Continuing the discussion from Jewel Eye: Staring down the beryl (July Mini-Rants):
I’m going to start off the month with a real mini mini-rant but a funny one.
One of my toilet seats broke so I’m looking to replace it. There’s a good one for sale on Amazon for a decent price (on sale) but I can save a little money if I buy “used - like new”.
For a toilet seat.
Used. (But like new!)
What the fuck Amazon?!
(I did not opt for the used one just to save $7 in case anyone is wondering.)
My mini-rant: I was hoping for “August, rant we must.”
That’s a good one.
That is unbelievable.
A toilet seat 
All my family connections on the Find a Grave site have unraveled and I have to contact their site admin to fix it.
Sometimes my online existence is a burden.
I’d guess the toilet seat was an opened package, not actually used.
At least, I hope…
Maybe.
But there’s no way to know for sure…
Many years ago, my mom ordered a packge of her favorite lip balms from Amazon, supposedly ‘new in package’. One of them had clearly been used many times; I think it even had a ‘tester’ or ‘sample’ label on it.
The weather forecast for tomorrow is sunny and warm. Same for the next day. A few days later will be sunny but getting hotter.
Why am I ranting? It’s the “sunny” part. It’s normally a fine thing, but it hasn’t rained here in months, other than a very brief shower last week. Lawns are drying up and turning yellow. We’ve had a bunch of heat waves, which almost always end with torrential thunderstorms as the systems collide with cold fronts, but not this time. Not a peep, not a drop.
Thanks, climate change! For the first time in my memory, we’re in a goddam drought! Although this may partly be a regional microclimate thing – apparently Great Lakes water levels aren’t significantly affected.
Of course, there’s no toilet seat so thoroughly well-used as the one in any public toilet, yet we (well, some of us) still use them.
Also of interest is that those whose careers drive them to study such things have informed us that there’s at least one place that has more germs than the seat of a public toilet, and that is the touch screen of a point-of-sale terminal. (I’m extremely gratified that the much higher limits for RFID contactless “tap” purchases introduced during COVID have been retained; I now routinely tap-pay even my extravagant liquor purchases without having to touch the contaminated keypad.)
I bought a toilet seat about a year ago at our local Ace Hardware. Each of the many kinds of seats was in a corrugated cardboard sleeve and shrink-wrapped in an extra-stout clear shrink-wrap. IOW easy to look, not possible to touch.
Not one, not two, but three large signs adjacent to this ~6’x6’ display said “Toilet sets not returnable if opened.” That many signs suggests attempted returns happen often.
It’s getting so hard to find simple pillows. Here’s what I want:
A firm side-sleeper pillow.
Not memory foam
Not down or any kind of feathers
Not “cooling gel” or any kind of gooey-textured, clammy filling
Not “suitable for all kinds of sleepers”, because they’re not. This is code for “soft and flimsy”
Not an oddly-shaped, magic cervical support thing
Back when the dear old Bed, Bath & Beyond was still here, they had a great assortment of pillows, and it was easy to find what I wanted. They carried Wamsutta Dream Zone extra firm pillows, and I think I might still have an unopened one back in the depths of my closet. When that one is opened and put into service, it’ll be the last one in existence.
This heat and humidity bubble we’ve been under is making me cranky. It was 72 when I went out to do chores at about 7 this morning, and 97% humidity. Not too awful - until the sun comes up over the trees.
So, so, SO tired of it 
You’ll have snow soon enough… although they say it’s on back order up to four months.
I pit homeopathic bacon.
Breakfast at a hotel was “scrambled eggs” that were no doubt microwaved in a bag, and bacon so thin that it had a bacon smell but no flavor. I tried stacking a couple up to see if I could achieve critical bacon mass but no luck. Not sure if there were any calories in it since it was so thin (think rice paper). It was really the idea of bacon without actually consuming any.
Yeah.
When somebody bitches about summer my comeback is usually something close to “In 6 months you’ll be praying for summer!” Same type answer if they’re bitching about winter.
Some folks jes’ ain’t never happy.
Hotel breakfasts can be pretty bad. Somewhere else on the internet someone started a discussion about how to sneak into hotel lobbies to ( steal? ) a continental breakfast… and my first thought was “why”? While I’ve never had bacon that bad, think of all the other bad choices there.
As horrible as it is, those scrambled eggs almost have flavor. There is always a big container of ketchup near by for people who like a little taste of eggs with their ketchup. I was told that ‘in the army, they teach you to eat eggs like that’… but I always thought that such hazing was frowned upon.
Have you ever tried the tiny rubbery sausages? They’re really pretty bad… and yet the tin with them and the bacon get emptied out almost immediately. I’ve seen people cut a ‘not-Thomas’ muffin in half and try to jam enough bacon between the slices to make a very disappointing breakfast sandwich. The bacon is always dry and tasteless… and when you bite down, a 360 arc of bacon bits sprays away from it. It will get your shirt, your pants, the entire table. Bits will land on other peoples plates at your table and end the meal. Bits will land on the carpet and on empty seats. I’m pretty sure that if you are really hungry and chomp down hard enough, bits will land on neighboring tables and disgruntled guests… so you really are right. Skip the bacon.
Have you ever made the mistake of trying to eat one of the bagels? They are the size of supermarket donuts… and if you cut them in half, a cloud of ‘bad bagel dust’ will rise towards your face. No, you won’t fly like Tinkerbell; you’ll cough like emphysema hell. Those bagels are a terrible thing to do to bread, and they know it. ( “I didn’t grow in a wheat field to be abused and misshapen into this Hellish Form. Somebody must Pay!” )
You can try to appease The Gluten Gods by slapping on a 1 x 1 white plastic container of faux- cream cheese; Kraft being the evil sorcerer who forced that malignant epoxy cream cheese into the 1 x 1 white container. It might keep the tiny angry bagel from attacking your gullet ( roll initiative ) but the best move is to have a cup of coffee at the ready to try to wash it down. If it does wash down, your trouble may still not be over because as Gandalf said, “You Shall Not Pass…!”
Honestly your best bet is probably the fresh fruit.
For the first time in my life I recently had to buy a toilet seat after the hinge on the one at home gave out & I’ve always moved into places that had one. Went to one (actually both) of the big box hardware stores. Gaaah! I didn’t realize there were so many options & then I actually had to think about what I had at home; bone isn’t that far off from white & round vs. oblong. There was really only one that I could purchase. I could get a nice one that was either the wrong shape or wrong color.
I live in South Carolina. I cannot wait for winter, it is lovely here!
Also, I grew up in the northeast, spent 10 years in Maine. I don’t bitch about cold weather.
Check your local JC Pennys. I found what look to be the exact pillows you are seeking in a two-pack on sale for $30 and they are perfect.