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errand to King's Mall Court
Thursday, January 21 2010
Last night Doug (of Doug and Jenny, curators of Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary) recommended that I see the movie Drag Me to Hell. So last night I threw its .torrent into my Bittorrent download client, and by today I had the movie. Watching movies on my computer is pleasant and zero-stress. I watch what I want, and don't feel any pressure. Being free, Bittorrent downloads are unlike Netflix DVDs; there is no obligation or pressure to watch. You're not out anything by not watching. Drag Me to Hell had completely downloaded by morning, so I watched it throughout the day. I'm not a big fan of the horror genre, as it often seems tedious to me, what with all the opening of doors to find nothing of interest behind them. Happily, there wasn't much of that in Drag Me to Hell, though the mystical mumbo-jumbo propelling its plot trajectory represented another species of tedium that I dislike. I mostly liked it for the good treatment it gave the non-horror aspects of the plot, such as the class conflict between our main protagonist and the snooty mother of her boyfriend (played by that guy who is always claiming to be a "Mac"). And any reservations I had about it were canceled by the ending, which amounted to a perfect horror movie twist.
Gretchen had some errands to run in town today, and for some reason I decided to go in with her. We ended up shopping at the Kings Mall Court, Kingston's most dismal shopping center, the grim 70s-era place featuring the Panda Buffet and Marshall's (though we noticed that its dollar store was being converted into an Olive Garden). Gretchen actually had some business to attend to at Marshall's and I had to buy a new battery for the Honda Civic (do batteries really only last two years?), which I could do on nearby Massa Drive. In the end we both reconvened in the deli area of Mother Earth's Storehouse, the big health food store in Kings Mall Court. I ordered a bowl of soup and a portobello burger sandwich. Seeking to add some jazz to the soup, I made use of a bottle of a red sauce called "Temporary Insanity." Usually hot sauces oversell their heat in their brand name, so I used a fair amount (a thimble full), a little more than the amount of Rooster Sauce (Sriracha) I would add to this amount of soup at home. This proved to be too much, as I soon found out. Its heat seemed to manifest in a different register than Rooster Sauce. It seemed like a habañero heat, which acted as a big loud drone under all the other flavors of the soup. I gave a tiny amount to Gretchen so she could understand the nature of my mistake. Nevertheless I was able to eat the soup and even enjoy it.
Later we were trying to get the peanut grinder to work. I'm a hands-on kind of guy, so I gave a push and then a pull to a large metal disk from which the peanut butter should have been emerging. The disk just popped off in my hand and went skittering across the floor, and my left forefinger jammed momentarily into the spinning blade that grinds up the peanuts. Lucky for me, this blade was more of a hammer than a knife, and the anvil against which it pressed was gone. Still, it inflicted a blow to the tip of the finger, bruising the nail. One of the Mother Earth Storehouse people came running over and reprimanded me, which seemed unfair. There had been no sign saying that the part I'd touched was likely to go flying off or that dangerous moving parts lay inside. When you make a tool available for the general population to use, you should make sure the cover to its whirring blades can't just pop off.
Mother Earth's Storehouse is an expensive store, but we managed to take advantage of several things that were on sail, included a box containing twelve bags of corn chips for less than $2 each.
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