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gin to rum
Sunday, August 2 2009
Penny and David were off camping in Quebec, and last night David called to say he thought he might have left his laptop computer in its bag in the driveway because he didn't have it with him. "It was a real Alzheimer's thing to do!" he admitted. So this morning I drove over to their house with the dogs to rescue it in case it was outside. It turned out that it had been safely inside, in a chair, but had it been outside I would have saved the day, because a rain began just as I arrived and it stayed raining all day long, ensuring I would take a bath and watch a fair amount of television. That's one way to spend a rainy day alone by yourself in a sprawling McMansion.
For the past five years at least, I'd kept my laboratory liquor cabinet stocked with a cheap two litre plastic bottle of gin (Crystal Palace or the equivalent) as well as a cheap one litre rectangular glass bottle of Evan Williams whiskey. Several times Gretchen had said something about how gin is worse for a person than vodka or other liquors, so a month or so ago I gave up gin and started drinking cheap rum instead. I get the clear kind that comes in a big plastic two litre bottle just like gin. For some reason cheap rum costs about ten to twenty percent more than cheap gin, but it's still the cheapest, most ecologically-minded way to drink. A lot of drinks can come out of a bottle that size without generating the many cans and bottles that are one of the nuisances of beer drinking. The biggest problem with rum, though, might be that it might be more likely than gin to produce a hangover, particularly when I'm engaging in the kind of unsupervised drinking I sometimes do when Gretchen is away.
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Though orders of magnitude smaller than the number of beer bottles, over years I have generated a fairly large number of bottles from my cheap booze habit. I always keep the rectangular Evan Williams bottles because I keep imagining I can use them as glass blocks in some future masonry project. As for the two litre gin and rum bottles, it seems like a shame to just throw them away. They're a lot tougher than a two litre soda bottle, so I've cut a few up and used them for things like hardware containers and scoops for wet concrete. Today, though, I disposed of a bunch of them in one of the intra-joist bays in the floor/ceiling between the kitchen and Gretchen's basement library. There are some copper pipes running the length of that bay carrying water to the kitchen sink, and it seemed that sealed liquor bottles would be one way to slightly increase the R-value of the space around those pipes, thereby allowing the hot water in the hot water pipe to stay hotter and to retain its heat longer between uses. Of course, if I was really serious about this, I'd blow foam or styrofoam peanuts into that intra-joist bay.
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