AUSTIN, Texas, Feb. 3, 2006 — When I go to the store with a particular product in mind, it seems that somehow that product is in short supply. This happened a while back when I found the cardboard cartons for my favorite taco seasoning on the shelf at Central Market (but no packets). And this percipitated the use of a cheap store brand that poisoned us with MSG.

Today I stopped at the Randall's on 38th Street to get the Hagen Daaz Mango Sorbet that Central Market was missing on Thursday when I settled for cornering the market in Wick Fowler Taco Seasoning.

At the 38th Street Randall's today, In the Ice Cream aisle, a guy was putting up the Hagen Daaz products. I found one carton of the Mango Sorbet. It was on sale for cardholders. I ask the guy about some more mango.

"There isn't any. I ordered some for another store, too, and didn't get any."

What are the odds?

Well, I wanted to be able to make three pitchers of the margaritas in case they were popular at the party. So I took the one carton home (along with the pint of half and half I always buy in case a guest asks for coffee with cream). Then I went to the Randall's on Balcones and they had some more. So...what is that? Three stores to get the stupid sorbet? I should have resorted to another brand or something.

I guess I should be glad that some shopping things worked out so well for me recently. To wit:

• We went to World Market to find some cheap dishes that would look good with the food to be served for this dinner party and that we could get thirteen of since we were to have thirteen guests. We found some straight away. And they had thirteen of each. And they were cheap.
• I went to Linens 'N Things and found (amid the chaos that was their store in late January) two very, very cheap (almost a disposable price) polyster round tablecloths fairly quickly and happened by some solid but fairly cheap (sixty bucks for four place settings) stainless that fakes its way well with the nice (and very expensive) stainless from France that we only have twelve of.
• I happened on a deal on some comfortable folding chairs at Costco that will allow me to give up some old and decidely uncomfortable wooden ones and also not bother borrowing my dad's chairs that he has cushions for.

With some luck like that...life has to deal you some aborted shopping to balance things out. Hence the sorbet escapade.

Meta: My threats to not post something for every date in the calendar, go unrealized again. I've had correspondence with a couple of readers due, I think, to this threat. In any case, I had a few minutes, I had something amusing to say (well, that's debatable) and I found it relaxing to do this. But it still remains to be seen whether dailyness will persist.