Blueberry Boggle

 
Dear well-loved readers,
If you’ve read and enjoyed either of my books, ​

...I would so appreciate a review from you – just a sentence or two would do – left on Amazon and/or Goodreads.
Here are the links on which to leave a review
For Amazon:
"Equal and Opposite Reactions":  http://amzn.to/2xvcgRa
"Hail Mary":  https://www.amzn.com/1684334888

For Goodreads: 
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​   Online reviews are the best kind of word-of-mouth for helping an author’s book make it in the world and I would be so grateful  for a few words from you.
   
    Thanks so much and enjoy today’s Ailantha!
​

​BLUEBERRY BOGGLE

   I was in Kroger's the other day, strolling through my favorite part of the store, the produce section.

     Now, it's not that I like fruits and vegetables so much more than, say, deli meats and cheeses or baked goods or dairy; it's that I find this to be the most beautiful area of the supermarket.

      A well-composed produce section - and some produce sections are definitely laid out more appealingly than others - is like an exhibition of colorful, edible objets d'art,

...that one can handle and acquire,

...then bring home and arrange to the preference of one's own palate.

     On this particular day as I was perusing the berries exhibit I saw that there was an exceptionally vast offering of blueberries of various labels and prices.

   I do like blueberries, but they're generally so expensive that I usually pass, unless I'm craving blueberries, or if they're on sale, as they appeared to be this day.  

     I picked up a container of the sale blueberries. It was a pretty small container. Six ounces, according to the label. So that would be twelve ounces for five dollars. I wondered if that was such a good deal after all. 
     However, by now, after looking at all these blueberries, I found that I was, in fact, in the mood for blueberries. But which among all these options was actually the best price for blueberries? And, as the packages all looked pretty much alike, which package went with which price, anyway? 

    I sought out a nearby store employee and asked her to help me with my dilemma. The friendly worker accompanied me back to the blueberry case and examined the prices and the berries.
   "Um..." she said as she compared containers to price displays, "I think this one...um, goes with...this price...and, uh, this one goes with...that price? You know, let me ask him."
       She sought out a nearby fellow employee who did, in fact, seem better acquainted with which berry went with which price.
      "But," said I, "some are sold by the ounce and some by the pint. Which is the cheapest?"
      The worker laughed as if this were the differential calculus problem of blueberry pricing. In short, he didn't really know.
           After I'd thanked the workers and they were out of earshot I muttered, "Well, snap,"  and knew that I would have to engage my own brain and call on my own considerably meager math aptitude if I wanted to figure out the best price of blueberries.
          I knew that 16 oz. equaled one pint, which seemed to make the $4.49  pint the best option.  

    But then I recalled that there was such a thing as a dry pint. Was a dry pint different from a...I don't know...wet pint? That I couldn't remember. I pulled out my phone. 
     And what luck: a dry point was actually more than a wet pint!

      And yet when I picked up the $4.49 pint the contianer looked suspiciously small. When I compared it in size with the $6.99 18 oz. container it was unequivocally smaller.

...and a whole lot lighter.

     Hmmm. Was Kroger's having some truth-in-packaging issues? 
     I typed into my phone, "How much does a pint of blueberries weigh?"
     Turns out that besides a wet pint and a dry pint, there is also a blueberry pint,

...which explained the descrepancy in the sizes of the containers, but also begs the question: does every entity have its own size of pint applicable only to itself? 
      In any case, having at least three different size definitions of "pint" is confusing enough. As the Lieutenant Colonel would say, 

     "That's a hell of a way to run an army."
      I would agree. I decided to go with the strawberries.