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leftover product from the Christmas season
Wednesday, February 4 2009
One of the things I did in town today was return a over a hundred cans and bottles at the Hannaford on 9W. As I worked, an obviously retarded guy came up to me and started conversing. He told me about how he had walked from Lake Katrine in the cold and that now he was waiting to get a ride. None of these details were particularly interesting, and one of the clues that he was retarded (aside from the brown glass vacancy in his eyes) was that he had marched up to me, a total stranger, assuming that I would want to hear about them. He'd had a lot more experience with the recycling machine than I had and knew just what it took to get it to scan, crush, and then credit me for a clear Corona bottle (which must have dated back to the summer beer drinking season). Hannaford tends to be a dreary supermarket full of marginal people, and it's at its dreariest, most marginal in its recycling area. Still, ShopRite has Hannaford beat when it comes to dreariness and customer marginality and I've yet to visit ShopRite's recycling area (it tells you something that, unlike Hannaford, ShopRite has seen fit to isolate recycling from its main traffic flows).
While I was shopping and not yet dropping, I tracked down a box of dual-layer blank DVDs at Staples. Such disks can store over eight gigabytes of data (twice a conventional DVD), which is necessary to contain some of the OSX installations circulating on the internets. Unfortunately, blank dual layer media cost more than a dollar per disk, which was the outlandish price I remember paying for my first box of blank CDs back in late 1998. The only device I have that can write to or read from these dual-layer DVDs is the Mac Mini.
One final item I picked up while I was out was a 25 foot extension cord containing 14 gauge wire. I intend to use this with my new high-powered electric chainsaw so as to spare it potentially-deleterious brownout conditions. The cord I bought was a leftover product from the Christmas season; it was forest-green and had a couple extra outlets along its length. For this reason it had been deeply discounted. Normally such a cord would cost $20, but I got it for $10, just because people can't wrap their minds around the idea of using a green cord in a month other than December.
Back at the house, the sun was falling towards the western horizon and shining on the roof above the house's ice dams. There was no leaking from beneath the northern ice dam (over the half bathroom), but the southmost ice dam was acting up, causing a regular drip-drip into a plastic container in one of the living room windows. I couldn't help myself, so there I was out on the roof again trying to do something to roll back that several-hundred-pound mass of ice, which had the tentacles and menacing bulk of a malignant tumor ignored well past its first symptoms. The surface of this mass were too steep to set anything on, so I attempted to drive a few spikes into it, but unlike (say) wood, the ice simply shattered in a wide, shallow depression on its surface, refusing to be punctured to any depth. So then I used a MAPP gas torch to heat the spikes, allowing me to slowly press them into the ice. This didn't work very well either, since the holes made this way were cone-shaped and wouldn't support an upright nail. But if the nail could be kept in this hole for a certain amount of time, it would eventually freeze solid. Once I had the spikes in place, I could string heat tape (resistive electrical wire, powered in this case by my brand new forest green extension cord). This wouldn't do much unless I could cover the ice and tape with something insulative, so I unrolled a narrow carpet fragment over everything and clamped it in place. (I tried using water to "ice-solder" the carpet in place, but it refused to stick.) Unfortunately, though, a wind soon kicked up and blew the carpet down. It had been such a miserable job putting it up that I just gave up on fighting the ice beast for the time being. I collected over a cup of water from the window drip by the time darkness silenced it.
This evening Gretchen and I made genuine burritos, the kind one normally has to fly to the West Coast to experience. Gretchen even knew how to roll them up into perfect little cylinders. We each made ours to suit our preferences; Gretchen's had olives while mine had avocado. Mine tasted and behaved surprisingly like a Los Angeles trashcan burrito, the kind whores, drunks, and obscure rock stars eat at 4am on a Sunday morning, but it was entirely vegan right down to its soy-based sour cream.
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