FIFTEEN POUNDS OF CRAZY IN A FIVE-POUND SACK

My tiny little brain is still trying to re-absorb the week.

Noodle has been alternating between nightmares and needing the potty, Beast turned 3, the Nana had to be hospitalized for a bit of falling off the wagon, yours truly had to blow up his schedule for a three-hour congressional candidates' forum and then get said Nana off to the hospital, and Her Awesomeness has been lost somewhere in a cloud of flour as she attempted to bake Beast a birthday cake as well as a couple of banana breads for the big school bus driver's appreciation day today, plus it's over to Kingston for a lighting part that just came in so that I can fix the living room lights and then off to the Wal-Mart to return some insufficiently flattering Noodlewear. She's not being spoiled...it's just that she's 99th-percentile tall for her age and standard clothing sizes don't work all that often. Add that to Wal-Mart's superior quality control (/sarcasm) and it would have been less of a time-suck to buy the nicer stuff straight off, except that the bank account is approaching Bush-approval-rating levels.

Yeah, you caught that right, I'm doing electrical work. Red's hot, black's not, why is my hair sticking straight up and what's that burnt-flesh odor I'm smelling?

SIGNS MY WIFE HASN'T HAD ENOUGH SLEEP

She just told me "I think I'll hit Wal-Mart with the kids tomorrow."

My wife hates Wal-Mart with the intensity of a thousand suns. Not for any political or labor-relations reasons, but just because it's a freak show. Me, I like freak shows because they're a fount of material for the radio show, but the kids really don't need to see the 250-pound tattooed woman in gold tights telling her troglodytic husband/boyfriend/rutting partner "Now this here aisle is the one I was in the last time I got kicked out."

How far off the bell curve of acceptable behavior do you have to be to get kicked out of a Wal-Mart?

And yet my wife is talking about going there tomorrow - with the kids, on a Friday, before a summer's weekend.

She will need a glass of wine tomorrow night. And a foot massage. I shall provide.

THE MAN IS KEEPING US DOWN

Here come the diaper price hikes, as warned:

Last week we started seeing higher shelf prices on both Huggies and Pampers, and today we're seeing a "sale"price of $9.99 per jumbo that used to be $8.99. For size 3, that dollar increase amounts to an increase of just less than three cents per diaper--about 13%! Most families will need to add between $5 and $10 per month to their diaper budgets, or $60 to $100 for the year.

Click the link to find out ways to get around this fiendish diaper-industrial complex plot. The comments are particularly interesting, with several commenters claiming that Wal-Mart is refusing to honor manufacturers' coupons from customers who stock up on diapers and use multiple coupons. I vaguely recall a Target clerk mentioning this policy to me while stocking up for Beast a few weeks ago, but I will have to test the claims for myself when I head out to buy another couple packages of GoodNites and Pull-ups later today. I'll report back...but if you know anything in the meantime, feel free to drop a comment!

UPDATE: No coupon hassles at Target. Wal-Mart to follow after the snow/ice/rain/muckstorm moves through.

WILL THE LAST WAL-MART CUSTOMER WITH DISPOSABLE INCOME PLEASE TURN OUT THE LIGHT?

I'm racking my brain trying to think of a circumstance where a Wal-Mart shopper might want to read the hyper-wealthy-targeted Robb Report, but I'm coming up snake eyes. And so is Wal-Mart:

Condé Nast lost space on Wal-Mart's racks for upscale parenting magazine Cookie, the urbane and sophisticated The New Yorker and the glitzy oversized W. Self magazine made the cut, but some slower-selling special interest spin-offs got the ax.

Several titles owned by Swedish publishing giant Bonnier, which less than a year ago paid $220 million for 16 Time Inc. titles, are being left behind. Among them: Parenting, Ski, Skiing, Yachting and Salt Water Sportsman.

Yachting? At Wal-Mart?!