Tastes Like I'm Old

I never really thought much about my age and maturity until I realized that my taste buds changed.  There are just certain things that do no appeal to me now that may have appealed to me when I was a much younger lass.  One of those things is ice cream.  I feel like when I was younger, there were a lot less ice cream flavors than there are now.  I think as a kid it was neopolitan or rocky road, those were the two choices in the household freezer.  There may have been other flavors out there, but those were the only ones that existed in my world, unless it came off of the ice cream truck.

I don't think I realized I reached adulthood with my ice cream until I took my utterly charming yet sarcastic 14 year old niece to The Turkey Hill Experience.  For those people that are not locals,  Turkey Hill is a chain of gas stations that for some reason also sells a wide selection of ice cream, ice tea and lemonade.  They also sell it in grocery stores and I learned by from the presentation, it is accessable all over the country. The Turkey HIll Experience is a small factory like tour that is super kid friendly and for a small ticket fee, lets you eat and drink as much ice cream and ice tea as you want. There are enough activities to keep various age ranges amused.  

One of the most worth while things to do is the pay a little bit extra on the ticket and go into the test lab where they will walk you through how to flavor your own pint of ice cream.  This is where I discovered that I like a mature flavor in ice cream.

My niece, Hannah proceeded to mutter and laugh about how her ice cream was going to be the best one ever and she wasn't going to share.  Then she proceeded to put cotton candy extract into it, and my tastebuds retracted in fear.  If there was one flavor that does not appeal to me as an adult it is cotton candy.  I couldn't even tell you the last time I ate cotton candy. It doesn't exist in my world as a thing that I would want to eat.  As if the flavoring of cotton candy wasn't enough, she proceeded to at cotton candy sprinkles into the swirling white creamy mix, further distancing my inclination to steal her ice cream at a later date.  The icing on the cake  (of in this case , ice cream) was the cake batter icing swirl she added to it.  I don't think electric blue is a natural flavoring and cake batter icing sounds like something that would cause my dentist to whimper.   I am pretty sure that Hannah madeWhen it  the perfect ice cream that would leave me with no desire to ever try it, and that she loved. How I wish I could go back and ask 14 year old me if I would like cotton candy ice cream with cake batter swirl and cotton candy sprinkles. I wonder what my answer would be. 

When it came time for me to make my ice cream, I stuck to things that I knew my husband would like. (Honestly, I was a little ice creamed out from the one sample that I had.  It was good, but it wasn't even lunch time and breakfast wasn't that much of a long forgotten memory yet. I have never been a lets eat ice cream for breakfast sort of person.)  My boring adult ice cream consisted of chocolate and coffe flavoring with chocolate covered espresso beans and peanut butter cups with a peanut butter swirl.  I was informed by my niece that I was doing it wrong and then I proceeded to tell her that her uncle was going to eat her ice cream.  My brother, who was the referee in this adventure just rolled his eyes and made his own very adult flavored ice cream (cherry flavoring, cherry pieces and chocolate covered espresso beans.)

I would definitely be interested in doing the Turkey Hill Experience again, because it was fun. I enjoyed the different things to check out and despite realizing I am old and eat old people ice cream, it was fun to think about different flavor combinations.  Just maybe the next time I will be able to come up with something that her and I can both agree on is awesome.  I just hope it doesn't include any sort of cotton candy or icing swirls. 

Swamp Chocolate

I wanted to like it.  I tried to like it. I didn't want to say anything negative about it, because if I didn't mention it then ,it didn't really happen, but it happened.  I fell prey to advertising.  Part of it was the something new to try to break up the hum drum of a work day and the other part of it was that maybe it would be healthy and wonderful.

I am talking about Super Rebbl Herbs; Reishi chocolate drink. The bottle proclaims it is dairy free, soy free, organic and ethical and made from herbs. I will admit that I did not know what Reishi was, buy my guess was it was sort of like Matcha, which is green tea extract. For those that don't know, let me tell you that Reishi is nothing like Matcha.  Reishi is a type of mushroom.  I drank a dairy free, soy free organic and ethically sourced Mushroom Juice.

I like mushrooms. I like chocolate.  I do not like the two together.  I also discovered that I really don't like coconut milk.  I wanted to see if there was something redeemable about the drink, so I flipped it over and checked the ingredients.  I recognized everything but the Reishi and the Quillaja.  I wasn't sure I even wanted to know what Quillaja was, but I was going to look it up anyway.

