It's educational! I swear!

On Sunday evening, my friend and I are leaving Pennsylvania to drive to Birmingham, and then New Orleans after that. Neither of our parents are too keen on the idea of a 2200-mile round trip in a 1992 Ford Tempo, but we figure we might as well do this while we're young and stupid. In an effort to legitimize the trip, we came up with a list of reasons to let us drive deep into the belly of the Old South.

1. We need crafting supplies. New Orleans markets only the finest glue sticks and yarn, imported from the Turks and Caicos.

2. The annual Louisiana Sock Show is going on that week. We need creative ideas for what to do with all the socks we have laying around.

3. Apparently New Orleans is the pastry capital of east central Louisiana, so we'd also like to bring back some exotic dishes to prepare at home.

4. We can obtain scientific observations of real live Southern folk in their natural habitat.

5. We can learn rape defense firsthand in Birmingham.

6. Would you rather have us laying around the house eating nothing but leftover cookies for a whole week? At least we'll be getting some kind of exercise.

7. There's some pretty great long-course open-water swimming in Lake Ponchartrain. More exercise!

8. They're pretty religious down there. Maybe we'll even find Jesus and abandon our immoral Northeastern college-student lifestyles.

We hope that, with careful consideration, this gives you reason enough to accept our educational journey through the South.

Thanks.

Popsicle

My family and I are leaving on a two-week vacation tomorrow.

This is the week when we use up all the food so there is nothing left to go bad when we're away, so we are running dangerously low on things to eat. The only sugary treats left in the entire house are popsicles. We had been joking all week that by Friday, we'd be eating popsicles for dinner, and lo and behold, after a dinner of pizza, I was forced to eat a popsicle for dessert.

I'm normally not a big eater of popsicles, so this was a special occasion and I was rather... excited(?)... to partake in sugary frozen goodness. I went upstairs and grabbed three popsicles out of the freezer, one for myself, my brother, and our friend. I hurled a delicious treat at each of them and proceeded to unwrap my own popsicle, stick-less end first. I put the popsicle in my mouth, but to my surprise, it wasn't very cold. And it tasted like paper. Paper that had been in a freezer full of bagels for a number of years (which is probably the case with this particular box of popsicles).

The three of us began poking at our popsicles. They were definitely not as hard as normal popsicles should have been. And aren't they supposed to be shiny and slobbery when you take them out of your mouth? These weren't. We started picking at the outsides of our popsicles and found that they had all developed a sort of crust or protective freezer-proof shell around the actual treat.

After peeling off the popsicle crust (which still hasn't melted, 15 minutes later, by the way), we were able to finish our dessert, though this could very well be the last popsicle i have in a very, very long time.

In other news, which really isn't other news because it's very closely related to the popsicle story, my mother and I have been coming up with creative potential dinners all week since our stocks of life-giving sustenance items are nearing their ends. Some of these meals include:

• Mayonnaise
• Chicken nuggets with sour cream
• Swiss cheese and grape wraps
• Cinnamon rasin bagels with dijon mustard
• Leftover wilty salad and Dorito crumbs

Tomorrow for the car ride I've packed a jar of Nutella, and requested that my mother buy Combos, so I should be good until we can get some real food.

"Fudge" and "Clotted" Do Not Belong on the Same Candy Box

I finally got out of the house today.

Up until today, the only places I had been this week were the dentist, the podiatrist, and the Verizon store. I decided it was time to do something even remotely productive, and I did sort of need a new TV, so I recruited a friend and we set out to find one.

I ended up missing the turn into the shopping center with the appliance store and I didn't really feel like navigating a left turn in five lanes of traffic so we ended up going to Wegmans (a major Northeastern grocery chain). Of course, neither one of us needed (or could really afford) food, but it's always fun to shop.

After sampling the day's cheese selections we moved on to the International Aisle. There we found a plethora (50 points for me for using "plethora" in a sentence) of delightful and not-so-delightful treats like "Clotted Cream Fudge," "Turkish Delight," "[Insert Asian Script Here]," and Marmite.

Marmite = "Yeast Extract" = yeast sludge. Ew. I know it's some kind of delicacy from Down Under, but Harrisburg, PA really doesn't have a large enough Australian community to warrant the sale of Marmite in a major grocery store. And we're above "extracts" here. If we're going to eat a fungus, we're going to eat it whole, dammit. Whatever, it's sort of pretty to look at from far away.

This is really hard to write while watching Family Guy. Like really hard.

My friend Cait is here and she just decided that we're going to get donuts. She wants breakfast food. But we already had breakfast shrimp at the mall!

We also went to the mall today. We got dinner there. I got Taco Bell, and Cait got "Chinese." The whole food court is just Korean people cooking fake Chinese food and calling it different things like Bourbon Street Grille and Yummy Japan. So she got a plate of shrimp fried rice. Apparently in food-court-speak, a "plate" is between three and four pounds which you then have to dump into a bag and take home, and "shrimp fried rice" is "a shrimp omelette chopped up and tossed with lava-hot rice." Breakfast shrimp.

