Ya know, I have to applaud Quaker.  They come out with some of the best snacky things for people who are watching what they eat.  For years, I’ve been a big fan of the Quaker minis.  But the last time I went to the store, I saw these new things - Quaker Mini Delights.  And in peanut butter flavor!  I swear, I could be buried in a vat of peanut butter and eat my way out - I love peanut butter THAT MUCH.

So I was looking for a little something sweet to munch on after lunch today and I remembered I had these little things in the pantry.  I tore open the package, not expecting anything to knock my socks off but I thought they’d be good.  My first bite registered something weird.  The snack cakes are multigrain and not sweetened so you have this little flat tasting thing but it’s topped by drizzled peanut butter.  Very yummy peanut butter, I might add.  It sort of took a second but no more than that and by the time I got to the bottom of the bag, I was licking the inside to get more.  What fun these things are!

They come in chocolate and cinnamon streusel, too, I think, but I will stick with the peanut butter.  ‘Cause it’s PEANUT BUTTER!

I had some good plans to get snookered last night.  And I was on my way!  However, I fell asleep halfway through my last glass of wine and was in bed by 9:30. 

Yes, indeedy, I am a party animal!

So, as promised, here’s a picture of my eyes this morning.  A bit cross-eyed, but not bloodshot.  Maybe tonight?

Oh boy.  I’m in trouble.  I’m sitting here having one of the absolute worst days at work that I’ve ever had and just watching the clock move slowly toward 4:00 so I can get the hell out of here.  The reason I’m in trouble?  Accompanying my very bad day are heavenly thoughts of what it is I’m going to be drinking tonight to wash this crap right out of my hair. 

Can you spell H-A-N-G-O-V-E-R??  And it’s not Friday. 

Yep.  I’m in trouble. 

I’ll post a picture of my bloodshot eyes tomorrow morning!   

Well, we are still battling saw-toothed grain beetles.  The wheat litter is long gone but I found out that those little peckers really liked that 50-lb. bag of bird seed we had stashed in the storage closet and forgot about.  I couldn’t figure out why we weren’t getting rid of them and, in fact, they seemed to be multiplying.  Then I remembered the bird seed.  Then I feared for the foodstuffs in the house.

And, yep, we finally saw them in the pantry.  I believe they had only gotten to the 10-lb. bag of cat food that was unopened on the floor of the pantry but the situation was such that a purge was in order.

So, after the 40-lb. bag of litter that got tossed, the 50-lb. bag of bird seed, and the 10-lb. bag of cat food, I started tossing anything that wasn’t in a can or sealed plastic container in the pantry.  Gone went my store of natural, local pastas, gone went three unopened boxes of cereal, gone went the 5-lb. bag of sugar and the 5-lb. bag of flour, gone went the granola bars, gone went the baking powder, the walnuts, the dried chili peppers, and the chocolate chips.  Breadcrumbs, brown sugar, oatmeal, corn meal.  Away, away!

I can’t even begin to calculate how many hundreds of dollars I tossed because of some teeny, tiny beetles who have decided to take up residence in our house.  Oh, and did I mention that they liked to live in the kitty litter boxes, even with clay litter in them??  Can we take a second to reflect on what they’re eating in there???  So, three boxes of kitty litter had to get tossed and refilled with brand new litter.  There’s another 50+ lbs. of product gone.

The purge will continue.  We have completely eliminated anything bug-worthy from the pantry and scrubbed it all down.  But we still have to pull everything out of the storage closet and make sure there are no leftover bags of bird seed or anything else that they want from there.  Then, we have to move to the basement, where I found a bunch living on the blanket that we put down under the basement kitty litter box. 

Have I mentioned how much I truly abhor bugs?  And now they’re cutting into my bottom line!  I will never be able to retire at this rate!  Those are some cheeky insects.

I am intrigued by the routes that commercial and professional places are taking to cut costs on their standard expenses.  Let’s look at bathroom paper products, shall we?

I’ve witnessed the thickness and general quality of the bathroom tissue go slowly downhill.  At one point, I was subject to tissue that was so thin, you could actually see through it.  This resulted in my using WAY more than I used to the old way.  That type of tissue is gone because I suspect I was not the only one to increase my usage.  No savings there.

The latest?  Shorter rolls.  Not less paper, narrower paper.  This is ingenious!  The actual length of the roll is an inch shorter than standard rolls.  They still fit in the paper holders but I don’t have that urge to use more than your typically sized paper.  Brilliant!

