I went into Costco today in order to buy a bag of shredded cheese (yes, I realize industrially shredded cheese sometimes contains sawdust particles in order to mitigate clumping; I appreciate the extra fiber). I left sometime later with a hundred dollars worth of goods. Dazed, no doubt, by the cornucopia of free samples. I’m pretty sure they lace the free samples with some insidious drug designed to induce consumerism. Curse you, Costco! Your wide and high aisles are so beguiling with their stacks of goods and their white-smocked attendants skulking behind their stainless steel carts.
I never realized I needed a combination power-washer barbecue snow blower. Very handy. Though, it doesn’t snow where I live except perhaps once every hundred years. When it does, I will be ready to clear my drive and cook up some hamburgers at the same time.
Speaking of snow, we need some here in California. Why is the rest of the country getting dumped on in spades and we have nothing except sunshine? California is in serious drought. However, Governor Jerry Brown (why is his nickname “Moonbeam”?) has just declared an emergency and says he has set aside 600 million dollars and change in order to solve the problem. I think he’s going to spend most of the money on funding gender studies classes at all the Cal States and U of California campuses. That should solve the drought.
Speaking of crazy people, I’m highly tempted to write a novel about California bureaucrats. My day job requires me, nay, forces me, to interact with them fairly regularly. Nice people as individuals, but the system they exist in (and enforce on us poor yokels) is stark raving mad. As in Mad Hatter (see: Alice in Wonderland and the old fashioned process of making felt with mercury). I’ve plenty of material to write such a novel, but I’m afraid nobody would want to read such a rabbit hole of a story.