No donuts. But maybe.

I'll leave you for the day with this.

Update:
We did go for donuts.

There were Virginians there. The dad doesn't "have underwear but [is] good for the night" and he is "going to the WalMart, I reckon" to get new ones. I love having a Super8 motel next to the donut store.

Dear Household Items

I wasn't sure what to write about today, so I thought about things in my house and if there was anything I could say about/to said things. This is what I came up with:

Air Conditioner;
I fear that you may be dying. Please don't die. I need you, especially when the overnight low temperature is 77. If you die and fall out, there will be a gaping hole in the side of my house. Bugs and heat and probably eventually the Chinese will get in and we will all be doomed.

Chemistry Textbook;
Stop taunting me. When I fronted the $158.98 for you, I was under the impression that I would be using you for two semesters. How wrong I was. All I really needed was the $30 code for the online book! You are a sneaky little cheat, only fetching, if I'm lucky, $25 on Amazon. Why don't you go get a real job like soaking up oil in the Gulf?

Bag of "Extra Giant" Marshmallows;
What in the world am I supposed to do with you? I really don't even care for regular marshmallows, let alone marshmallows that are the size of the fist I can't make because of my knobbly arthritis-hands.

Reese's Pieces;
I love you, but I can't. If you didn't have any calories or fat, I promise I would only eat you. Ever. Also, you don't want to see me on a sugar high.

Dog;
I've figured you out. I know you only love me because I feed you French toast and ham and ice cream, and because you can hide under my legs when Padre is mad because he found the pee/dog treat/poop you left on my bed/under his pillow/in the basement. I wouldn't have such a problem with this if you did something more than lounge around on pillows all day. A little watchdog instinct might be nice. Kisses and tail-wagging are probably not going to keep Al-Qaeda and/or the Chinese away.

I am also afraid that you may be slightly retarded. Your name is Shiloh. Not Dishrag, Stinky, French Door, or Carpet Bug. It saddens me when you respond to every word uttered in your general direction.


I'm sorry today wasn't so great. But here's a picture of Dog.

The Chinese Are Coming! The Chinese Are Coming!

I went to the dentist yesterday.

Normally the dentist isn't a big deal and I thought yesterday would be the same. I was wrong.

I knew something was up when I pulled into the parking lot. My dentist's parking lot is normally a deathtrap of tight spaces, soccer mom vans, and unruly children. Yesterday, there was only one car.

Dentist - 1, Me - 0

Little did the missing cars know that I had something up my sleeve. By not being there, they had given me ample space to fail at pulling my car into a parking spot like any normal driver. The front end of my car, as usual, was approximately a foot to the right of the back end of my car. And I had turned right into the parking space.

Here is an artistic representation of my dentist's parking lot.

Dentist - 1, Me - 1

I went inside, checked in for my appointment, and took a seat. But something was missing. Where were the magazines? There was no Newsweek or Time, not even Central PA Magazine or Senior Digest. I stared blankly at the fish tank while I waited.

Dentist - 2, Me - 1

All was normal until the dental hygienist broke out the pokeys. In case you've never been to a dentist because you don't have insurance, or you just plain don't understand, "pokeys" are the metal hooks that dentists use to poke/dig/scrape at things. Ms. Hygienist started with the usual scraping. The scraping turned into digging at my molars, which then evolved into what felt like my gums being probed for crude oil. This was by far the longest and most excruciating tooth-scraping of my life.

Dentist - 3, Me - 1

After all the scraping, digging, brushing, rinsing, and spitting, Ms. Hygienist said "I'm just gonna go get a little gadget." I knew what the gadget was. They told me it checks to see if you have a cavity, but I've decided that it has a hunger for radioactive mouth-parts. Ms. Hygienist stuck the probe in my mouth and the machine started bleep-bloop-boooooop-ing. I knew it. My teeth are trying to kill me with radiation.

This is where the Chinese come in. My friend has a theory and it goes like this: The Chinese are going to take over. Everything. And it's going to happen soon. I don't know if you've noticed but most toothbrushes are made in China. Everything is made in China. Have you figured it out yet? The Chinese are making radioactive toothbrushes which they are using to destroy our mouths.

Dentist - 3, Me - 1, China - 1

They'll start small and from the inside. A few missing teeth here, an ingrown toenail there (another incident I'm convinced is the work of Chinese nail clippers). Before you know it, our bodies are going to fall apart, leaving the country open for invaders.

Luckily, my dentist caught the "cavity" (RADIATION!) before it leached into other teeth.

Dentist - 4, Me - 1, China - 1

But the only appointment open is August 9th.

Dentist - 4, Me - 1, China - 2

I can't even win against a toothbrush.