March 14th, 3/14, or 3.14 if you will, is International Pi Day. It’s a day for annoying math nerds to show off how many decimal places they have memorized pi to and for normal people to have an excuse to eat a slice or three of pie. Guess what group I belong to?
I do have a story about pie. Like many of the stories on this site, it involves my good friend Ray. I was visiting him in January of this year and Ray was a feeling a bit peckish. He asked his wife Nancy if there were any ice cream sandwiches left and there were not. He looked crestfallen when he realized there was no dessert to be had, so I volunteered to venture out into the cold snap to procure some in short order.
Saying “in short order” was rather optimistic.
The debit machines were down at No Frills in Leduc thanks to the extreme cold. Okay, fine. I headed over to Safeway. Also down. I went to Sobeys. Also down. Well, shit. I rifled through my wife’s van that I was using for this trip to find the emergency cash stash and it was not there. It turned out that she used it on a previous trip with her mother and I would have to find a bank machine. Hopefully, some were still working.
CIBC’s ATM was down. TD was down. RBC’s machine was online and coughed out some cash, but it cost me an extra three dollars. Cash in hand, I headed back to No Frills to pick up the desserts I had put back in the freezer.
Unbeknownst to me, Ray was in a full-blown panic at this point. He was worried that he had sent his friend with a bad heart out into the worst cold snap in half a century and something had happened to me because I was taking too long for a short run to a nearby store and I was not answering my phone. So he started frantically texting my wife who was texting me. ARE YOU STILL ALIVE? Yes, damn it.
Ray was bug-eyed by the time I got back to his place with two pies and three buckets of ice cream. (I couldn’t decide which flavour he would like best, so I just grabbed a bunch.) I spent a couple of minutes getting lectured about checking my phone more often before he calmed down and had some pie and ice cream. I think it took a second helping of pie and ice cream to calm him down more.
Alberta, 2024-03-14
Alberta, 2024-03-14
Pie can fix almost any problem, even Ray’s. That’s why it has its own holiday. Well, that and math, but no one sane cares about that last one.
This diary entry’s images are courtesy of my Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra.
