Quick London update
So my plans to post while in London didn’t exactly pan out, but the pressure was off since I’d already blown NaBloPoMo anyway. I’d much rather use my time to just enjoy being here– sampling holiday Starbucks flavors, Christmas shopping at Marks & Spencer, seeing “Wicked”, eating Indian food and scones with clotted cream (not at the same time). We also made a vegetarian Thanksgiving dinner, which I’ll blog about later. Hope your Saturday is as nice as mine will be!
Picture quiz answered
In my post yesterday, I asked if anybody could identify these curious little dots.
They’re candy buttons or candy dots, a classic American candy that I ate as a kid. They’re just colorful little sugar candies evenly distributed on a strip of paper. My mother sent me some at some point, I guess to evoke some nostalgia. Since the candies are pretty well stuck to the paper, we used to lick the back to moisten it so the candy would peel off neatly (how sanitary, right?). The Wikipedia entry claims they come in three different flavors, cherry, lime and lemon, but all I can taste is sugar and food dye. I guess the flavor varies slightly among the colors… mmm, Yellow 5.
Well done to traynharder23, who answered correctly yesterday!
Picture quiz
Just a quick question for you today, since I’m busy packing for my London trip, which begins tomorrow. 
What are these things?
Do you hoard?
I definitely hoard. I always have, especially with food. It’s not a habit I learned from anyone else, it’s just me. I like to save the best for last. After I went trick-or-treating as a kid, my candy lasted until January, if not longer. I inventoried it and then hid it away, wanting to draw out the enjoyment, saving my favorite pieces for a rainy day. The downside to this logic, of course, is that some things ended up going stale before I ate them and I had to throw them away. Bummer.
Now, as an adult with a kitchen full of stuff, I am still doing this. Sometimes it’s with candy. J has learned that I do, most of the time, have a candy stash of sorts, and if he asks I’ll go dig around in my closet and find a chocolate bar or bag of Fisherman’s Friend that even I had forgotten about. But it’s not only candy. I have a bunch of food items in the cupboard, obtained as gifts or while traveling, that I feel are special, unique, hard-to-get, and I want to save them for a particular moment, when we can really enjoy them. But you know what? If I keep on thinking this way, those special items will meet the same fate as my Halloween candy– past its expiration date in the trash. I’m trying to embrace the idea that there’s no day like the present to enjoy these treats, to have a little something different. Among this stash of “special” foods, we have sauce mixes, reindeer pâté, cloudberry sauce, hazelnut creme, and Jell-O.
A glimpse at some of the stash.
I have officially decided that during the month of December we will make an effort to eat our way through some of hoard. I want to enjoy the items before it’s too late, and also take the opportunity to think about our trips or wherever we happened to get each item from. And after that there will be more trips and more guests, and the stash will be replenished, but I promise that in the future, those “special” things will always be used, never left to waste away in the back of our cabinets.
I got nothing
Edit: I wrote this quickly last night, hit publish, and happily closed my computer for the rest of the night. Except… I guess I didn’t hit publish. It wasn’t published yesterday. So I’ve screwed up NaBloPoMo again, in the exact same way I did last year. At least I’m consistent? But I’ll do my best to wipe away my frustrated perfectionist tears and follow through until the end of the month, even though it won’t count anymore.
I hate to say this, but… I got nothing for you today. Two-thirds of the month of November has passed and posting every day has definitely taken its toll. Today I took some time to write in my sadly neglected (paper) journal, and I think it drained my writing energy for the day. And I couldn’t even find a pretty picture to post! So for today, you get my apologies. Have a great Saturday!
