The Pilver

I am entirely aware that not a soul was anxious about me returning to writing.  But the photo I downloaded was simple and to the point.  The Max is now in college (Eek!), albeit not out of high school.  He has begun a program called running start where he attends college and high school simultaneously.  In his endeavor he has also begun classes where he must write, a lot.  While helping him edit his papers I have realized how much I miss the writing process.  I am also realizing how rusty I am.  So forgive me while I remember where commas belong and that sentences should not end in prepositions.  As a side note, I also need a brain break from the nasty divisive world we are living in.  (Ended a sentence in a prepositions right there).

In addition to my desire to blog, the holidays will be here soon.  And there is nothing I enjoy writing about more than malty holiday beers and bizarre Christmas products.  This summer was long and wonderful.  And I am so happy it is over.  It is definitely time for bonfires and spooky nonsense and parades and even Christmas shenanigans.

So if you remember how much fun the 00s were, as a blogger or as a blog reader, let’s revive that happy-fun-joy time.

Long ago, when blogging was all the rage, I started this one. And every anniversary of the day The Pilver started I bought or made a cake to celebrate the fact that it’s still around. Until today. My car is in the shop and by the time I recalled what the date was, it was too friggin hot to drive my back up car without A/C to the store. So instead, I unwrapped a can of beer, grabbed a marker, and this is sadly all I’ve got.

2007 was a great year. Cheers!

The Halloween season is nearly over, and I haven’t yet written a thing.  This ends tonight.  This ends because I saw a new/old Halloween special that I had never heard of until last week.  I have been trying to create some holiday memories for little kids I know.  These memories have consisted of pumpkin bread, cotton spiderwebs, and vintage TV Halloween cartoons.  We watched and enjoyed all time classics like It’s the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown and Garfield’s Halloween Adventure.  In my searches for specials to watch I came across Halloween is Grinch Night.  Somehow I had never heard of this spooky short and last night we snuggled together to be entertained with a brand new cartoon.

Don’t do it. Don’t watch it. Or if you do do it,  (I said do-do) watch it first and then come back to read the review.

It is awful.  It’s Atrocious.  It’s Dismal.  It’s a three decker saurkraut and toadstool sandwich with arsenic sauce.

I now understand why this movie has never crossed my path.  From start to finish it lacks the magic that How the Grinch Stole Christmas possessed.  The animation is  bad and  the story line is confusing.  It’s hilariously poorly written.  Let me tell you why:

This movie is a prequel to the Christmas Grinch.  So at the start of the film we know that the Grinch begins as an evil character and also ends as one.  The story is set in Whoville on Halloween night, a holiday which isn’t even celebrated.  All the Whos get scared of something called “the sweet and sour wind” and lock themselves in their houses.  During the spooky wind the Grinch comes down with a bunch of scary stuff hauled by his dog and then the Grinch scares them.  But not this Halloween.  A little boy named Euchariah decides he cannot stay inside during the sweet and sour winds because he needs to go to the Euphemism.  Most of the movie I was confused as to what the Euphemism actually is.  It’s the outhouse.  So this little boy has to pee.  On his way to or back (I cannot remember) from peeing he encounters the Grinch.  He gets scared, and then braves up and somehow the Grinch decides not to scare Whoville. That’s it.

There’s the Grinch’s dog, Max.  He’s not wearing antlers for this trek down the mountain.  The colors are awful, don’t you think?

Speaking of awful colors, the Grinch isn’t even his glorious shade of green.  He’s a sad late 70’s shade of earth tone that was probably found in the Euphemism.

One good thing came of my watching this show.  I found the original ad for the show from it’s debut.

This takes me back to rummaging through the Sunday newspaper to find the TV listings booklet to see what was going to be on during the holidays.  Back when you had one shot and only one shot to watch the good stuff.

If you are doubting me, would love to prove me wrong, or are just morbidly curious.  Check out the show for yourself.  I want to know what you think!

The summer of 2017 had been relatively sane, until today. There were scattered hot days, but not too many. There were wildfires, but not too close. On the first day of the worst month of the year all of this changed and my yearly vow to give August a chance failed on day one.

Just look at this.  100+ degrees so far as the eye can see.  

This is the view from my house.  That’s smokey air that has not been present in our area at all, until today.  

I went to the grocery store to see if maybe some brewery chose to release a fall ale early.  No luck, just 286 different types of IPA.  But I did find this.  I’m not really a fan of flavored creamer.  However this is my first PK sighting of the year.  Tomorrow morning my French press will join with some of the contents of this bottle and I will whisper softly to myself, “September is coming.”

Hanging by a thread, that’s what I’m doing folks.  I grabbed a cheesecake from the bakery, slapped it onto a plate and took a quick picture.  But I did it.  

