tasty.

La chocolat, trés délicieux

HPA's Willy Wonka was quite super.  One of my bestest friends (as the nutterific Grandma Josephine—hi Emily! *waves* ) and her little bro (as a rainbow-striped Oompa-Loompa) were in it, and they were fantastic.  I love homeschoolers and theatre.  Especially because they're a good combination.  The only disappointment (which was in no way related to the production) was my post-show chocolate yen, which could not be fully sated because every single Wonka chocolate bar in Meijer was gone.  (It was incroyable.)  But the chocolate I did get was very tasty, and I am thankful for it.  (And thanks very much to Rick and surgery-bound Connie for giving me and Rachel their show tickets!)


(Random interjection of enthusiasm for parenthetical clarifications!)

I'd like to teach the world to smell like strawberries…

the one on the far left makes me think a bit of marshmallows,
which are another yummy, albeit human, invention.

According to the New Oxford American Dictionary, "strawberry" is derived (through Old English) from "straw" and "berry".  (So profound, I know.)  The problem with this is as follows:  if you look up any of the eight definitions in the same dictionary for "straw",  they all have to do with something being dry or pale or worthless.  Unless the pre-1150 A.D. Anglo-Saxons only ate underripe berries, that frankly does not describe well the amazing fantabulosity that is a strawberry.  Strawberries are bliss.  (If I were thirteen, I would write a perfectly rhyming ode to the strawberry. But I'm not, and no  longer brave enough to try.)


And—mon mot—have you sniffed one recently?  or even better, a full punnet?  I am convinced that one of God's most wonderlous gifts to humanity is the smell of ripe strawberries.  (Their genus name in Latin, on the authority of Wikipedia, is Fragraia.)  I wish I could get this into a Google picture, but I doubt it would produce quite the desired effect. And they're quite sweetly aesthetic, too.  I think I'd like to grow strawberries someday (you can grow them as potted plants, and not just beds).

Oy, I haven't had strawberries in a couple of months, and a craving is coming on right about now…

Also, this is one of the best things I have ever seen:

Bending Space and Time To Bring You a Tale of Marvelous Holiday Spirit:

Once, on the twenty-fifth day of the penultimate month of the last year of the first decade of the second millennium, there was a national holiday.  There was a girl who slept late and got up just in time to eat giant cinnamon rolls with her family and watch the Macy's parade.  She wore jeans that smelled like salt and a very purple sweater with a cowl, kindly knitted for her by her grandmother.  She helped make the sweet potato casserole for dinner, and set the table, and played video games with two of her younger brothers.  They turned on the invincibility cheat codes and shot down a few hectomabobs of droids who were trying to invade the Galactic Republic.  She got the Tarzan soundtrack stuck in her head and listened to Enya on her iPod, and explained what a glottal stop was to her family, who don't like Regina Spektor's music.  Then she ate one plate of scrumptious edibles, plus an extra serving of yams and marshmallows.  Her father, oldest younger brother, and she had an in-depth discourse on the fall of historical Prussia, and an argument about past-perfect verb tense.  She and her sister watched the National Dog Show.  She pined after the wire terrier and the Irish setter and the blue-eyed Akita husky.  After sitting around and thinking for a while, she did a tad bit of writing (felicitously, not homework).  She grossly flouted American rules of punctuation in favor of the British rules.  Then she watched the season 2 finale of Doctor Who, glared daggers at her brother for what was probably a good reason, if she could only recall what it was five minutes afterwards, and fain read her friends' NaBloPoMo updates.  The day after that very long-windedly-titled day is called Tomorrow, also known as Friday, and is bound by the laws of the universe to arrive in about nine minutes.  

The girl wrote a story.  

The very long-windedly-titled day was temporarily nicknamed Today, and a pretty first-class day it was, in the unsnowy mitten-shaped land where the girl lived.  
(Especially the sweet potatoes.)

The girl was very thankful for a long list of things, and she spent some time shutting her eyes and clenching her fists and hoping very hard that she will remember to be just as thankful tomorrow, and maybe for the rest of her life.

