Sleep deprivation.

One of the things that happens to me when I fail to get enough sleep is that I make strange purchases. Thus, a couple of things I bought after my weekend push to meet a deadline are a puzzle to me a couple of days later, when I've pretty much caught up on my sleep.

One is a giant box of Cheerios. I don't have anything against Cheerios, you understand. It's just that, as a rule, I don't eat breakfast: breakfast is coffee, and nothing else. And if it is anything else, it's not cereal. My guess is that over the past quarter-century, I've averaged about one bowl of cereal every five years. So what would cause me to buy this? I'm guessing that it was the premium in the box: a free Shrek 2 watch. A free, glow-in-the-dark Shrek 2 watch, to be precise. And again, it's that sleep deprivation kicking in, because I don't wear a watch, either. (Virtually every room I'm in has a clock in it, as does this computer, and the cell phone, so it's not as though I need something else to tell me that I'm running late.) I guess I was so astounded by the concept that you could get a big box of Cheerios on sale for $2.99, and in addition to the Cheerios, there'd be a watch, too. I'm just hoping that if/when I eat enough Cheerios that I find the watch, the watchband will be child-sized and I won't be able to wear it.

The other odd purchase was of Baja Four-Cheese Wraps. I guess I'm always looking for something different for my sandwiches, and this qualifies. Nothing too odd in the purchase itself, but once I got the package home, I decided to look at the ingredients, to see what the four cheeses were that they named the product for. Let's see: there's cheddar cheese, and ... that's it. One type of cheese. Sounds fraudulent to me. On the other hand, boy is it shelf-stable! The sell-by date is October 8. Of this year, luckily, but that's still over 4 months away, and there's no telling how long it had already been sitting on the shelf.