When I’m at the grocery store, buying perishable products, I’m always careful to check the expiry dates (aka Best Before dates.) I can’t afford to throw food out so I’m always very careful not to buy short-dated stuff.

Especially milk (aka half-and-half creamer). Gotta have some widener in my coffee, or it’s all hot and black and uncreamy. So when I buy my coffee milk, I am very careful to check the date on the carton. The 10% stuff is usually good for 6 to 8 weeks, and I usually go through it in 10 days, so it’s almost never a problem. Nonetheless, I always check the dates.

(I also have other rules, such as I never take the first one or the last one… the first one is half-exposed to the unrefrigerated air in the grocery store, and the last one is suspect by virtue of hiding at the back, so I always take one from the middle.)

Anyhow, so I recently stumbled onto a new conspiracy with these so-called best before dates. See, I brought home a carton of coffee milk, and put it in my fridge. No big deal. The following morning I took the carton out, and was surprised to find that the best before date said the milk was going to expire in a week. I know it said it was good for a month, when I bought it.

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Remember when food and drink had expiry dates on them? Neither do I, but I am certain they did, at one time.

I mean, you hear people talk about it, like you have to drink the milk before it expires.

The thing is, if you look close, there’s no expiry date. Instead there is a “Best Before” date.

I understand the difference, and I sort of understand why. If they said the product expired on a fixed date, and the product went bad before that date, you could sue them (if you were so inclined) for false whatevering. And if the product was still viable after the expiry date, I’m sure someone would want to sue them anyways for trying to convince the public to throw out foodstuffs that were still good, in a conspiratorial effort to make you spend more money blah blah blah.

There are certainly concpiracies revolving around these dates – I’ll cover that in another post however.

So by calling it a Best Before date, they are more or less covered. It isn’t going to specifically go bad on that date. It might, but might not. Maybe it’ll still be good for another week – who knows? All the manufacturer is willing to commit to, is that it will be best if you consume it before that date.

My thing is, what if you have lower standards? Or your budget does not permit you the luxury of disposing of food products that are still acceptable, even if they are no longer at their very best?

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So much going on, but aside from the occasional rant, I’m not focused enough to make complete topics of anything in particular. So, point form.

• Snail babies – lots of them. Clutches number one, two, and four all had a whole lotta babies in them. Clutch number three was mostly a dud. However, I’m not finding myself overrun with baby snails so I assume that the die-off rate has been high after all. I’ve only seen 4 or 5 snails that are larger than a BB and 3 of them are definately from the second clutch. I don’t know if there’s actually a thousand million baby snails hiding under the gravel where I can’t see them, but I figure if they were, they’d have to be getting bigger and I’d start seeing them…
• Winter crazies – as the end of the year approaches, the days get shorter, the dark gets darker, I’m filled with an overarching sense of running out of time. Projects are coming due, crisiis are looming, and stress is building. Monday I was having a panic-attack or anxiety-attack or something, and stopped functioning completely for a few hours. Then there was the insomnia and general lack of restful sleep. By Tuesday the panic/anxiety had subsided a bit, but it’s starting to build up again now.
• Work hazies – part and parcel with the above. Not sure which is the cause and which is the effect. Work deadlines lead to stress, stress leads to crazies, crazies lead to malfunctions, malfunctions lead to missed deadlines, and it’s all this big spiral of confusion and discombobulation.
• Tax mazes – one of the companies I work for is getting a tax audit. I just made the connection, the audit is starting on the 21st – the winter solstace. Also known as The Darkest Day Of The Year. Seems appropriate. And I promise never to say the word ‘nitwits‘ while filling out tax forms, ever again.
• X-mas lazies – not the right word, but I’m running out of things that rhyme. I don’t wanna x-mas. Bah humbug! Hah bumhug! I don’t mind buying gifts for folks, but I don’t have time to shop and don’t know / can’t remember what people want. And I don’t want anything tangible (though I’d really like More Time.) I just want to cancel the holiday this year. The only part of the tradition I care to maintain is the Ice-Cold-Beer-on-a-Hot-Xmas-Morning. And maybe some hors-d’oveurs from M&M.

That’s about it for now. No pics or illustrations, no time.

There are some things that just go great together. Peanut Butter and Jelly. Cookies and Milk. Guns and Alcohol. Laptops and Driving. Ok I might have made one of those up.

What follows below though is not made-up. This is a real product, as near as I can tell, that you can really buy.

Click the image to order your own Laptop Steering-Wheel Desk from Amazon! Be sure to check out all the customer-supplied photographs of the product in use, and read the customer reviews. If that doesn’t convince you to buy one of these for everyone on your x-mas list, then nothing will.

(Found this through ThatWillBuffOut.com)

Roughly speaking, more or less, it’s been about a year since I started taking my mind-altering drugs – a year of cryptospam.

Originally I was just taking one of these a day. Then after a couple months, it went up to two a day. Two a day seemed good, worked well for several months. By well, I mean, you know, stable, steady.

Then lately, like end of October / beginning of November, I started having wild mood swings. One day I’d be up, bouncing off the walls, everything was cool. Then the next day or two or twelve, I’d be down, really morose, wondering what was the point of anything.

It was pretty messed up.

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Other people have bad hair days. I do too, frequently. Sometimes though, it’s worse than that. Some days, my hair is just completely mad.

I mean insane – when it’s really troubled, my hair will shout obscenities at strangers. It mumbles to itself on busy street corners.

Some people stare, others just furtively glance then look away, not wanting to participate in the unruly embarassment. Parents whisper to their children, “Look away. It’s unwell. Don’t stare.”

I attribute all this to a handful of separate issues – each one, on its own, wouldn’t be too bad. But together, they are greater than the sum of their parts, and my hair really has the deck stacked against it.

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Doing the accounting for three businesses plus my own self-employedness, I tend to fill out a lot of tax forms on a regular basis. Today while doing three sets of tax forms for one of the two levels of sales tax, I suddenly had the following paranoid thought:

Can the government detect how many times you said the word Nitwits while filling out their forms?

Not that I was saying it a lot mind you… and I certainly wasn’t referring to them. It was completely unrelated. Honest.

I envision there is some kind of machine that the tax forms get fed into… obviously it scans the paper to work out how much money you owe them, and also analyses your handwriting so they can tell if you need to be put on some sort of watch-list… but does it also have the ability to extract audio data that the paper was exposed to?

I’m going to be up all night worrying about this now…