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lighter purchasing in New York
Saturday, October 24 2015
After our weekly coffee, Gretchen headed off for Manhattan, where she would be attending a big farm animal sanctuary gala. Celebrities would be in attendance, and Gretchen would eventually manage to have her second conversation with Jon Stewart. (Read about her first one that happened slightly more than thirteen years ago.)
Meanwhile, back at the house, I set off into the nearby forest (just a hundred feet to so southeast of where the Stick Trail crosses the Chamomile) and cut down a medium-sized dead Chestnut Oak, bucked it into pieces, and lugged it home. 48.95 pounds of it went inside, and 42.25 pounds of it somehow went onto the sprawling woodshed pile.
Later I drove with the dogs out to 9W, mostly so I could buy waterproof plastic molding (the kind used for trimming around the edges of finished wall) from Lowes. (I hadn't been able to find any such product at Home Depot.) I also needed cigarette lighters and peanut butter, though of course I'd have to get the peanut butter at a grocery store such as Hannaford. When I couldn't figure out where the lighters were at Lowes, I gave up and added them to the Hannaford shopping list. But then I couldn't find them at the Hannaford either. Didn't they used to be with the candy, crappy magazines, and batteries right there at the checkout line? I ended up having to go to Stewart's to buy lighters, where they were, as expected, at the checkout. I bought a red one, a green one, and a blue one. The woman who sold them to me scrutinized my face for a moment before selling them to me, saying she was making sure that I am old enough (somehow, even at 47, cashiers don't always automatically recognize me as a non-teenager). It seems that cigarette lighters are governed by the same tight restrictions that apply to tobacco products. I wasn't aware that this was the case and asked if this was new, and the woman said she didn't know, and that she'd only been employed at Stewart's for two years. (That seemed like a very long time to me.) I never buy tobacco products and rarely have a need for new cigarette lighters (which I use for, in roughly this order: starting the wood stove, smoking pot, and starting the gas stove when the igniters fail), so it's possible the restrictions on their sale has always existed during my time in New York State.
Back at the house, I launched off onto one of my Gretchen-is-gone booze, pot, and television benders, all of it riding atop a 120 milligram recreational dose of pseudoephedrine. Time passes slowly when you're smoking pot, and I kept marveling at how early it still was every time I looked at the clock.
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