Sunday, 5/19/2019
Woke to the sound of rain, the arrival of the third of a string of unseasonal rain storms. I’ll bet this will be the last rain we see until November. In fact I hope so, because I took the winter cover off the A/C condenser last week. It’s not used to being wet. (But then, IOMISEP.)
Started Sunday as usual with the NYT puzzle during which there was a blink outside. I counted slowly to six when BLAM! a very sharp and loud crack of thunder hit. So I drove to coffee through steady rain, instead of walking.
Back to the house I settled down to continue my research (which I started Friday but omitted to mention) into edible marijuana, and marijuana dispensaries. Probably the most informative tutorial was this one from leaf science. Key points:
- Two major components are THC and CBD.
- THC produces the psychedelic effects, ranging from euphoria all the way to paranoid panic.
- CBD produces the soporific/sedative effects as well as pain relief.
- Different strains of the plant have remarkably different ratios of CBD:THC, all the way from 30:1 to 1:30.
I thought this was a key paragraph:
When you eat an edible, THC gets slowly absorbed into your bloodstream through the stomach and intestinal tracts. THC then gets broken down by the liver, which converts THC to a more potent chemical called 11-hydroxy-THC. The result is a high that is more intense and psychoactive effects that last much longer.
So THC, eaten, is more impactful even than when smoked. And the general advice is “start low and go slow”.
I am not interested in getting high. (Really. I do not like the sensation of being drunk. I drink beer for the taste, and rarely finish a glass of it. Maybe a relaxed cannabis high would be nicer, I wouldn’t know–yet.) My principal interest is in getting longer and better sleep (presumably a CBD effect). But going forward, I might experiment with a small amount of THC as a social lubricant. But that will take careful and cautious experimentation.
Checking out local retail outlets with Yelp I settled on Harborside in San Jose. They have a very extensive online selection of products, and offer in-store pickup or delivery. Checking edible products, I found the following interesting:
- Care by Design soft-gels are available in different CBD:THC ratios.
- These Kiva Gummies are 3:1 CBD:THC
- This Kiva chocolate bar has 1:1 CBD:THC
I set up an order for a bottle of 10 soft-gels in the 4:1 ratio, a bag of the 3:1 gummies, and one bar of the chocolate. After I uploaded a picture of my driver’s license, they texted my phone to say the order was in progress, and a few minutes later that it was ready for pickup. So I drove down to their store. You have to show the back side of your license to be scanned at the door. (I never knew that the back side of my driver’s license has an elaborate bar-code thing.) Then I used a debit card to pay for my $90 worth of edibles and was out again in minutes. The whole excursion took less than an hour.
My plan is to try one, 4:1 soft-gel at 9pm tonight, and I’ll report on the effects if any later.
With a lot of Sunday left, I headed out meaning to visit the Cantor Arts Museum on the Stanford campus. After I parked and walked along the Goldworthy Snake sculpture toward the Cantor, I was deflected by signs to the Anderson Collection. This is an entire new building to house the collection of the Anderson family. The building has been constructed since the last time I was inside the Cantor, so clearly that has been a while. Anyway, I opted to visit the new collection on this visit. It’s all modern, non-representational, and mostly from large to heroic in scale. The work I most enjoyed looking at is this Untitled acrylic dome by Robert Irwin.
It’s fascinating how your eye has trouble finding the edges of it, which seem to turn into a haze. The camera has less trouble so it looks more defined in the picture.
After walking through this collection I noticed that the sky was what I think of as “English”, lots of big loose cumulus with blue sky beyond, and sun-breaks sweeping around. It’s a common look for English skies but rare in California. I decided to drive up to Palo Alto’s Foothills park, to Vista Hill, in hopes that it would be puffy cumulus to the north and maybe the City shining out. Sadly, no. The lovely blue and sun-streaked sky was only here in the South Bay, the north was still under rain clouds. I took a panoramic shot but it’s not worth uploading.
Codgerville 