Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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   how could Nexafed actually be a product?
Monday, June 3 2019
I wasn't feeling too bad when my alarm woke me up this morning, so I went to work as usual. Still, I was definitely not running at 100%. I felt like my sinuses were producing excessive mucous, though only once did this produce a runny nose.
A highlight of my workday was monitoring the pileated woodpecker via the surveillance camera I'd set up yesterday. The woodpecker (always the female) appeared several times, and I would stop to watch, usually as she deliberated about whether or not to fly out of her hole. I gave Gretchen the link to the video feed (which was permanent only on our local network) so she could watch too, though at some point she had to see her in reality (from the laboratory deck).

In the early afternoon, I drove to the Red Hook CVS to get some supplies. I'd hoped to buy a surge suppressor for my woodpecker spy camera, some pseudoephedrine should the colds that Gretchen and I are developing get any worse, and maybe some simple men's socks. CVS sells sundresses, snacks, and snorkels, so they could theoretically sell anything. Unfortunately, though CVS sells a surprisingly large variety of socks, they're all overly-decorated novelty products designed for women and children and clearly intended to be impulse purchases. The kind of socks I had in mind would never be bought on an impulse. As for surge suppressors, they didn't sell any whatsoever, though they did have powerstrips and extension cords.
The best discovery in CVS related to pseudoephedrine. The last time I'd try to buy some, I'd been at the "Ghettoford" Hannaford in Uptown Kingston, and the only kind they'd carried had been a product called Nexafed, which comes in huge horsepills filled with biologically-inert filler placed there to foil people trying to make crystal meth. I'd assumed that his was the only kind of pseudoephedrine legally available, since nobody would ever buy such a product if the old pseudoephedrine were still available. (Economics lesson: the making of crystal meth is an externality of the pseudoephedrine market, and without regulation to distort that market, nobody will willing pay extra for an inferior product designed to thwart other people.) Evidently Nexafed at Hannaford had been a fluke, and the Red Hook CVS carried good old regular pseudoephedrine, the kind that can be made into crystal meth with so little difficulty that hillbillies can do it in an aisle down at the local Walmart.
Fortunately, my surge suppressor needs were easily satisfied at the friendly hardware store in the center of the Village of Red Hook. I opted for the three-outlet suppressor that could absorb a lot of joules instead of the six-outlet suppressor with USB jacks that could only absorb about half those joules.

On the drive home from work this afternoon, I forgot to stop at the Red Hook Hannaford, so I stopped at Adam Fairacre Farms instead. Gretchen wanted me to pick up orange juice and old fashioned vegetable soup in hopes these would help her with her cold. Of course, once there, I also had to buy butter lettuce, a day-old french bread, two different kinds of oat milk, and Newman's Own mango tango (which, I was later dismayed to discover, contained cane sugar). The preferred Campbell's-brand vegetable soup wasn't available, so I got various Progresso and Amy's soups instead.

Unfortunately, earlier today I'd seen on Gizmodo that the James Holzhauer reign of terror on Jeopardy had finally come to an end. Not wanting to spoil things further, I'd only read part of the article. When watching the broadcast of tonight's episode with Gretchen, I didn't tip her off to the fact that I knew Holzhauer would be losing. But I kept wondering who would emerge victorious, since I didn't know who or how. Somewhere in Final Jeopardy it was clear that the dykey-looking librarian was the likely victor, and when she got the second Double Jeopardy, Gretchen stormed out of the room screaming with delight. She'd been wanting Holzhauer to go down for weeks, and now it seemed possible. The librarian did indeed win, and I think Gretchen was cured of her cold then and there.


A picture of the female I snapped while at work.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?190603

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