They put real borax in you

[austin_dern]

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.

Comments

[porsupah.livejournal.com]

everything was labelled inaccurately or else not at all

Ahh, like the 7-Eleven by one place I inhabited a few years ago.. every time I went to pick up Sapporo, it'd be a different price. Sometimes $2.39, sometimes $1.89.. I think it formed something of a Gaussian distribution, overall.

Someday, I'll discover where California Redemption Value on bottles goes. In Oregon, the system was boringly straightforward - if a place sold such goods, you could take the bottle back and receive the 5 or 10¢ deposit.

Last time I moved, I'd only used about half the box of laundry detergent, so I just left it with the others in the house. It surely wouldn't go to waste, and taking half a box of detergent a third of the way around the world did seem a tiny bit pointless. Perhaps a detergent connoisseur would've been appreciative.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I tend to abandon cleansers when I move apartments, which admittedly isn't that often. It's just easier to pick up the laundry detergent and such that I need on the fly than tape or bag up endless loose powders.

Stuff like half-liter sodas seem to always cost different prices here, but that's just because there's invariably a sale or discount or promotion going on and at some point I just stop paying attention to them. Even when it's marked there's a point where it's not worth the effort to buy two cans of Coke Light with two Violet Crumble bars just because it saves a net of fifty cents total.

[xolo.livejournal.com]

provoking me to try saving essentially empty laundry bottles so that between two or three there'd be enough for a light load

The way to deal with that is by selecting one bottle as the 'keeper', then washing out the others with small portions of warm water, and pouring that into the keeper. You'll end up with a bottle completely full of watery detergent solution, and you just dump the whole thing in all at once. That way, you collect that little bit that stays in the bottom of the bottles, that you can otherwise never use.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I do rinse out to get the last of the soap, but I leave them in separate bottles. I'd rationalize that by saying that way I know when I have the equivalent of a full undiluted scoop, but really I'm just too lazy to do it piecemeal.