Cigars and reading material

Back when I lived in Syracuse (The Salt City; The City Where The Sun Don’t Shine; So Much City They Named It Once; etc.) I used to make a weekly trek to a newsstand that carried papers from all over the country and just about every magazine imaginable. I never understood how they made money doing this, but it was fun once in a while to pick up the Sunday Boston Globe or the Philadelphia Inquirer, or even just another upstate New York paper. And I bought a lot of magazines back then, too, just about anything that struck my fancy. I think I had a little more time on my hands than I do now. Nowadays, my magazine selection is pretty much specific to activities that I partake in, although I can sometimes go for an Entertainment Weekly just for its infoporn value. And I mostly get to read them on the train back from NYC. But back then, I’d think nothing of picking up a couple of Sunday papers and a couple of magazines just for the hell of it, and I’d read ’em, too. The place where I got the papers was Durston Cigar Store, which at some point in its history had been on Durston Street, hence the name, but had moved to a near west side location and then moved again to a spot on Erie Boulevard across from the Niagara Mohawk building. In addition to about an acre of magazines, the store had a sizeable (though by no means fashionable — this was before cigars became high chic in the ’90s) humidor. And despite the fact that the papers and magazines were nowhere near the cigars, and didn’t stay in the store for all that long, every single thing I brought home from that store had a stale tobacco smell woven into its fibers.
Which brings us to the copy of “Sick Puppy” I borrowed from the library. I noticed that something in the bedroom didn’t smell right the other night, which was odd since the window, as usual, was open. I was sniffing around and Lee said, “Oh, yeah, doesn’t that book stink?” I already knew she didn’t care for Hiaasen, but I didn’t think he quite deserved that level of disdain, until I realized that she meant the phantom odor was in fact coming from the book. I picked it up and sure enough . . . cigars. It’s like the book was soaked in tobacco juice. So now I’m trying to whip through it so I can send it back whence it came.
When we moved to Albany, we rented an apartment on Bertha Street that would have been lovely . . . new (ugly) building, spacious apartment, decent neighborhood, I could walk to work. But the previous renters must have had special cigarette smoking machines designed to go through several dozen packs a day, more than any normal human beings could manage. The windows were literally yellow when we moved in (ALWAYS LOOK AT APARTMENTS IN THE DAYLIGHT!!!). It took hours just to get them clean, washing off this nasty tobacco juice. We scrubbed the walls, to little avail. The carpet, forget about. We spent about 9 months there, leaving the windows open a lot and trying every sachet, potpourri, baking soda concoction possible. Nothing even dented the constant, low level smell.
Stats: I’m mostly getting hits on my genealogy site. Still getting hits for glycerol ester of you know what. My pages of college photos get hit fairly often . . . some poor person looking for Bennington College photos yesterday. Well, I have pictures of college, and pictures of Bennington, but that’s as close as he’ll get.