Ten years ago, when blogs were still all the rage, when G-dub was pres, when we all used MySpace and AIM, I started a blog.  I loved it so much.  I have met so many amazing people, many of whom I have yet to meet irl.  Some who I have gotten to know well and actually have spent time with.  Someone I loved who was taken in 2010 to the cruelty of cancer.  (Miss you tg). Another who we lost this past month.  (Miss you too, Dan). 

I keep telling myself I need to get back to it. I need to write again.  It won’t be the same though.  We don’t all blog anymore.  We don’t click from blog to blog every night to see who has posted and we don’t read each post and make sure to comment.  That’s expected.  There are more demanding careers and spouses and busier lives..  There are more kids in our lives now.    I had the privilege of going through pregnancy at the same time as a couple of outstanding ladies I met blogging and now those babies are entering kindergarten.  

I only posted twice between the 9th and 10th year.  And again I’d like to think there will be 364 posts between this cake and the next.  I’ve got some fantastic things in my life I’d like to share.  But I won’t.  I’ll go to bed early some nights for work early in the morning and late others helping with homework.  I’ll think of something to post and decide against it just because it’s tough to try and start it up again.  So my goal for the 11th year is three posts.  I bet I can achieve this.  

There will be cake on July 18, 2018.   Mmmm…cake.  

I work four days per week.  Fridays are my Mondays which makes Mondays my Fridays.  It hasn’t always been this way for me, I worked a typical week for most of my adult life.  Now I am a weekend warrior.

I truly like my job, which makes Fridays absolutely bearable for me.  It is also easily bearable because everybody else is in Friday mode, so the people I interact with are in a good mood.  Today nothing went right.  I was having a unpleasant first day of the work week experience.  For the first time in ages I felt as though I was having a Monday moment.  Let me tell you about it.

To begin, I slept only about six hours last night.   I realize this is not going to result in major exhaustion or deliriousness.  But I get my eight hours of sleep a night.  Some people have to eat only healthy things, others must get to the gym.  I sleep eight hours, it’s what I do to keep my sanity and health.  So, I am a little tired, but I will definitely make it through the day.  When I got out of bed I noticed that the windows were all down in my car, and I knew it had down poured last night because I heard it on the roof.  Whee!  Soaked vehicle!  Still not the end of the world, I’ll lay down a towel.

I get myself ready for work, drive to work, everything is great.  But everything isn’t great when I remember that I took a different car to work than I usually do and the key to enter my place of business is on the key chain of the car I normally take.  This car is at my house, 40 minutes away.  I’m early for work, because I am always early.  I checked to see if any windows might be unlocked or if any doors are easily wiggles open or if any spare keys are left in obvious spare key places.  The answer is no to all of that.  So I phone my extremely forgiving boss and explain my situation.  There are two humans in the vicinity with keys.  YAY!  I call both and am directed to their voicemail boxes immediately.  Boo!  I once again call the kindest boss ever and am directed towards a solution.  Phew!

After all the shenanigans, I got into work ten minutes late.  I am ashamed of this fact, but I’m there none the less.  Let’s celebrate this achievement and also take a minute to discuss the clothes I wore today.

I had just bought new pants.  These new pants are so lovely.  So lovely in fact that they will only coordinate with one pair of shoes that I own.  As I was putting on my shoes this morning I realized that the strap to them was not staying fastened.  I really didn’t care too much if I wore these new pants but I was going to be late if I went and tried to find an entirely new outfit.  I am not late, ever.   Sleeping well and promptness are my superpowers.  I was going to have to find a way to wear these shoes.  So I dug around in a drawer and found some super glue.  There was no reason for me to remove my shoe at work, so why not just glue it shut for the day and take them to the cobbler tomorrow, I thought.  Clothes on, shoes glued, all is great.

So now back to me at work.  I unlocked the building and raced to get everything ready for the day.   I have to run a sandwich board out to the road when we open.  I was hustling out to the road with said sign and remembered that they had recently done some excavating to the parking lot creating a bee-line to the space where the sandwich board must reside.  With glee I raced across the area that was not accessible prior to the excavating.  Because of all the rain (the same rain that had soaked my car seats last night) and because the ground was still soft from the pushing around of dirt and gravel my foot sunk, deep into the muck.  Not the foot that had a working strap, oh no.  The foot that had a shoe superglued together that could not be removed without the shoe becoming worthless, lowered itself quickly into what felt like quicksand.

Inside that shoe is a lot of mud.  And gravel.  And that shoe is super glued onto me for the rest of the day.  I wiped off all I could of what debris was surrounding my foot.  And until clock out time came, I tried to ignore the discomfort that resulted from my eager sprint in the parking lot.

So, today, was my Monday on a Friday and it felt like a Monday.

