Today was a very normal day. I did some errands. I drove to the shopping plaza that's quite close by – the one I got my wisdom teeth removed in, at the children-and-families dentist – and went to the discount store. Now that I'm more than a week out from wisdom tooth surgery I'm allowed to lift heavy stuff again, so I could get a new 40-pound bag of sunflower seeds for my bird feeders. I also needed cat food for my cat and cat food for the outdoor cats, and milk.

The discount store cashier who seems quite pleasant complimented my arm tattoo. The sign on the grocery store forbidding soliciting also forbids handbills and "peddling", which struck me as a funny little turn of phrase, because calling somebody selling something a "peddler" is amusingly archaic and it's funny to think of someone complaining about "peddling."

I don't remember the sign being there before. Maybe I just didn't notice it before, though. I don't go to that grocery store often; it has weird vibes. One time there were some unpleasant old men camped out at both entrances crabbily soliciting donations and peddling American flags – something to do with Veteran's Day, I think? - and when we declined to donate and acquire a flag one of the unpleasant old men called us communists. Which we are, so not much of an insult really, but it did strike me as intriguing that a crabby old man prone to insulting strangers was the best this organization had to offer, peddler/soliciter-wise. Generally with canvassing you're supposed to be personable. Maybe they weren't pawning off as many flags as they expected. I don't remember if the sign was there back then; I assumed at the time they had the store's permission to do their soliciting and peddling, but maybe they didn't.

I also picked up some Christian propaganda from the ground in the parking lot of that store last time I was there (handbills!), so maybe it's a hotspot for handbills and soliciting and peddling and they've had enough. It's not a super busy shopping plaza; there's always a moderate amount of people around, but never a crowd.

While I was in the large parking lot I thought about how I was having a normal day, and how sometimes unremarkable things are interesting. I'm always surprised by how many things that seem like they ought to be written down somewhere actually aren't. I think a lot about when HBomberguy said, "Turns out when something is easy to check... no one checks!!"

The Romans had some special super-concrete that we just don't know the recipe for. It wasn't secret, just the regular concrete that they used for buildings and roads and stuff. But it lasted forever – for thousands of years – and we just didn't really know how they made it so well at all because the recipe wasn't specially saved anywhere. Why bother? It's just concrete, everyone knows how to make concrete.

Note: I'm not sure how much if any of that was accurate. I read some article or other about it a while ago. I'll track it down and link it later, maybe, if I remember. (I probably won't.) (If it's easy to check, no one checks...)

A lot of old writing – hundreds to thousands of years old – has jokes we can't decipher any more because they're pop culture references.

Watching episodes of Saturday Night Live that are even just a few years old is bizarre. Their weekly format means they're referencing things that are in the zeitgeist right then, which means a lot of their material becomes incomprehensible very quickly.

A lot of useful and interesting historical material is ephemera. Garbage. Shopping lists and personal letters. Little snippets of ordinary life that indicates what things were like back then, how people lived and thought and communicated with each other.

The grocery store I don't like has a robot that patrols the aisles. It's a big grey plastic obelisk that slowly rolls around beeping. They have named it "Marty" and it is not especially useful. Apparently its only job is detecting things that have fallen or spilled on the ground, although I imagine it also collects data on foot traffic or customer behavior or something as well. Supposedly it does not have anything to do with snooping for shoplifters, though I'm skeptical; since it can't clean, its only actual function is making a loud noise and alerting employees when there's something on the floor, which doesn't seem useful basically at all. Do customers at Stop N Shop not inform employees when they see something spilled on the floor...? Why would you need a robot for that? It's only one robot and it moves slowly, so it's not like it's guaranteed to be faster at spotting messes than a person.

They were selling Halloween-themed plushies of the robot in the seasonal garbage section. It's such a dreadful product I was tempted to buy one, but I think I'll wait and see if I can get one for dirt cheap months after Halloween is over. I can't imagine there's much demand for it, although this world is full of all kinds of people so who knows. Maybe everybody loves this thing. Apparently they usually have huge googly eyes stuck on them, but if this one has them I haven't noticed. It's quite tall, so maybe the eyes are above my eye level and thus escaped my piercing gaze. I didn't see the robot itself today or hear its loud beeping; maybe it was on break.

I got a different brand of cat food for the outdoor cats because it was cheaper. I was a bit worried they'd refuse to eat it – when I got the really cheap stuff at the discount store once, they collectively shunned it – but at least some of them were happy to chow down, so Friskies are apparently acceptable.

It was cloudy all day today and yesterday, threatening to rain, but didn't rain.

I'm trying to get better at appreciating ordinary days rather than just glossing over them and forgetting about them. I felt alright and nothing bad happened to me. I left the house. I didn't forget anything on my shopping list.