Baths

Yesterday, on the way to work, I walked past the field to the train station directly after a heavy downpour. The field still had soggy patches of accumulated rain. There was a flurry of activity in one of the wet patches and I realised that a family of mynahs were having baths. They rolled around in the water, shook themselves, fluffed up their wet feathers and then hopped a few feet away to dry off. 

Now all the mynahs need to do is to tell my dogs that baths can be fun.

Ah, here's the clever stitch. I wrote yoinks ago when the bath tub was new and I was spending many happy hours soaking in it (I still do) that there seemed to be the absence of Epsom salts in the country. I finally found them! All the established pharmacy chains didn't have them or don't carry them any longer. I finally found them in a chain that sells over-the-counter medicines and toiletries and they are revamping their outlets to become full-fledged pharmacies with a pharmacist manning an Rx counter. So phooey to the established big boys.

I went into their newly opened outlet in the mall near our home. The pharmacist knew what i wanted but had to scramble to find it because the shop was newly open, he was new and he wasn't sure where everything was. But he was sure he saw Epsom salts in a corner somewhere. He told me to browse around while he hunted for them. He was so pleased when he finally produced a packet for me. Then I asked for two. I figured I might as well get more than one since it took me so long to find them. L said I should take a good dozen if not the whole carton -- Costco would've loved his quantitative approach. What if I never find them again, was his reasoning.

Now that I've found Epsom salts, it's occurred to me that I no longer see bath salts and bath cubes -- stuff that my mother used to have in the bathroom -- on toiletries shelves here. Maybe there's a severe lack of demand because there's just no bath tub culture in a hot country?


Anyway, got home, pleased with the Epsom salts purchase, ran the bath and while I normally just chuck in a couple of handfuls, the compulsive reader in me who reads the cereal boxes on a repetitive basis actually read the instructions for use on the side of the box. It said to use 375g for a normal-sized bath. So what's 375g? I wasn't going to measure out 375g exactly, this isn't baking where you need stuff down to the last gramme. Flipped the box over and did the agak-agak (estimate) lazy measurement method -- every package has a net weight. Just take the net weight and proportion out what you need, ie measure things by halves, quarters, fifths, not grammes.

So I flipped the box round and round for the net weight. 375g. I had to put a whole box of the stuff into a bath. That's finishing up a box almost as soon as I found one. Sheesh.

So I did what I should have done. I ignored the instructions completely