The Power of the Post (and a Teaser)

Well. I seem determined to transform this corner of the blogosphere into a continual chorus of "I never endorse anything...oh, wait, here's an endorsement!"

Take last week's post, for example, when I admitted that after saying for two decades I'd pay anything to have my groceries delivered, that turned out not to be true. I was irked at Instacart because in addition to a delivery charge (which I was willing to pay), after I'd paid for a year of deliveries there also turned out to be a service fee and a tip for the delivery person automatically added to each order.

I was not happy, and I yanked that MomQueenBee seal of approval faster than you could say "There's no such thing as a free lunch or free delivery."

BUT WAIT! There's a rest-of-the-story to that post! Instacart has rescinded the service fee for Express members! Now we only pay the annual fee, and the automatic tip that can be changed by the customer. My delivery person today even used my loyalty card as requested.

I can't claim credit for this--or can I? May I be so puffed-up as to think that the Instacart moguls read the post preview that I had sent them in the spirit of fairness, and thought "Well, that certainly seems greedy of us, and also MomQueenBeen has so much influence that we dare not interfere with her happiness so RESCIND THE SERVICE FEE! QUICKLY!"

While I may have to have a word with them about consistency in use of loyalty cards, yay for you, Instacart! You've earned, by actual count, five exclamation points in the preceding two paragraphs.

And now I seem to have hijacked my own blog post. This was meant to be a report about my birthday, which was last Friday but I managed to fool all of my friends into stretching the celebration to three days by Facebooking a road trip picture on Thursday with the caption "Birthday trip."

Instantly I received lovely birthday greetings from dozens, and not a single one mentioned my accordion-pleated neck in that shot because they were all focusing on the door behind Husband and me. About half of the dozens also asked for a full report on what was behind that door, so since today's post is already getting too long, I'm going to give you that report tomorrow.

And if the adorable and on-brand polka-dotted soup bowls in today's beauty shot didn't give away where we were, here's another hint:

Tune in tomorrow for the inside scoop on the Mercantile and the birthday! Spoiler: It's another endorsement.