Coke Zero

Yesterday saw an almost-heroic purge of 16 years of acquired workshop/play space flotsam—small coils of wire, plumbing fixtures I’ll never use, lookalike Argentine electrical fixtures that don’t play well with Uruguayan counterparts, hardware oddities carefully saved over the years because of course.

Between a weedeater and dog food, I was up to three freebie promotional beach umbrellas which, despite appearance, have never had any real use. And certainly not recently.

So I posted them as giveaways on our neighborhood Whatsapp group. Our neighbor Álvaro immediately claimed one, and someone else said her daughter would love to have one and she’d be here to pick it up in un ratito, which means “a little while” in English, which means maybe an hour and a half in Uruguay.

When she arrived, she was thrilled with the brand new umbrella (with the name of some dog food I’d never heard of—where does this stuff come from?), and held out as a thank you a cold 1.5 liter bottle of Coke Zero.

Which is close to the last thing I would think of actually drinking. I thanked her graciously, and immediately started wondering what am I going to do with this stuff? Then I remembered all the wonderful internet claims: clean dirty grout! Half a bottle later in the shower, uh, no. Speed up compost by adding sugar…uh, no. Clean oil stains in the garage! Uh…no. Clean rust off tools? Another day, perhaps *sigh*.