Last weekend I dug through my freezer and was reminded that I still had the bottom of a bottle of spiced rum.  Enough for a drink, perhaps two.  What I lacked was anything to drink with the rum.  I googled a solution to my problem and in roughly twelve minutes I was at my nearest convenient store in search of my mixer du jour, ginger ale.  What I found alongside, was far greater.  

First a little history with my relationship with ginger.  I like it.  But when I was pregnant and suffering from all day “morning” sickness it was suggested that I try ginger candy to alleviate my nausea.  To this day I associate the taste of sweet natural ginger with losing an otherwise lovely dinner in a roadside bathroom in the state of New Mexico, another post altogether.  So if I decide to partake of ginger ale, it is always the less authentic version one can find under the name brand Canadian Dry.  Real ginger ale, ginger candy, etc. is not my favorite.

So there I was at the C-Store staring at the only ginger ale option they provided:  Reed’s All Natural Jamaican Ginger Ale.  I hesitated.  Maybe my taste buds have forgotten, I thought.  Better look for another option to go with rum, I thought as I peered through the glass doors for something else with which Sailor Jerry would play nicely.  I came upon two drinks I had not seen in over a decade.  They make Surge again!  Is that Crystal Pepsi?!  Without even contemplating my no caffeine after noon rule I grabbed both drinks and instantly my thoughts went one place.  Blog.  

I do this all the time, sometimes many times per day.  I have written dozens of unpublished blogs since I last posted here but none of them seemed right.  But soda, this was good.  I then grabbed the ginger ale and because I was feeling thirsty at that moment I rounded out my order with a can of Sanpellegrino.  I paid for my drinks and drove home.

First Crystal Pepsi.  AKA the soda that came out in my early teens.  I confuse Crystal Pepsi and Pepsi Blue (another short lived 90’s cola), because I don’t usually drink Pepsi.  Of course I tried both of these sodas when they debuted in the decade of grunge, but I really didn’t remember them.  But…after tasting Crystal Pepsi I remembered it in the same way Robin Williams remembered he was Peter Pan in Hook.   It took some effort, but I did recall the taste.  I wasn’t as thrilled about my reunion with this soda as he was with tinkerbell, but you get my point.  It took a few sips.  Crystal Pepsi tastes to me, like Pepsi, but different and yet totally them same.  Another fun fact about Crystal Pepsi:  It has a great commercial from the Super Bowl including a song by Van Halen.

Moving along…

Sanpellegrino is great.  It’s orange juice soda.  I wanted some while I was driving home so I bought some.  You didn’t come here to read a review on this beverage.

Surge.  *sigh*

I have a love/hate relationship with Surge.  I would have likely been a huge fan, but I was still nursing my wounds from the discontinuation of OK Soda when Surge broke out into the market.  I didn’t want Surge,  I didn’t ask for it.  I didn’t contact Coca-Cola headquarters specifically asking for the re-release of Surge.  I did this with OK Soda.   So while I would have loved Surge if I still had my Gen-X soda of choice, I scoffed at its release as a pseudo  alternative beverage that could never bee as wonderful as my beloved.  However, I took a few sips this evening.  It’s not bad.  I imagine they mixed Mello Yello, Minute Maid Orange and Sprite in order to create this drink.  Sorry I gave you no play in ’97 Surge.  I am still holding out for an OK Soda re-release.  1-800-I-FEEL-OK.

Finally, Ginger Ale.  Reed’s Ginger Ale is tasty.  After adding a shot of rum I did in fact forget about my New Mexico episode and I might even try it again at some point.  However it is coming on the warmer season and spiced rum doesn’t seem like the spirit of choice in the heat.

So, cheers to overcoming my fear of ginger.  Cheers to remembering sodas from the 1990’s.  And cheers to The Pilver which is nearly ten years young.

Good!  You came to the right place!

I am utterly depressed about not keeping up with my vow to blog every day this month.  I really am, I’d much rather be blogging than doing what I’m doing.

I’m ill.  In the sore-throat-high-fever-I hope-I’m-not-sporting-a-case-of-strep variety.  My carpal tunnel in my wrists is flaring so badly driving is a painful chore, let alone the numb burning that I get from typing a few paragraphs.  While condo life is definitely more simple because I have a dishwasher and a working washer/dryer, acting as a single parent is not.  I’d kill for a night with a couple hours to do nothing. A couple minutes would do.

I’m tired, sick, frazzled, and I’m missing hundreds of clumps of hair.  My biggest worry right now is that when my baby girl turns four this Sunday I won’t be able to pull off the sort of cake she’s requested as neither cake making nor art are talents I possess.

There’s more.  I’m just not willing to share.  I’m in one of those moments that won’t kill me but will hopefully make me stronger.

Thanks for listening to me whine.  I’m hoping to make up the loss of posting days.  And I’m also hoping to put up a Christmas tree up soon.  It’s time.