Wednesday, September 30, 2015

do as I say...

Regular readers will probably remember that I have a bit of an obsession with clear, concise writing.

And it's nice to commiserate with other reviewing types who also believe in clear, concise writing. Hey, if you come across something like "The subsurface soil sample was collected by the sampler within a discrete zone at the 2 to 4 foot depth interval in the soil column", feel free to call me and we can have a good giggle at the author's expense.

However, if you have spent a significant amount of time raging about the redundancies and general sloppiness of the poor schmo who started a report, and I find that all of your inserted text is either missing punctuation or has obvious factual errors, I start to get annoyed.

Sure, it's good to be concise.You know what matters more? Being correct. And I really don't want to hear about how terrible someone else's writing is when when you can't actually produce readable copy yourself.

Wednesday, September 2, 2015

expired sunscreen use

As I mentioned a while back, I use a ton of sunscreen. I am also a bit scatterbrained and tend to lose things like sunscreen, so over the years, I have bought and squirreled away innumerable bottles of both "regular" and "face" sunscreen (critical to prevent serious pain from sweat + sunscreen running into my eyes).

I am also cavalier about expiration dates.

This isn't usually a problem, but I recently found an old bottle of sunscreen and in a pinch, applied it to my face. Two days later, I had a horrifying rash + acne breakout, and checked out the offending sunscreen.

It expired in 2009.

In hindsight, the fact that the sunscreen was not white (or even sort of yellow) but a light brown color should have tipped me off that perhaps the stuff was not trustworthy. I think I've used it relatively recently (like, a year ago) with no ill effects, but I may have restricted it just to non-sensitive areas like my arms.

So I actually went through and pitched everything that expired more than 3 years ago. In the future, I'll try to keep my purchases of new sunscreen to a minimum, and keep my sunscreen storage places to a few safe locations (i.e. not in the car, where they alternately cook and freeze). I would like to avoid looking like a dermatology case study.