yesterday the display was only about two packages high at best.

It occurred to me that a bunch of other people must have had an experience like my husband and I did when there was a really heavy snow in the first couple of years were were married and I went to the store and bought everything in the world to make us comfortable while the roads were being plowed, shoveled and salted, except for toilet paper. We ran out of that first, then we ran out of tissues and then we ran out of paper napkins and then we ran out of paper towel and it was just so badbadbadbadbadbadbad....