August 10, 2018
Dear Everyone:
“Red dawn at morning, sailor take warning.
Red dawn at night, somethin’ ain’t right.”
Lately, the sunshine around here has been rather orange, thanks to all
the wildfires raging in one direction or another.
With all the smoke in the air, I can hardly see the top of Mount
Diablo some days. Of course,
it’s much worse for people closer to the conflagrations.
It does remind me that I should check my “grab bag” occasionally.
And naturally, there’s the inevitable “Emergency Supply Box”
ready to go at any moment’s notice.
Just in case.
I went shopping at Costco last week.
The parking lot fills up quickly.
All the more surprising when you consider the kinds of
automobiles that you see there.
Sport Utility Vehicles (SUV), of course.
How else would you transport a full
pallet of toilet paper home?
And, as a co-worker once explained to me:
“You need the
four-wheel drive to get over those
speed bumps in
the parking lots.”
What I find particularly interesting is all the high-end luxury cars
sitting in the parking spaces.
Acura;
Infiniti;
Lexus;
Mercedes-Benz;
Range Rover.
What are all those people doing shopping at Costco?
Of course, the whole point is to save money by purchasing in
large volumes. But if you
don’t mind paying hundreds of extra dollars for the luxury model, why do
you need to save money on toilet paper?
I bought three 12-packs of the cube-shaped boxes of
Kleenex that I
prefer. Saved $18.00 on the
whole lot, too. Now what to
do with three dozen boxes of Kleenex?
Store them in the
garage?
The problem with that solution is that I don’t have a garage.
I have a carport, which is about 100 feet from my front door.
Plus, it has no sides, much less shelf-space.
There is an outdoor closet on the patio.
But it’s fairly full with Holiday Lights, birdfeeders, all the
household tools like hammers, screwdrivers, the occasional hacksaw, etc.
And everything in it is quickly covered in a fine layer of dark
dust. Also, rummaging in an
outdoor closet in the middle of the night is not appealing.
That pretty much leaves the “linen closet” in the master bedroom.
Not that it contains any linens.
Instead, I use it to hold supplies like shampoo, conditioner, 16
pump bottles of antibacterial hand soap (because they were “buy one, get
one (BOGO) free”, and so on.
One shelf easily holds a dozen cube boxes, another reason for preferring
that style. Two high, two
across, three deep. That
leaves just two dozen more to accommodate.
This particular closet goes all the way up to the ceiling, which
means the top shelf has two feet of clearance.
That’s enough room for three dozen boxes with enough space left
over for a dozen rolls of paper towels, provided I stack them two-high.
Now the only problem was getting to that top shelf.
I have a large, rather heavy step ladder with three steps.
By balancing on the top step, I could easily twist my hand up
into the closet to deposit boxes and rolls in the right places.
But dragging the ladder halfway through the house each time I
need to get something down from the shelf was, well, a drag.
So, off to the Really Big Orange Hardware Warehouse Store, where I found
a step that folds flat when not needed, and weighs only a few ounces.
Plus it cost considerably less than the $18 I saved on Kleenexes.
The label promised “7 feet 2 inches” of reach, then noted in
tiny, tiny print that this was assuming the user was about
five-and-a-half feet tall and had at least another foot of “reach”.
In my case, wrong on both counts.
Nevertheless, it does make me “tall enough” to reach the shelf and pull
a box or roll out from under the others and still be able to control the
fall of the other items down onto to the shelf.
Sometimes being short can be a pain.
On the other hand, I can stand erect in an
airliner without
bumping my head on the
overhead storage bin.
Life is a balancing act.
Love, as always,
Pete
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