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Gold Emblem cashews
Sunday, June 16 2019
Early this afternoon, I did a final clean-up and then painted the steps down to the basement. I did it in two passes, first concentrating on the risers and the sides, places where cats (or I) would be unlikely to step. Later I would put up plywood pieces to block cat access to the basement stairs and then do the rest of the painting. But before I got to that second step, Gretchen sent me a message saying she needed more copies of her new poetry collection Visiting Days at the bookstore in Woodstock. So I loaded up Ramona and drove straight there. When I got out of the car, I let Ramona out of the car without any leash (as I sometimes do even in a busy place like the center of Woodstock). She immediately ran into a nearby store just to meet another dog. The dog in questions was a thin, sleek, short-haired black dog, and i didn't even notice if it was male or female. I was sort of in panic, you see, and didn't want Ramona causing trouble. In recent years, you see, Ramona has been reliably horrible to dogs whom she doesn't know, but in this case she actually seemed to want to make friends.
At the Golden Notebook, the door wide open to the street, so Neville ran out to greet both Ramona and me. It seems he has become the sort of dog one can trust not to run out into the street or wander off, both things he'd been known to do in the past. I gave Gretchen her books and didn't stick around because my car was blocking a driveway. When I went to leave, Neville jumped in the car. It seems he was done being a bookstore dog for the day, so he joined Ramona and me for the ride back to Hurley.
Gretchen is battling another case of poison ivy rash and had been wondering if there was something stronger available over the counter than 1% cortizone cream. It turned out, though, that 1% is maximum strength. After making this discovery in the Woodstock CVS, I decided to buy the gel version instead of the cream on the chance that the gel is more bioavailable. I also got a can of cashews, opting for the Gold Emblem brand instead of Planters, since it was half the price. What a mistake! Experience has taught me that brand loyalty is foolishness, but (at least when it comes to nuts), there are lots of factors to consider beyond price, and that complexity can occasionally be neatly encapsulated in a brand. The Gold Emblem cashews were so obviously stale that it's hard to imagine any company being proud to slap their logo on the can. But that's the thing about a logo like "Gold Emblem." It should be a dead giveaway that it sounds like the description of what a quality logo should look like instead of, you know, actually being a quality brand. My guess as to why these cashews were so cheap was that a tractor trailer full of cashews was left forgotten in a parking lot for four months in the hot Savannah sun, and when they were finally discovered, all that could be done with the cargo was sell it for pennies on the dollar to an off-brand wholesaler liked Gold Emblem. After eating no more than a tablespoon of them, I gave a fair amount to Ramona and Neville.
This was, I should note, the second time I'd been burned by off-brand nuts sold at drug stores.
Unsurprisingly, I stopped on the way home at the Tibetan Center thrift store, where I bought yet another shaving mirror, a set of VTech DM221 audio-only baby monitors, and a half-inch brass boiler drain. I wanted that baby monitor so I could remote monitor the sounds of the woodpecker nest from however far the DECT-6.0 technology can transmit. Unlike my woodpecker video feed, which is available on the internet, this system relies on non-IP (tha is, internet-protocol) technology. (According to some research I conducted later from the bathtub, the easiest and cheapest way to make my Raspberry Pi also capture audio would be to install some sort of USB dongle.)
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