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coffee grinders are hard to find
Sunday, September 3 2017
It was a rainy day, and a consistently rainy one at that, meaning there really was no pause in the rain allowing me to take the dogs for a walk. At some point, though, the rain was coming down lightly and I just headed out into it, and (surprisingly) not just Ramona joined me; Neville did too! He's the most rain-shy of all our creatures. With him walked, I could finally take him to Woodstock to drop him off with Gretchen at the Golden Notebook, where he could be the bookstore dog for the rest of her shift. The place was mobbed when I arrived, and Gretchen was being pulled in all directions. I would hate a job like that, but Gretchen thrives on that sort of thing.
A couple months ago I'd taken delivery of dried ephedra, shipped straight from China. It's semi-illegal in this country, though it's still permitted for "traditional Chinese" practicesW. I'd tried drinking a tea made from the woody stems, but the hoped-for stimulant effects were weak at best. So the other day I tried chopping up the stems in a coffee grinder. The fluffy material resulting from that operation made for a much richer tea, with a bit of a bitter flavor as well as a surprising note of sweet. It also had real stimulant effects. Grinding it up before making tea was clearly the way to go. But when Gretchen sensed that I'd used our coffee grinder for something alien (she'd heard it, though the noise it had made was unusual), she insisted I clean it out so it wouldn't taint our coffee. Fair enough. So I did. Today, before setting out on the mission to drop Neville off at the bookstore, I'd made some more ephedra tea, immediately cleaning the coffee grinder afterwards. Clearly, though, I needed my own grinder just for this one job. So that was what I was looking for on the drive out of Woodstock. I stopped first at the CVS drugstore to see if they sold a coffee grinder. They had a cheap little food processor for $16 that I should've bought, but no coffee grinder. As for the Tibetan Center thrift store, they never have anything you go there seeking to get, but they did have the sort of triangular fan one mounts in a doorway (and I've often thought about getting one of those) so I bought it for $4.
Ramona and I continued out to 9W, where I checked the options first in Target and then in Best Buy. (The hope at Best Buy was that I would find one, go to the checkout counter with it, and be asked if I wanted the extended warranty, at which point I would say, "You're kidding, right?") Both Target and Best Buy sold all sorts of vegetable chopping devices ("the Bullet" being all the rage), but none of them sold anything characterized specifically as a coffee grinder. So I went down to Bed Bath and Beyond and quickly found a coffee grinder there, though, after taxes, it was $23. I seem to recall the last one I bought (after I kicked Kim out of my condo in Los Angeles) as costing about $12 in 2000.
I had a hankering for a vegan Chipotle burrito with sofritas, so I walked over to Chipotle and ordered that very thing. This was the first time in years that the guy adding guacaomle to my burrito didn't say that it was going to cost me more, which I've always found vaguely condescending. (I'd get it if I looked like a dirtbag gutterpunk who panhandled my burrito money, but not with lines on my face and streaks of grey in my hair.)
I continued my ephedra-tea drinking ways back at the house, using my new coffee grinder to turn ephedra sticks into tea in the comfort of my laboratory. At some point I looked up Juicero, the ridiculously overfunded juice hardware manufacturer that sold an over-engineered $400 juicer along with an $2000/year subscription to overpriced packets of chopped fruit, the only thing that their juicer can juice. I'd heard of Juicero for the first time on Friday, on the drive to Woodstock while listening to Marketplace, where it was announced that Juicero was liquidating. Evidently their business model was not a viable one. This means that our landfills will at least be spared plastic packets containing the otherwise-compostable fiber from crushed fruits and vegetables.
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