and things went downhill from there

I didn't think my monitor was going to break out of its power-up cycle this morning. It blinked off and on for almost five minutes before it finally switched to an epilepsy-inducing flicker and settled down. Once it has come out of sleep and settled down it looks great, but it takes longer to fix itself each time it comes out of stand-by, and I doubt it's more than one or two sleep cycles from not recovering.

It's a shame, because other than that, it's been a good monitor. On the other hand, my Dell monitor is almost twice its age, and it's still going strong.

I ordered a replacement monitor for pick-up today. It's a bit bigger than my old one, but the pickings get a bit slim as the sizes get smaller. I have a bit of wiggle room (but only a bit) on my desktop to move things around some to make it fit.

Trying to find a monitor was an exercise in frustration, though. I wanted to order it from a smaller business to support them during the lock-down. Each time I found one that I liked, though, by the time I got the search narrowed down to my local store, I discovered that it was not available either on-line, or at that particular store. After a few failures, it started to feel like an e-commerce version of the Monty Python Cheese Shop sketch.

Me: Hi, I am interested in a monitor. I see you are offering this one that has fantastic reviews.
Store: Great choice! That's one of the best models we carry, and it's on sale too.
Me: Okay, I'd like to have this one.
Store: We're fresh out of those, sorry.
Me: How about this other one?
Store: Sold the last one this morning.
Me: Well, my third choice is...
Store: Gonna have to stop you right there.

Eventually I found the buried options to tell it that I wanted to narrow my searches to only one of their stores, and that I did not want to see any that were out of stock. The one I picked is as good as any of the others I was looking at, but it cost a little more than my first choices. Not horribly expensive, but a bit more than I'd planned to spend.

I mean, we can afford it, but that doesn't make me not a cheap bastard.

On a side note, when the smaller store hit me with its first "sorry, that's not in stock" on my initial choice, I searched for the monitor in Google and discovered that WalMart was selling it for less. On a whim, I selected it on their site, and they came back with, "Oh... that one. Yeah, it's sold out."

When I was out for a walk yesterday I noticed that there was a ring around the sun. I didn't expect it to show up well in the picture, but it came through better than I had anticipated.

The quandary
Assume for a moment that you are in charge of stocking the shelves in a medium-large grocery store. For the sake of argument, pretend that you want to stock things in a logical place where a typical shopper (who we will allegorically say is a short, dumpy, anthropomorphic snow leopard who has a passion for fish, scotch, and Thai curried chicken) can readily find it. You are presented with a slightly unusual product to stock: coconut milk. Where would you stock this product in order to ensure that a consumer would reasonably know where to look for it.

a) In the ethnic/Asian cooking section, with all of the other ingredients usually used in Thai cooking.
b) In the baking section, since that seems to be a reasonable place to put it if you don't have, or don't think of the ethnic foods section.
c) In the canned fruit/vegetable section, since that makes sense too if you stretch things a bit.
d) In the soft drinks aisle, next to the sparkling water.

Give yourself
2 points for the right answer.
4 points for an answer that makes sense.