January 22, 2021
Dear Everyone:
I have always made it a practice to avoid going
into Costco between Thanksgiving and New Year’s.
It just doesn’t seem safe with all those people shoving oversized
shopping carts around in a kind of manic Holiday frenzy.
And that’s not even mentioning the horrors of the parking lot
outside.
Then came the Pandemic and suddenly people were
standing outside the building waiting to get in.
Of course, they were keeping a “safe distance”.
Those carts are nearly six feet long by themselves.
I saw no reason to participate at the time.
That, needless to say, was nearly a year ago.
A couple of weeks ago, I felt it might be safe
now, so I ventured in just to see how things were going.
The crowds were far fewer, to be sure.
And no one was helpfully offering tasty samplings of various food
items.
The first things I saw were, naturally, flat
screen televisions literally bigger than I am.
Seriously. Where
would you put such a thing?
However, not far from the gigantic TVs I spied
big jugs of my preferred brand of fabric softener.
The kind of containers that come with a sort of spigot on one
end. The idea is that you
lay the thing on its side and use the spigot to dispense an appropriate
measure for a load of laundry.
Not that I use such spigot-endowed vessels in
my laundry. There’s no room
for such a large tank of fabric softener, or detergent, in the closet
that houses the washer and dryer.
Instead, I keep some much smaller bottles on the bathroom counter
across the hall from the closet.
I refill the bottles when necessary and keep the
economically-sized containers elsewhere.
If for no other reason than I wouldn’t need to
buy softener for quite a while, I decided to indulge in one huge cask.
The price looked acceptable.
The tricky thing about buying huge quantities at a place like
Costco is determining if the price really is a bargain, or just looks
like one.
Later, I had an opportunity to identify the
cost of a somewhat smaller bottle of the same softener at my usual
grocery superstore. By
comparing the cost-per-ounce of the gigantic vat from Costco to the same
from my usual place, I estimated that I saved a whopping 2¢ per ounce.
With the vat sloshing in at 165 ounces, that came to a savings of
(drum roll please) $3.30.
Add that to the $12 I saved on two-dozen boxes of my preferred brand of
facial tissues and it all came to a total savings of around $15.00.
This comes to roughly one-fourth the cost of a
year’s membership. That’s
the other thing to keep in mind.
A year’s membership is around $60.
If I don’t save at least that much each year, I haven’t really
saved anything.
In other news…
I went up to “Jeannie’s” place last week.
She needed some help with her smartphone and with the purchase of
a new laptop computer.
Her previous laptop, approximately seven years
old, and running on Windows 7, had finally given up the ghost.
Actually, the wireless transceiver had died, so the computer
could no longer link up with her household network; and that was the
same as dead as far as “Jeannie” was concerned.
I firmly controlled myself and did NOT say, “I
told you so.” Truth is, I
had been warning her for months that she needed to replace the (very)
old machine and get up to speed with the newer Windows 10 operating
system before it became absolutely necessary.
So we would go shopping for a new laptop.
But first, we wanted to have some lunch.
There is a locally-owned restaurant in Walnut Creek that offers
what might be called “comfort food”.
The usual burgers-and-fries, sandwiches, baked chicken pot pies,
and so forth. What we
weren’t sure about was if it would be open.
With the high number
of Covid-19 infections in Contra Costa County, some restaurants survived
by offering outdoor dining.
This was OK in the summer time, but it’s winter now.
However, last weekend boasted temperatures in the 70s, in which
case we could comfortably eat on the patio.
But the county had cracked down again, so we
bought sandwiches-to-go and took them back to “Jeannie’s” place.
“Jeannie” sat on her “sofa” with her sandwich in her lap.
I used an “ad hoc” table in the form of an unopened 12-pack of
toilet tissue. Fine dining
at its best.
In due time, we ventured out to the Big Blue
Electronics Warehouse Store, where “Jeannie” dragged her ancient laptop
with her to look for a keyboard that was closest to the one she had.
Some people are interested in type and speed of the processor,
how much Random Access Memory (RAM) is available, size of screen, that
sort of thing.
The only thing “Jeannie” cared about was where
the Home and Delete keys were located.
A lesson in keeping one’s priorities in the
right place.
Love, as always,
Pete
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