Went to a great wedding this weekend. Man, do I love weddings. First you have excuse to have everyone you know stay in the same place for the weekend. Then there are the free dinners. Since we try to avoid being friends with people who do not have good taste in food, we have avoided being fed too many rubber chickens. Another nice touch are those little goody bags into which the bride and groom painstakingly ration peanut butter crackers and little bottles of water. At this wedding, we also got a toothbrush and a little tube of toothpaste, which could be useful after those crackers. They tend to stick to the teeth. I love a good wedding band and a nice set of vows. Be honest: when’s the next time you’re going to see anyone say such nice things about someone else in public, and then hire you a band for celebratory dancing? The answer is never.

We got home Monday afternoon and reentered reality with a trip to the always-aggravating Home Depot. I consider Home Depot the worst store in the world for several reasons. It seems to be staffed by an infuriating combination of retired contractors and Bed, Bath, and Beyond rejects. The effect of this combination of minds is to convince you that it would be worth asking someone for help to decide, as I did yesterday, what to buy to insulate the scalding hot pipes that turned our basement into a fascinating but expensive experiment in microclimates last winter. There’s a chance you’ll get to talk to a former plumber, but there’s also a chance that you’ll explain the details of the ill-conceived project on which you’ve embarked only to hear, “Um, maybe you could use, like, foil? I don’t know, really. I just started, and I work in shelves, mostly. You should find someone else to talk to.”

At our fancy grocery store, the fruit is beautiful. The meat looks nice and clean. The fish doesn’t sit in grayish pools of melted ice and fish goo. But what I like best is that when I ask where something is, someone walks me to the item in question. No directions, no pointing, no grunting. After all, they’re not performing heart surgery. It’s nice to be walked places. This does not happen at Home Depot.

Another difference between Home Depot and the supermarket is that I tend not to return from the supermarket with splinters. A lesson to anyone planning to do a little pipe insulating of his or her own: fiberglass is not just a name. There are fibers in there, and they feel like glass. Careful, my friends.