Take your time with lollies

Whenever I go to San Francisco, I stop at the same little airport shop to pick up something for the kids on my way home. I try to get something different each time I go. This time, I was all set to buy a 3-dollar bag of salt-water taffies, each wrapped in its own translucent white paper (I love the paper! I love it way better than I love the taffies!), when the woman behind me in line started talking up the See's Candy Lollipops. They were about 15 dollars, but they did look good! The check-out clerk agreed—they were good! Another person in the line thought they were good too! So I thought, heck, I can part with the extra 12 dollars for something as good as that. I bought them.

And they are so good! Cafe cream, chocolate, vanilla, and caramel. (I think the marketing team was completely out of ideas after naming the coffee one.) I totally recommend them. Keep an eye out next time you're there.

I always, always, crunch hard candy. I can't not crunch it. I'm in a rush, you see. My mother has spoken to me about this many times over the years (quite recently, too), but I never really thought that anything bad would actually happen to my teeth.

(Can you guess what's about to happen?)

So, the other day, I was crunching away on a vanilla one, when I thought, "HEY! There are little ROCKS in this lolly!!!!!" Scenes of legal action started running through my head. Not that I am really the litigating type, but I could be! I COULD BE! What if this isn't rocks? What if it is mouse bones or something?

It wasn't rocks. You know what it was: my molar. Upper right. In bits. Pretty much destroyed. Sad, hey? It didn't really hurt though, and—good news—it got me to the dentist. There was a lot of drilling but it was nothing like what James Frey went through (or did he? Or. Did. He?) in A Million Little Pieces.

I have a temporary crown on that molar at present. I go back next week for the porcelain one. I haven't had a lolly since this happened, but I will. And I will be patient with it.


This is the second in the Challenge category. See what Mark and Zoot have come up with.

O Best Beloved

Don't make 'em too vulgar-big. I wouldn't look like Giraffe—not for ever so.

Leopard started out as the 'sclusivest sandiest-yellowest-brownest of them all. No spots at all! When he lived on the High Veldt, O Best Beloved, he could easily hide and surprise Giraffe and Zebra and all the rest of 'em out of their jumpsome lives. He could indeed! After a time, though, they learned to avoid anything that looked like a Leopard. And finally Giraffe and Zebra moved to the forest, which was all 'sclusively speckled and sprottled and spottled, dotted and splashed and slashed and hatched and cross-hatched with shadows.

Leopard wondered where his where all his breakfasts and dinners and teas had gone. And when he went to look, he stood out like a sunflower against a tarred fence. Leopard needed to change his skin. And he did, O Best Beloved! He did indeed—he got all fulsome spotty and dappled. Now Leopard can lie out on the bare ground and look like a heap of pebbles. He can lie out on a leafy branch and look like sunshine sifting through the leaves. He can lie right across the centre of a path and look like nothing in particular. And he can catch Giraffe and Zebra. Oh yes he can!

I'll tell you a secret, O Best Beloved....

The Ethiopian didn't press on those spots. He didn't do it with his five fingertips. He didn't indeed! Forget what's in the "intelligent design" section in your new biology text books, O Best Beloved! (I don't think even grown-ups would keep on saying such a silly thing if their president didn't say it—do you?) No—it's called natural selection, O Best Beloved, and you can look it up!

Photo credit: Dianne Chamberlain.
Gratitude and heaps of acknowledgement of course to Rudyard Kipling.

The zoot challenge

Zoot (a close friend and, well OK, relation) has issued a challenge to me and Mark: each week one of us will provide a photo and then we all write about it without peeking at each other's posts. Deadline: midnight PST. Today is the first challenge. You'll see my effort in the next post. I have a little under three hours and a heck of a lot of thinking to do.

For this, I'm introducing a new label to this space: challenge.