They put real borax in you

After I finally remembered to buy soap, I discovered yesterday that I'd forgotten to buy deodorant. I used to be a lot more organized. I can let that slide, since my major use for deodorant is a vague feeling that I ought to use it; I'm not particularly active even when I'm being active. More important was I'd forgotten to buy laundry detergent. I was down to that little extra splash of soap that isn't enough to do a load, but that is enough it feels like a waste to not use, provoking me to try saving essentially empty laundry bottles so that between two or three there'd be enough for a light load. There never is, but I'm not rational where my laundry soap is concerned.

I went to the apartment complex's convenience store, which is in the midst of heavy renovations that put all the soaps up front. They've reached the point of getting little chips and filling out product and price names, which they've never had before. In the past everything was labelled inaccurately or else not at all. That would ordinarily annoy me, but when it's a small, family-type operation routinely interrupted by the person on the cash register calling back for the price on things, it's hard to get worked up about not knowing what a pack of Eggo blueberry waffles will cost, since I don't buy them anyway.

I got a two-liter bottle of Dixan, and the cashier called back -- several times, because nobody seemed sure what it was -- and the verdict was that it cost S$2.50. That struck me as pretty well impossible, since every other detergent of that size costs on the order of ten Singapore dollars. Two dollars is about the price of a bottle of soda. I asked if they were sure; maybe some dinky half-liter bottle would cost that, and you could see size information getting lost in the process. They were sure of the price, though. The guy who was in back calling out the prices checked, and said yeah, they just had too much stock. So, S$2.50. It still looks wrong. Smells good, though.

In a moment that's sick even for my pop culture-absorbing head, I managed to remember the lyrics to one refrain of the After Dark ``Flying Toaster'' anthem. I dropped one line and mixed part of the first and the second together, but that's still disgustingly good.

Trivia: Of twenty colleges in Pennsylvania in 1872, only one had two hundred students; fifteen had fewer than one hundred students. Source: Rutgers: A Bicentennial History, Richard P McCormick.

Currently Reading: War for the Union, 1862-63: War Becomes Revolution, Allan Nevins.