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Nexafed
Saturday, March 17 2018
Gretchen and I got up unusually early, not long after 8:00am, while the sun was still low in the east and filling the house with golden warmth. We started drinking our Saturday morning coffee before 8:30am, and then Gretchen took the dogs for their customary morning walk. For the past several days, Neville has been semi-officially back under the old dog walking regime, going off-leash with Gretchen and Ramona. This is nearly a month earlier than the surgeon had suggested, but our local vet had suggested that this would be okay. And Neville likes being able to pal around with Ramona in the forest, especially as (in fits and starts) the winter unwinds.
Gretchen told me about some trees that had fallen across the Stick Trail after recent winds, so I set out with the big battery-powered chainsaw to do a firewood chore, the first along the Stick Trail in about two years (as I did so, I was listening to parts of the audiobook of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Antifragile). I wasn't out there long (and had done almost no work) before I realized I was experiencing something of a blood sugar crash. I was feeling weak on my feet and dysphoric, a feeling that is usually best solved by eating something rich in carbohydrates. So when I returned home, I ate two and a half peanut butter sandwiches. This didn't seem to help at all, so I lay down on the couch in the living room and tried to surf the web on a Chromebook while Gretchen puttered around in the kitchen making a cake to celebrate Nancy's imminent 51st birthday. Perhaps my problem was caffeine overload, though that doesn't explain the ease with which I fell asleep and napped. After that, whatever was wrong with me had dissipated.
Gretchen went off somewhere with Sarah the Vegan to watch an afternoon matinee at some local theatre (taking advantage of cards they both have allowing them to see an unlimited number of movies in a month). Meanwhile, I turned my attention to painting a picture of Frances, Ray & Nancy's cat. Frances is such a 'fraidy cat that I've almost never seen her (and I didn't even know her gender for a long time, assuming she was a he and that her name was "Francis"). ut I found a nice (if burry) photo of Frances in one of Ray's Facebook galleries, allowing me to crank out this painting in about a half hour:
Interestingly, I used an actual cat whisker (probably one that had fallen off of Celeste) to paint the whiskers.
With that out of the way, I loaded up the dogs and went on car-based errand, mostly to relieve the cabin fever that slowly sets (like a foot falling asleep). I went directly out to the Tibetan Center thrift store, passing a place on Dug Hill Road where Gretchen and I had encountered a seemingly-suicidal squirrel last night on the drive to Woodstock. The squirrel had survived that encounter, but today I saw a dead squirrel very near that same spot, suggesting he or she had been less lucky with subsequent cars. Charles Darwin wrote several books about how this all works, though the survival advantage of being able to dodge cars is unlikely to do much for squirrels in the distant future.
There was a fair amount of activity in the Tibetan Center thrift store this afternoon, but there was nothing that I wanted to buy. So I continued into Kingston to do some shopping at the "Ghettoford" Hannaford, which has a much wider selection of products than the Hurley Ridge one. I got a number of my usual staples, including Naked-brand mango smoothie and a good assortment of Amy's vegan soups. Cinnamon Buns, new vegan flavor of Ben & Jerry's that Gretchen had been trying to track down, was in stock, so I got two pints of that. I also wanted some pseudoephedrine, mostly for help as an occasional mental assist similar to (but not as fun as) adderall. But it turned out that Hannaford no longer sells pure pseudoephedrine. They now sell a kind called Nexafed, a formulation of pseudoephedrine designed to thwart the manufacturers of crystal methamphetamine. The cashier seemed apologetic about it, but I thought I'd see if it would work for my needs. After all, though I use it for off-label purposes, I don't use it as a methamphetamine precursor. Interestingly, though Nexafed is supposed to be impossible to turn into crystal meth, I was still required to fill out paperwork indicating I'd purchased a methamphetamine precursor, suggesting there is still a way forward for would-be Walter Whites.
Sarah the Vegan came over this evening and Gretchen made a big pot of orecchiette pasta in a pesto sauce with asparagus and an arugula salad. We ate it while watching an episode of Shark Tank up in the teevee room.
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