Family Circus Peanuts

We had a nice discussion about circus peanuts the other day. Apparently they come in numerous flavors now. It reminded me of when I was about 10 and my friend and I would visit his Grandmother. The woman smoked. A lot. There was so much smoke in her house it’s a wonder that she stayed alive as long as she did. Heck, it’s a wonder my friend and I made it out of there alive.  We rode our bikes there sometimes in the summer. She’d let us in and then she’d sit at the kitchen table smoking Luckys and listening to her police radio. I never knew why she listened to it – I guess her son was some kind of deputy or something. With all that smoke she probably should have listened to the fire department radio. 

And she always had this candy dish filled with circus peanuts on her coffee table. We never ate any. Circus peanuts were supposedly covered with that powdered sugar looking stuff. These may have been covered by the powdered sugar but it could have been dust or ash. That’s the problem with circus peanuts. We left the candy for the other grandchildren who visited on other days. I’m not sure how many of those kids lived to adulthood…

Tom Sawyer

I was leaving a funeral home Friday after visiting a family when I heard this guy yell “Hey Tom”. It was this guy we knew from the neighborhood where we lived about 12 years ago. I never knew him real well. So, he came up to me and said, “You’re Tom, right? Tom Sawyer?” I assured him that I was not Tom Sawyer and that Tom Sawyer had been a fictional character in some Mark Twain writings a while back. So then he said, “But you used to go by Tom Sawyer, right?” At this point I was baffled. I do not have a period of my life when I had been hit on the head or had some type of accident or anything that would result in memory loss. I did have a “California Name” in college but I didn’t use it much and nobody remembers that. (Except me. My California name was Chad Stevens.) If the guy in the funeral home would have called me Chad Stevens that would have been cool. At least he didn’t call me Huckleberry Finn, friend of the fictional Tom Sawyer. That would have been weird. Maybe I shoulda called him Huckleberry Finn. But I didn’t want to get him mad. He’s a big guy.

If somebody else calls me Tom Sawyer I guess I’ll have to go back and check my old yearbooks and stuff and see if that was ever my nickname.

The Yodeler

I love live entertainment in restaurants. We’ve got this restaurant in town where a magician goes from table to table performing tricks for the guests. This typically goes well as long as the tricks aren’t about turning their food into something else, having their food disappear, or sawing someone in half (“Hey, give me back that steak knife!”). There was another restaurant in town that had an organist. People would start singing a song and he would start playing in the key they were in. Pretty, pretty good. Oh, and by the way, the guy was blind. Amazing! Then there was this Mexican restaurant on the west side which apparently for years had a yodeler who would come in and sing. I guess he just showed up and yodeled. I never caught his act but I sure would have liked to have heard him. Who doesn’t love a yodeler?

What would happen today if you yodeled in a restaurant? I’d try it but I’m pretty busy here with this blog. If one of you loyal readers could try it, and let us know how it went, that’d be great. Thanks.

Oh, and somebody please find out if yodeling counts as exercise in a calorie count.

Weight, Weight, Don't Tell Me

I know this guy whose Mother-in-law ended up in the hospital and he had to retrieve her driver’s license for her. Not that you ever want to know what your mother-in-law weighs, but this guy kinda noticed her weight on the driver’s license. Well, according to the guy, she listed her weight at about 130 pounds lower than her actual weight. He thought this was funny and I agreed. If this woman ever gets pulled over, and the policeman asks “how can this person on this license possibly be you?”, her response, I suppose, could be:

•          I got that license before the holidays
•          I got that license before Costco opened
•          I think my grandson switched my scale to kilograms
•          I got the ten pound Whitman Chocolate “Sampler” for Valentine’s Day
•         Want some paczkis?

Speaking of driver’s licenses, I knew a guy (not the guy above) who was really short. How short, you ask? Well, he was so short you could see his feet in his driver’s license picture. That’s short!

The Caramel Code

I’m still getting used to the bulk buying concept. I went to Costco (did I tell you we’re members?) and, to get a Valentine there you had to buy twelve. I’m not sure I have 12 friends, or 12 I want to send valentines to. I suppose I could buy 12 for my wife and give her one every year until 2028. But I like my purchased poetic thoughts to be a little fresher than that. After looking at cards, I wandered over to the chocolates. The smallest box was the 10 pound Whitman Sampler. That seems a bit heavy, especially what with my wife and I both being on diets. And it seems to be a bit more than a “Sampler”. But I think there would be one big advantage to having 10 pounds of that stuff. I think after six of seven trays of the candy I might be able to figure out their code. That code, of course, is the caramel finding code. That’s what we’re all looking for when we indulge in assorted chocolates, isn’t it? The gooey, yummy caramel. You know not to take the wrapped piece – that’s never good. And don’t take the dark ones – nobody likes those. Beyond that, I’ve never figured out how to find the caramels. But I think with 10 pounds I could figure out the caramel code.      

I wonder how many pounds of paczkis it would take me to learn not to pick the prune ones!

Down Under-Weight

Like most Americans, I’m counting calories to start the year. So far this year I lost some weight, got sick, lost some more and now have to keep the pounds off and try to lose some more. The online calorie counters make it easy, don’t they? I like typing in a food and then the website gives you suggestions. Like, I typed “meatballs” and it suggested “Woolworth Meatballs”. Woolworths? Wow, I thought to myself, those would be some pretty old meatballs. Alas, it turns out that Woolworth is big in Australia! Well, I’ve never eaten Kangaroo or Koala, and I’m not eager to do that, so I didn’t choose the Woolworth Meatballs for my chart. On the other hand, this Australian connection was encouraging since you rarely see overweight Aborigines. So yeah, maybe I can fool my computer into thinking I’m eating the Australian meatballs.

My weight is now under my weight on my driver’s license. How many of us can say that?