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preferring to buy from robots
Monday, July 1 2019
At around noon, I made my customary weekly visit to the Red Hook Hannaford, mostly because I'd run out of peanut butter back at home. Somehow I ended up spending over $50, mostly due to impulse purchases: a Daiya-brand Vegan Harvest flatbread (that is, frozen pizza), and a topical anæsthetic called Kanka for the outbreak of sores currently underway in my mouth. I prefer not deal with a human cashier when buying certain health products, particularly those used to treat embarrassing symptoms like mouth sores. Fortunately, most big stores these days have replaced some of their cashiers with robots. Interestingly, the fact that embarrassing products can now be bought in secret probably helps combat shoplifting. Before the robots arrived, the only way to "buy" embarrassing products was to steal them. (There are, or course, vending machines that sell things like condoms. But they're also robots.)
On my drive home from work, I made a detour (using Sawkill Road) into Kingston to try to retrieve a rent check from the Downs Street house. But the check wasn't in the landlord mailbox, so the whole detour was a waste of time. I'm not sure why it was that Gretchen wanted me to pick up the check on the day it was due, considering the tenant still had hours left to put the check in that box. On my drive back out to US 209, I got stuck in the left lane on Route 28 and couldn't make the exit onto 209, so I said fuck it and kept going straight, which is the way one goes if one is going to the Tibetan Center thrift store. Naturally, that was where I ended up. Not much had changed since I'd come through last time, but there was something I definitely wanted. It was a solar panel designed to recharge a car battery by plugging into the cigarette lighter outlet in the dashboard. The panel was of the size where it might only be able to generate five watts in full sunlight, but that's enough to run a Raspberry Pi (well, maybe not the new Raspberry Pi 4). Rob sold it to me for only $2, and, since all I had was a $20 bill and a $1 bill, he told me to get him next time.
Back at the house, I took the dogs for a walk down the Farm Road, around through the abandoned go-cart tracks, and back home across the forested plateau west of the Farm Road.
For dinner, I put that Daiya-brand Vegan Harvest flatbread (covered in slices of fresh hot pepper from the garden) in the toaster oven, where I had to fold up the edges to make it fit. It was the best frozen pizza I'd had in awhile.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?190701 feedback
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