Grrr! Ya can’t fix stupid…a particularly frustrating circumstance when it’s your own stupidity you have to cope with. See this ’yere matching set of decorator items?
Welp, I bought that smaller bottle some years ago, when I was running short on cash and felt not inclined to buy a lifetime supply when I really only needed enough to tide me over until I could afford a Costco run. Month or two later, when the fifth-size bottle ran out, I realized it’s one heckuva lot handier to use than the Costco Magnum Size Maker’s Mark Lifetime Special. So I’ve kept it, lo these many years, to use as a decanter. Whenever it runs low, I transfer a little more from the Magnum into the cute little MM bottle.
To accomplish that without slopping any of the Precious Elixir all over the drainboard, I use — what else? — a kitchen funnel.
Funnel. Yes. You use these convenient devices for all sorts of tasks. For example, if you have long hair that you like to blow dry or curl on hot rollers, you can funnel a small amount of your favorite hair conditioner into a squirt bottle, fill said bottle with water, shake the bedoodles out of it, and come up with a killer frizz and split ends control. Mist a little of that into your hair before drying or curling, and you’ll never see frizz or splits again.
The other day I poured a little bourbon and water to go with the amazing chicken and rice dinner I’d concocted. Sat down to take a sip and thought…huh! Something’s off here.
It had a kind of floral flavor. Not awful. But not bourbon.
Glass must not have gotten clean in the washer, I imagine.
So I get out a clean glass; pour another swiggle. Once again: eau de fleurs!
WTF? I think. Somebody’s trying to pizzen me! Note that I still haven’t tumbled to what happened.
Now I get down the giant Costco bottle of booze. Pour a few drops, neat, into the shot glass. Taste.
Good. Very good. Nothing wrong with that.
Pour a few drops out of the short bottle.
Eau de fleurs!
Mixed a new bourbon and water and sat down to contemplate this state of affairs. Finally it dawned on me that even though I’d rinsed the funnel in hot water and washed it in dish soap and more hot water, I must not have gotten all the hair conditioner out. What I was tasting was industrial hair conditioner perfume. Ech!
So, that ENTIRE decanter of Maker’s Mark had to go down the kitchen sink.
Tragedy! The horror!
Fortunately, I hadn’t filled the little bottle all the way up — had only put about 3/4 of a bottle in there. But it still was too damn much of an expensive potable to have to dump down the drain.
Takeaway message: Have several funnels around the house, and dedicate one solely for use with food and drink.
***
And on another front, here’s today’s hilarious happening:
Cleaning lady shows up this morning. She needs some products, so I drive down to the nearby Albertson’s, a venue that I ordinarily avoid because I don’t feel safe in the parking lot. It caters to the slum apartments across Main Drag West, and it tends to be full of fairly threatening white trash — once I actually stood in line behind a guy with teardrops tattooed down his cheek — and you’re almost sure to be accosted by panhandlers between your car and the front door. Some of them even stand right outside the entrance, so they don’t have to chase you around the parking lot.
So I’ve picked up some scouring powder and stuff and, after waiting behind one of the elder idiots who don’t know how to use a credit or a debit card while she sloooooowwwleeeee painstakingleeeeeee fills out a check, asking what date it is and asking three times for confirmation of the amount and then standing there and not effing getting her fanny OUT OF THE WAY while the cashier is asking me to swipe my card in the machine she persists in blocking, I’m finally on the way back out to the car.
Yep.
Charging purposefully (and, I hope, aggressively) across the parking lot, I’m approached by a woman. I figure she’s going to hit me up for a handout. She doesn’t look like the average bag lady: she’s sharp-looking — Latina (I’d guess, or maybe Roma), nicely dressed, handsomely made up. But still, she does have the “My purse was stolen and the baby needs formula” look about her.
She barges up to me and says — wait for it!…
“Hello, sweetie. Do you speak English?”
I say, “No,” and she goes on her way.
Heeeeeee! It doesn’t occur to me to say “Nein. Sprechen Sie Deutsch?” Darn it. I never think of anything until it’s too late.
Marvelous. On this particular day, I fit right in with the WT ambience of that store: I’m wearing cutoffs, an old shirt worn loose so it won’t rub on the sore chest, a pair of old clodhoppers that serve as gardening shoes. I’ve just washed my hair and it’s hanging dry — loose unset shoulder-length hair on an older white woman in public says one thing: “I can’t afford to go to the hairdresser.”
So what’s with do you speak English?
Almost would have liked to hear her pitch…
😆
That is an abomination against bourbon. 😉
And, we might add, against humanity.
That’s a sad story about the bourbon. We have three classifications of funnels, ones used in the kitchen for anything food related, ones used for cleaning supplies (filling up the cleaning bottles with vinegar and water, for example), and those I use in the garage for oil and such.
I’d probably put your conditioner in the second classification. 🙂
Yah, definitely! And three appears to be the number needed. Maybe even four…it would be good to have one for gardening, to handle fertilizers and the like. Next time I’m in a Target or some such, guess I’ll be clearing their shelves of funnels! 😀
Yes, play some “Taps” over the bourbon and hope the bottle can still be rescued.
I have gone from trying to hire panhandlers for work (over 20 years ago) to refusing to look at them. I don’t believe a word they say. Am I just old and cranky or have I wised up?
Don’t know.
Wised up.
A police officer who enrolled in one of my upper-division sections once remarked that you should NEVER give money to panhandlers, because nine times out of ten they’re not spending it on food or shelter: they want it to score drugs. She said almost all of them are drug users.
My plan is to buy a new tiny bottle sometime in the near future — probably whenever the next budget cycle begins. Frosts my cookies, because even the remaining 3/4 of a Costco Magnum Lifetime Supply bottle of Maker’s Mark is enough to last for months. But…it’s surely a lot easier to handle the smaller sized bottle, especially since the stuff has to be lifted down from a shelf that’s over my head.