Author: towandapunk

It’s been a while, kiddos.  Might as well relaunch this thing with something completely crazy.

With a title like that, this could be a ridiculously long post. Sure, I recently read a book on the history of butter, I can write an ugly but functional computer program in a couple of languages, and I can explain why your wool sweater shrunk when you accidentally sent it through the washer and dryer (surprise: it wasn’t the hot water. Well, not just the hot water, anyway). But the list of things I don’t know…is infinite. So buckle up, because I don’t know how big this is going to get. (Bonus points if you caught the movie quote there.)

What is that exactly?

So, I eat candy once in a while. Ok, every now and then. FINE, I eat a lot of candy. And candy flavors are usually based on real foods. Those strawberry hard candies with the liquid centers. Lemon drops. Hot tamales (which thankfully taste like cinnamon, not actual tamales). Orange slices. Cherry nibs. Mints (don’t get me started on mints, I have some sort of addiction).

And each of those things taste like some sort of relative of what they represent. Fourth cousins twice removed, maybe, but one could at least identify them as in the same family.

Now, I love a good cold grape soda. Welch’s, if i can be selective. So cold it’s just a bit slushy, like the pop machine on the fritz in the Rotunda at SDSU would deliver back in the stone ages when I was in college. (That pop machine may be the only reason I ever went to my big lecture classes.) Everyone knows what grape soda, or gum, or Mike and Ikes taste like. It’s a very specific “grape” flavor. Except…it’s nothing like any actual grape I’ve ever eaten. And I buy grapes every week. It’s baffling to me.

Apparently it’s a theme

As long as we’re talking about grapes…this isn’t about them, exactly.  Including grapes, many fruits are eaten in both fresh, ripe forms as well as dried.  (I’m a sucker for dried pineapple, because it often features extra added sugar and might as well be pure chewy glucose.)

The subject of dried fruit is really a two-fer in the land of things I don’t understand.  I know you’re thrilled to read that.

Thing the first:  Why do some dried fruits get new names (I’m looking at you, raisins and prunes*), while other fruits just get the word “dried” or “chips” added to them?  Why don’t we call dried apples “almegs” or banana chips “brundorgs”?  Something in me suspects it has to to do with the moisture content left in the fruit, where it can be considered a whole separate fruit rather than just a shriveled up leather version of it’s former glorious whole.  The odds are better that this theory is just something I made up, though.**

The moisture content idea does segue nicely into thing the second, however.  If a prune is a dried plum, it is commonly understood that it has had a fair portion of the fruit’s moisture removed.  So what the devil is prune juice?  Why isn’t it just plum juice, since they have more juice to provide in the first place?***  I’ve consumed vast quantities of grape juice in my life, but never once even encountered raisin juice.  And I doubt one could even juice a brundorg.

Maybe it’s not fruit that I don’t understand, but the English language in general.  That actually makes more sense.

It’s gross

Yet another food thing.  I know this is bound to rankle some folks…

Nutella. Nope, I don’t get it. You want to ruin my chocolate with hazelnut? What’s wrong with you? Give me peanut butter (creamy, I’m not a sociopath). Give me chocolate spread. And keep your hazelnuts to yourself.

Not a food at all

I’m a life-long allergy wrangler.  Foods, animals, the world in general.  I’m allergic to it all.  I don’t know about the rest of my allergy-laden friends, but mine frequently manifest themselves with a healthy dose of itchiness.  That’s right, I’m a scratcher.  That is easy enough to understand (albeit likely more than you hoped to learn upon clicking the link to get here today).

What I don’t understand is why some scratching works, and some doesn’t.  If I get a mosquito bite on my upper arm, it itches, I scratch it, temporary relief.  Repeat ad nauseam until I’m bleeding or three days have passed, whichever comes first.  However, if I have an itch anywhere on my hand…ANYWHERE…scratching it with the other hand just doesn’t work.  No relief whatsoever.  The only thing that works is to gnaw on that paw like a feral cat.  Admit it, you’ve done it.  You’re driving along, an itch strikes on the muscle below your thumb, and suddenly you’ve got your palm jammed in your mouth so you can chew your way to nirvana.  No?  Just me?

Enough already

Like I said at the start, the list of things I don’t understand is infinite, so I’m just going to wrap this up for today.  I’m sure another round will pop up in the not too distant future.  For now, it appears that I’m the crazy lady who doesn’t understand what she puts in her mouth.  (Yes, I typed that, read it, thought about it, and still posted it.  No, I don’t know what is wrong with me exactly.)