On caramel apple dip and almonds, and other things that don't really go together.

For lunch at school, today I brought an apple (I have no idea what kind it was because I pilfered it from the stash at the Iglesia last Sunday), several spoonfuls of caramel apple dip, and a bagful of raw almonds (because salted/roasted almonds taste like chicken. I am so not joking). (I left my peach yogurt at home, darn.) I ate the apple with the dip and about half my almonds, and then I had several fingerfuls of caramel left that I wanted to eat but couldn't, because I had no apple and I didn't want to eat it with my fingers (basically, because I was too lazy to put all my stuff away so I could go to the cafeteria and get a spoon). So...I dipped the rest of my almonds in it.

'Twas only a vaguely interesting food. The caramel pretty much overpowers the almond for about three seconds until you've sucked the caramel off, by which point the almond tastes really bland, and the stickiness of the caramel really gets the almond stuck in your molars. I wouldn't particularly recommend the experience, unless a handful of raw almonds is the only medium by which you can safely consume the remainders of your delicious caramel dip.

My ability at math is often somewhat limited. I either can't make heads or tails of math, or I don't retain it very well (except systems of equations. I don't know why, but that is forever branded into my left brain.) I have managed to work out that

almonds + caramel = vaguely untasty

math + Kiersten = dangerous chemical explosion

...It's interesting that I hate math and love English, since I hate math for the rules but am a staunch defender of the grammatical codex. Of course, I hate math's rules for the logic and everyone knows English utterly lacks logic, at least by comparison with every other language on the planet.

“English is a language that lurks in dark alleys, beats up other languages and rifles through their pockets for spare vocabulary.” ~ Oscar Wilde

I was thinking about empty time. What does one do when one has nothing to do? Or when one's brain is convinced it has something to do, but there are no actual thoughts floating about in one's brain? When one would write about anything just to write? When one would mix moonshine with daylight and name it poetry? What does one do with the conflicting all-consuming entities of a writer's heart and writer's block? With pictures and no words, with words and no people? With nighttime and no sleepiness?

With a blog post all written and no internet until I get home tonight?

Pizza

Things of note:
  1.  Ham is horrid.  It's a repulsive food in almost every sense.  It tastes awful, it's a sort of imagination-stimulating color (not in a good way), and the texture is all slimy.  Not really, but it's the first passably workable word that came into my head.

  2.  Pineapple is normally very good.

  3.  Reheated pizza is mush.

And yet—because I had a random and inexplicable craving for pizza—I combined all three of those into one triangular piece of edible questionableness, and went at them all in one go.

      I ate reheated pineapple-and-ham pizza.

Unfortunately, the top half of the slice was tragically bereft of cheese.

Conclusions:

  1.  Ham is absolutely just as horrid on pizza as anywhere else.  The slathering of cheese (on the bottom half) did a lot to disguise the color, not much to disguise the texture, and nothing at all to disguise the taste.

  2.  Pineapple, while delicious practically everywhere else, is just weird on pizza.  Do "tomato" and "pineapple" sound like they were meant to go together?  I answer you, no.  I mean, one word is from Middle English and one is from French/Spanish/Porteugese/Nahautl.  And pineapples grow in the Americas, which isn't anywhere near the home of pizza.  i don't really know where tomatoes originated. 

  3.  Leftover Sajo's pizza is, texturally, almost galatically preferable to leftover Little Caesar's pizza.  
...My spell check is telling me that "galactically" is not a word.  I find this absurd.

  4.  My dad is awesome for sacrificing his second-to-last slice of three-day-old Sajo's pizza to his oddness-prone daughter.

  5.  I changed the time zone on my laptop so that I could post this slightly after eleven p.m. on Saturday and not slightly after midnight on Sunday.  

Well, that's not really part of the conclusion; it's just a random fact that's mostly unrelated to the pizza, but I already numbered it and don't feel like changing it back.  (And after all of that, I just previewed the post and it's going to label it as having been posted after midnight on Sunday anyway.  "Stars.  Can't do it.  Not today.")