I applaud whoever thought of that.  Good job!

I must thank my good friend, cjh!  She helped me figure out what the problem was when I was weighing myself.  I was doing it wrong!

Breakfast makes me cranky.  I don’t particularly care for breakfast foods - never have.  When I was a child, I only had things like toast or Froot Loops with no milk for breakfast.  I didn’t like any “real” cereals, I didn’t like eggs, I didn’t particularly care for oatmeal.  I did like pancakes, however.  Mmmm.  Pancakes!  But who has time to make pancakes??  Oh, and any sort of breakfast potato.  But let’s face it - breakfast potatoes are only “breakfast” potatoes because they are served in the morning.  You can have potatoes done any way, shape or form at any meal.  So they don’t count.

I have gotten past most of the dislikes and I can actually eat breakfast food - I just don’t enjoy it.

Living where I do, it’s quite difficult to procure any sort of food in the morning except for breakfast food.  What I’d really like is some leftovers from dinner or a grilled ham and cheese sandwich.  But I am alone in this, I think.  There are many people in this world who enjoy breakfast foods.  And not just for breakfast!  When they have the omelet bar for lunch at work, people squeal with delight!  I want to know when they are going to have the pizza bar for breakfast - that would make me squeal! 

And, you know, I don’t understand why they can’t make me a grilled ham and cheese sandwich for breakfast at the grill.  If I asked for a ham, egg and cheese sandwich on grilled bread, they would gladly do that for me.  But if I asked them to hold the egg, I don’t know if they’d be able to cope.

So.  Here I sit.  I’m really, really hungry this morning.  And I’d so love a chicken salad sandwich with red grapes and walnuts on a multi-grain bread or a bowl of spaghetti and meatballs (or just the meatballs) or some buttery corn on the cob.  But is that possible?  No.  I have to figure out what to eat from the sea of breakfast foods in front of me.  Cereal, oatmeal, eggs.  Blech.

Well, this is the end of my 48th birthday.  It was a nice day, complete with watching Buffy and Angel (what?  It’s what I wanted to do!) and doing a little schoolwork and NOT WORKING and going out to dinner and ending the day sipping port and eating small bits of some very excellent chocolate with the love of my life.

All in all?  A very good day.

Tomorrow?  Back to freakin’ work.  Where did I leave my cone of silence?

Well, we haven’t seen evidence of varmints in our garden since we put the fence up and secured the entrance.  So, optimistically and possibly foolishly, we refurbished the garden and planted a second round of some crops.  (Heh, crops - that’s funny since this is our first garden and we are NOT farmers!)

A couple of them will be OK, I’m sure, like the broccoli and carrots, since they are good for 2nd plantings, especially the carrots.  But we planted a bunch more things, hoping for a mild late fall.  Since you can grow squash in a garbage heap, we planted another zucchini plant.  Amazingly, the yellow squash we originally planted survived the varmint scourge and resurfaced and now has quite a few big leaves on it.  So maybe we’ll get something.  We also planted more lettuce, because I read the you can keep planting lettuce all through the season.  And lots of beans.  The first round of beans that we planted sprouted so quickly and looked so good (right before they disappeared down the gullet of those pesky groundhogs) that we thought we’d see if we could get something out of another planting.  We also planted another round of peas - a bit too early, I think, but we’ll see.  And we put in another cauliflower and two more cantaloupes.  Oh, and cucumbers and pickles. 

So we’ll see.  We already had all of the seeds and something just might come of it.  If we get anything at all, it will be like a gift. 

Our potatoes are all done for the year, our scallions are all harvested and we lost all of our hundreds of beefsteak tomatoes and some peppers to blossom-end rot.  So those plants are all pulled up.  We still have several other pepper plants that are hanging in there, some onions that are close to harvesting and some really die-hard celery that won’t grow but also won’t give up.  The deck plants are doing amazingly well.  We will have all sorts of peppers for a long, long time.  And the herbs are fantastic.  We’ve even got some asparagus ferns growing - very funny!  The berry bushes that we never planted in the woods look good and maybe we’ll leave them in the containers until next year.  See if we can’t winter them in the garage or something.

I ordered some brussels sprouts seeds for fall planting, too.  When they get here, I’ll put ‘em in the ground.  Why not, right?