Footnotes, aka Nerds Can’t Leave Well Enough Alone

*It seems that prunes had an image problem on account of their associated juice, and have been rebranded as “dried plums” since 2000.  This was blessed by the FDA and handed down to the California Dried Plum Board (CDPB).  I couldn’t make this stuff up.

**My research (cough~NERD~cough) indicates that it’s more likely a product of the source of the fruits than the moisture content.  Prune and raisin are the french words for plum and grape, respectively.  Many long years ago, if a fruit were to be exported from France to England, it needed to be dried to survive the journey intact.  It makes sense that the name from the source of the dried fruit would stick with it, and the native name would stay with the local, fresh fruit.

***There actually ARE both prune and plum juice, of course.  Prunes are made from a different variety of plums than the fresh red or black plums we generally eat.  So not only does the drying process for prunes produce a more concentrated and differently flavored sugar that affects the final juice, but the fruit itself has a different flavor.  Also, prune juice is made by boiling or steaming the dried fruits before extracting the juice, whereas plum juice is made like most other fruit juices, by crushing the ripe fruit to expel the liquid.  Because of the difference in the fruits and the chemical processes that happen during drying, even boiling down this freshly expelled juice wouldn’t magically create prune juice.

Every fall, the store my wife manages gets in their holiday merchandise. Being a farm supply type place, they get more interesting things than one would expect. Candles, home decor, toys, all sorts of the things we use to fill our homes.  This includes stuffed animals of all sizes.  ALL sizes.  Usually there are cows and lambs and horses that are about 3 feet long and just plain big. 

I can only assume these plush beasts are meant for kids.  They aren’t stocked with the pet toys, and they only come around this time of year. I would say I don’t understand why a kid would need a snuggly toy cow that is bigger than they are, but then I think back to the stuffed animal collection I had as a child. A ridiculous amount of fuzzy, fluffy, and well loved bears, dogs, rabbits, ewoks, Grover, even Lurky from Rainbow Brite. 

(Note:  This all came crashing down upon my 11-year-old shoulders when my allergist told me that I couldn’t have any of them in my room due to dust mites. None. Not one. No carpet either, but what child of 11 cares about carpet?  My Garfield collection had to go in a glass bookcase, like some sort of prison for sarcastic orange cartoon cats.  But I digress.)

You may know that we have animals. Spoiled animals. Every year, Tank, the 90 pound lab/coonhound mix, gets one of the big plush farm animals. First a cow, another cow, then a lamb. These things are roughly the same size he is, so he carries them around the house, unable to see where he is going and generally tripping over them. Once he has it positioned in whatever room we are in, he proceeds to lick it profusely, then…suck on it like a pacifier. There’s no pretty way to say that. But he loves it. So we have a big slimy speed bump wherever we want to walk.  Eventually, a hole forms somewhere along a seam, and stuffing pours out until we deem the poor being deflated enough, and I sew it shut with some of my knitting yarn.  

This year…this year, we moved. Into a tiny duplex for the time being. And Tank has adjusted marvelously.  The limp lamb came along for the move.  But stuffed animal season came.  And what came home this year was a…bear?  A puppy?  It’s sort of both, I can’t tell. I call her Vivian because I got sick of saying “get your bear…puppy…whatever thing!”  And you guys, Vivian is…enormous. She’s easily 50% bigger than either cow or lamb were. She’s so big that even if she DID fit through the doors, Tank couldn’t carry her without clearing every surface within 4 feet of the floor.  So each night, one of us picks up a slimy Vivian and carries her from the living room, through the kitchen, into the bedroom, only to do the reverse in the morning, with Tank trying to help by dragging her down to the floor every other step.  The only way to avoid that is to carry her over our heads like a disgusting Macy’s parade balloon. 

Over the weekend, Tank performed an occipital lobotomy on Vivian.  Stuffing has been pouring out of a nine inch gash at the base of her skull. In the living room. Trailing through the kitchen. In our bedroom. Now, normal pet toys have big chunks of stuffing, he can pull it out in pieces the size of a softball or bigger. Vivian?  Oh no, Vivian has her own mysterious ways. Her stuffing is the size of cotton balls.  These things are everywhere.  I don’t watch Star Trek, but I know a Tribble infestation when I see one. 

So tonight, I yanked a bunch more of Viv’s brain matter and spinal column out, then placed some sutures. Tank was so traumatized by my stitching that he had to hide in the bedroom during the procedure. Vivian pulled through, but she’ll have a rather ugly and colorful scar.  Tonight, I’m the crazy lady who performs brain surgery on giant, slimy, stuffed…whatevers.