Salt & Pepper

 

In both of my offices at the U (one is in my research lab, and the other one is more in the "outer" part of the building, which is the one I work in during my office hours for classroom student visits mostly)..... I keep both a salt and pepper shaker in case I am eating something that warrants said accoutrements (usually hard boiled eggs, but also a variety of other things).  I have traditionally bought these from one of our local "dollar stores" and they come pre-filled.  They are very simple, yet also not refillable.... but also not messy like our more traditional shakers we have at home.  

I tend to like A LOT of pepper on most foods that benefit from that spice.  When I eat cottage cheese, for example, it often looks like a "dirty, urban snowdrift" with all the pepper I like on that food. Salt, by contrast, is something I have never used all that much generally.  Sure, I like salt on popcorn, which I do eat a lot. But, other than that, I tended to not use much if any salt.  That is..... until I started running several years ago.  I noticed then that I tended to sometimes crave salt.  I attributed this to perhaps my running causing me to sweat more abundantly and to lose more salt from my body.  Conversely, it may be that my higher revving metabolism while running causes me to physiologically use more salt biochemically.  However, both of the above ideas are just hypotheses.  But, these days, I do use some salt.  

This brings me to my major observation, which relates to the Dollar Store purchases of disposable salt and pepper shakers.  Inevitably, I find that in what I buy, there seems to be MUCH LESS pepper in the shaker compared to salt.  Yes, I do CONSUME much more pepper, so that may exaggerate the difference.... but.... I wanted to see more definitively, so in this last batch I just bought and opened.... I used my chick candler (a strong light source that is a part of each of my egg incubators for class, where the light can pass through the egg shell strongly enough that you can see the developing chicken embryo) to see how much each canister was filled (I did not want to pry them open to see, as they would not be usable or stable afterwards).  Just as I expected.... the pepper shaker was only 1/2 full, whereas the salt shaker was over 90% full.  

Salt and pepper can also refer to one's hair, beard, and mustache.  I used to be more vividly "salt and pepper" with distinctive patterns of light and dark in my hair, beard and mustache.  But, these days, while I am still NOT white.... my hair, beard, and mustache are a relatively uniform gunmetal grey.  

As I was running this morning, after finishing praying the rosary, I let my mind drift to my pipes and pipe tobaccos.  In a newsgroup I belong to about pipes, a new "trendy" thing a lot of folks talk about is the "aging" of pipe tobaccos like folks do with fine wines and whiskeys.  There are some folks there that INSIST that their "aged" tobaccos are significantly more sublime than a freshly opened tin or tub.  I tend to think it is utter balderdash, truth-be-told.  But, I also was thinking that I now have a helluva lot of "finely aged" pipe tobaccos all about me!  It has been, I believe, now roughly 7.5 years since I was a daily pipe smoker.  If these fellows are accurate in their assessment, I am sitting on a gold mine of pleasure!  It did have me thinking while running, that is for sure.  

PipeTobacco