Feeding The Five-Year-Old In Me

Guess what I had for dinner? Go on, I'll give you three guesses and I'm positive you're never going to figure it out.
   A hot dog wrapped in a tortilla with cheese and some salsa?
   Jeez... first try...
   Yup, I ate a tortilla-wrapped hot dog for dinner. With some cantaloupe and grapes on the side. For lunch I had lemonade and yogurt and some bread pudding (not really sweet, but it's very good. From Sun Harvest.) For breakfast I had iced tea and Pop Tarts, the chocolate chip kind, which are much more honest than the fruit-flavored kind which pretend not to be the candy they so obviously are.
   I'm regressing back to my childhood. When I was five this was what I thought it would be like to be an adult and to feed myself. Not junk food, not really (except for the Pop Tarts and hot dog), but not the most nutritious day I've had in my life either.
   I don't know, lately I just can't be bothered. Either I'll go days subsisting on fruit and vegetables because I just can't quite make it to the grocery store for animal protein, or I end up raiding the pantry for whatever's in there that might go well together. No middle ground. I'm waiting for the 'leftover lemon chicken - ranch style beans' night that will inevitably happen some time soon.
   I can cook meals. Really. I used to be a cook, years ago. I can make fifteen pans of lasagna and four-hundred-fifty hand-breaded cheese sticks and work the ovens and stoves on the line. And still have time to read to orphans. I'm good. But I'm terribly, terribly lazy, especially when the meal is only for me, myself and I. I dread what's going to happen to me next. When I was five I thought a stellar breakfast would be Lucky Charms but with all the pesky cereal bits taken out. I pined for a bowl of just Lucky Charms marshmallows but my mother foiled my efforts to bring my dreams to life.
   Now that I'm good and grown I might just need to make that happen. Although maybe that's a cry for help...

Everything Old Is New Again

I was in Austin Friday, going to tech startup/incubator/mentoring quasi-business quasi-service provider. It's the kind of place that's all over Silicon Valley, and which the owners of the place in Austin are trying to get going in Texas. I met a lot of engaging entrepreneurs, I saw that my brother-in-law and I are farther along than most people, and I heard some interesting ideas. But one business in particular struck me as something you could really only get going in Austin, and yet it was also something that my grandmother must have done in the depths of the Depression.
   One guy has started a business recovering yarn from old sweaters. Really. And he's making money doing it.
   I had a few thoughts. My first was 'Only in Austin' my second was 'He must have been laid off in the last two years,' my third was 'That's actually kind of cool' and my fourth was 'What else did my grandmother do that no one's doing now?'
   Back in the Depression people recycled everything. EVERYTHING. That's why things like old tin toys and copies of Action Comics #1 are so rare, they were all recycled. When clothes got worn enough that they weren't presentable for company they became work clothes, and when they were worn enough that they weren't suitable for that they became rags and when they were so used up they couldn't be rags any more they got left for the rag picker who probably sold the scraps to be incorporated into paper currency. The ultimate in economically-enforced frugality.
   And this guy, the sweater recycler guy, probably hit on his idea independently, I don't imagine he studied Depression-era re-use principles. Although it is Austin, maybe the dude's got a PhD in it.
   It's with the Baby Boomers that we got the throwaway economy. Growth predicated on planned obsolescence. That crap don't fly no more. People are keeping things longer, cars, clothes, houses, furniture, what have you. And they're looking for sustainability; they don't want fresh-cut timber, they want the wood that's re-used from the demolished factory. And if they knit they want yarn that's recovered from discarded sweaters.
   I think his idea has legs. And not just for yarn, for everything. I know I like to buy things once. If I buy a vacuum cleaner I'm going to have that appliance until the color fades and the wheels drop off. Same with my cars. Same with my clothes. And furniture. And pots and pans. So if I were an entrepreneur, perhaps with a mind to manufacture things, I'd go for quality right now. Made in the USA, durable, quality stuff. You could charge more for it because it would last. And I know customers would respond.
   And if you could figure a way to dismantle, say, a couch into its component parts and re-purpose them, you'd have something. For as long as you had discarded couches, I suppose.

Sugar

I love sugar.
   And I TOTALLY mean in the 'I love it so much I want to marry it' kind of way. I want to go to sleep beside sugar, I want to wake up next to sugar, I want to have sugar peck my cheek when I leave for the day and give me a hug and a soda bottle full of itself when I get home from work. I want to dive into sugar like Scrooge McDuck dives into his money bin. I want to become my own country so I can issue 'sugar certificates' like when US currency was backed by gold certificates. I want to grow sugar cane and sugar beets in my back yard so I can have something to gnaw on when I cut the grass.
   I think you get the idea.
   But sugar doesn't love me. Rather, high-fructose corn syrup doesn't love me. If it's something you need to cut with a scissors in chemistry lab* then it's not really something you need to be putting in your body. Nothing good will ever come of high fructose corn syrup because nothing good has so far. It's alarmingly common to see a line of kids who all look like Augustus Gloop, adults are dropping from diabetes, and there's corn syrup in everything that isn't pulled straight out of the ground and put on your plate. Seriously.
   And aspartame isn't any better.
   Those who've known me for longer than... say... three months know I'm constantly falling off the sugar/soda wagon. Give it up, go right back, give it up, go right back. I have a friend who's been 'quitting' smoking for twelve years and I give him crap about it all the time, but I'm no better. I'm like a heroin addict but without all the neato and unhygienic hardware. We do both have spoons, I suppose.
   So I need to commit, I need to find some reason to give it up for good. The only way food producers are going to stop feeding us poison is if we stop buying poison. And I can't wait for others to take the first step for me.
   Here goes nothing...


* that's how they do it in college, ooze out a length of high fructose corn syrup and cut a nubbin free