A Safe Return
We left on Friday for our annual holiday trip to Abandon Hope Town (also affectionately known as "Slowville").Today, we returned.
I've given up trying to describe how hideously difficult these trips are, or why. Let me just say that by the time we get back to Austin, I feel like a Chilean miner who sees the sun after months trapped underground.
Now, a few pictures.
I like to call this first picture "welcome to East Texas":
It was even more disturbing in person, believe me.
On Sunday morning, I took Eli to Krispy Kreme, and we had an interesting discussion about this picture:
What we discussed was whether the snowman was right-handed or left-handed. Based on the position of the scarf, we concluded that he was left-handed. Actually, it would be fair to question how he could have a scarf on at all, given that he has no hands.
Finally, we went to the children's science museum in Shreveport, and in the gift shop, I saw this:
That's right--your eyes are not deceiving you. That is Count Chocula lipgloss. And Lucky Charm lipgloss was on the next row. Who knew?
On the way home, while we were eating lunch, Eli 10.4 asked Gloria why some of the cheeses she likes smell so bad.
"I'm not sure," she said. "I think they might actually put little bits of mold into bleu cheese."
"That would certainly make me want to eat it," I said.
That made her curious, so she looked up bleu cheese on Wikipedia. Here's an excerpt:
Blue cheese (or bleu cheese) is a general classification of cow's milk, sheep's milk, or goat's milk cheeses that have had cultures of the mold Penicillium added so that the final product is spotted or veined throughout with blue, blue-gray or blue-green mold, and carries a distinct smell, either from that or various specially cultivated bacteria. Some blue cheeses are injected with spores before the curds form and others have spores mixed in with the curds after they form. Blue cheeses are typically aged in a temperature-controlled environment such as a cave.
...The characteristic flavor of blue cheeses tends to be sharp and a bit salty. The smell of this food is due both to the mold and to types of bacteria encouraged to grow on the cheese: for example, the bacterium Brevibacterium linens is responsible for the smell of many blue cheeses, as well as foot odor and other human body odors.
Gloria read this out loud. Eli and I both said "EWWWWW!" At roughly the same time. "Mom, you like stinky foot cheese," Eli said.
On the basis of this description, I believe there would be a market for cheese deodorant. Maybe Dr. Scholl's would be interested.
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