According to the various internet searches, Quillaja is a type of bark. Great. I drank a juiced mushroom, some bark flakes, coconut and chocolate puree that declares that it is not intended to treat, cure or prevent any disease.  I wasn't looking to cure, treat, or prevent anything other than thirst and by half way through the bottle I was willing to be thirsty, because chocolate should not taste like that ever.  This drink almost ruined me and my belief that chocolate can make almost everything better.  I don't think they put enough cocoa powder in the drink to wash away the swampy taste the rest of the drink has.

If you like coconut water, you may like this drink.  More power to you. If you receive any of the miracle super powers that seem to be side effect from drinking the magic mushroom juice, awesome.  I on the other hand am going to go back to my drab life of drinking water and back slowly away from anyone that offers me chocolate covered mushroom bark smoothies.  It is all lies and distilled truths.

Very rarely do I write about something I don't like, because there is plenty of negative in the world, but being duped by advertising irritates me. The fact that I drank it also irritates me.  I just want it to be known that chocolate should not ever taste like that. It was swamp chocolate in a bottle.

Bump

I don’t always handle stress well.  I am not sure that there are too many people that do.  I believe that a person will most likely do two things when they hit the stress wall hard.  They will either laugh or they will cry.  About 80% of the time I am going to laugh and crack horrible jokes and 20% of the time I will tear up and look like a sad clown with runny makeup.

A perfect example of this happened this past week.  On Tuesday, I noticed a lump in the center of the Dib Cats head.  It looked a little swollen, but it didn’t seem to affect his cat abilities or his feline temperament.  I ask my husband to take a look, to make sure I wasn’t being crazy and that the Dib didn’t always have a uni-brow and I was just now noticing this about the cat.

My husband was adamant that the cat did not come with a uni-brow and that we should call the vet IMMEDIATELY.  A quick call to the Vet and an appointment was acquired in two days’ time, with the instructions to watch the cat to see if there were any changes in energy levels or dietary consumption.  Dib seemed fine with the arrangement and continued to do all the cat stuff he normally does, however my husband was pretty sure that Dib was dying and proceeded to lavish attentions on the cat to savor his last moments. Dib loved every moment of it.  I spent my time joking that the cat was trying to grow a horn and this was just the first step. (I blame a recent trip to the Mutter Museum for this idea.)

By the time Thursday rolled around, the Dib Cat had quite a furrowed brow that made him look like he came out of the Flintstones and my husband was cursing up and down about why we couldn’t be independently wealthy. (If we were independently wealthy, we could have taken care of this on day one and not wait two more days and watch the horn/bump gets bigger was the way of his logic.)  I had spent most of the time trying to keep him calm and assure him that the Dib would be fine.

On the way home from work to pick up Dib for his appointment is when the 20% hit me. For whatever reason, it popped in my head that the bump on Dibs head had exploded like a chest bursting alien and he was no longer in this realm and I was going to discover his remains. My imagination is a jerk at times and I was in a near panic on the way home, because I wasn’t sure how I was going to break the news to my husband that his best friend was dead due to my over confidence.

Getting home, Dib Cat was fine, looked like a unicorn wanna be, but over all he was fine. For that twenty minute drive home I was pretty sure my world was ending and then once it was established that there was no brain parasite in my cat, I went straight back to the 80% laughing at my stress as I monologued to the cat on the way to the vet.  

Dib cat turned out to be mostly fine, other than the fact that his brother, Iggins bit him in the head and it got infected. Dibs dreams of being a magical horned cat were crushed, but my husband was pleased that everything could go back to semi normal and I can go back to my normal stress levels. 

Gyrating in Chairs

Have you ever been hanging out with a couple of friends and then out of the blue someone says, "That would be a great band name!" Then the rest of the night devolves into discussing the imaginary band and joking around about our celebrity personalities. Yesterday Lizzy, Gat and I made our imaginary band, Gyrating in Chairs.  It is kind of a folksy sort of thing, or it might be based off of the imaginary album cover we posed for yesterday.

It looks like a legitimate album cover. At least I think so.  Unfortunately a fake album cover and a bunch of wine does not make us musicians.  Only one of use can actually sing and play an instrument, but not at the same time.  The other two have other talents that have absolutely nothing to do with music.  It probably has more to do with helium infested mice, salami and The Little Mermaid. In fact all could be revealed in the fake biography of the group and how they became a back porch favorite, if I ever get around to it.  Until then, I am just going to snicker at our song titles and enjoy the strawberry jam we accomplished while goofed around with stardom. What would your band name be?