shopping coup

I hate it when there's moolah in your checking acct, but due to not-yet-quantified expenses in your immediate future, you cannot touch said moolah. I am in this very fiscal condition at present. YUCK.


But I went to Encore Books just the same...before you scold me....let me interject that I had a $10. credit. I thought it was a relatively harmless way to satiate my spend-lust provided I could keep the grand total close to that $10 mark. My grand total was $11.98 so...(work it out, matheletes!!) I only did $1.98 worth of harm. I got this book , which, I am ashamed to say I started in on straight away. Ashamed, because I have been reading Our Mutual Friend and have gotten just 1/2 of the way thru, but I got wary of it...it's a friggen HUGE book!! So, I skipped ahead and read all of the Bella/John "Rokesmith" parts and then put the book "on hiatus". But I hate it when I do that. Shows a lack of perserverence on my part. So I MUST (after a break) return to the Dickens book. I am entrusting y'all to nag me about that. Capisce??




Also I bought "The Bubbly Deck" which is a deck of informational cards all about champagne. Probably 1/3 of the deck is general facts & history of bubbly, and then the rest is different cocktail recipes that use champagne. That's something me & Chris Rock have in common: I love champagne ('member that song??) I would like to become some kind of self-taught champagne expert but I haven't the sufficient funds for the field research. One thing I thought was interesting was the card about bottle sizes. It seems they can't just be classed as bottles, and then just differentiate between bottles by adding how many oz of bubbly--y'know a 25 oz bottle, and then call the next largest a 50 oz bottle...etc. Nope. Not poetic enough. Each different size must have a name. I love that actually. I tried to scan that card and then post its image here, but unfortunately the resulting PDF was too dark too make out. I shall have to transcribe the info then...





This amt./size of bubbly ..............is called a..............{fancyschmancyname}





quarter of a bottle (6.3 oz) ....................................................................."Split"


half of a bottle (12.7 oz)....................."Half Bottle" (okay, that one is not overly "fancyschmancy")



bottle (25.4 oz). ..............................................................................."Bottle" (again, not so fancy )


2 bottles (50.7 oz)...................................................................."Magnum" (NOW we're gettin' fancy)




4bottles (101.4 oz).............................................................................."Jeroboam"



6 bottles (156 oz) ................................................................................."Rehoboam"



8 bottles (202.8 oz).............................................................................."Methuselah"



12 bottles (307.2 oz) ............................................................................."Salmanazar"



16bottles (416 oz) ..................................................................................."Balthazar"



20 bottles (520 oz). ..............."Nebuchadnezzar" (trivia: this happens to be what my folks were going to
name me if I'd been a boy-child )

36 bottles (936 oz) .................................................................................."Sovereign"





Woweee. I find that charming..the naming of things rather than numbering them. Makes me wish we still had telephone exchange names, but I digress. "Sovereign", though, is kind of anti-climactic isn't it?? After tackling those funky, tricky-to-pronounce monikers (all Biblical kings, I'm told) you then hit "Sovereign". I mean, shouldn't the BIGGEST size available have the craziest name possible? "Magnoboamthusbaltchadnezzar" (the third..esquire) But I suppose if you're knocking back 936 oz of bubbly, "Sovereign" would be tricky enough to utter.



Here...just to prove that I DID try to scan it...