Hopping Down the Bunny Trail

I get excited about Holidays.  The excitement probably comes from my mom.  When I was a kid, she would always fully decorate the house to celebrate and to this day I still get an Easter Basket and care packages for Halloween and Valentine’s Day.  I am already anticipating the Easter Basket that awaits me this weekend because it will probably mean lots of candy.  There are different things I like about different Holidays and while Halloween is by far my favorite overall holiday, Easter is my favorite Candy holiday.  Yes – I have categories and by the way, Valentine’s Day is my least favorite candy holiday.  Why would anyone want to waste all of that time eating chocolate?  At least the conversation hearts redeem the Holiday a little bit. 

I am a huge fan of Easter Candy.  I love jellybeans, Cadbury Eggs (yes they are chocolate, but filled with sweet goodness), coconut bird nests, and marshmallow goodies.  Ok, side note, why have Peeps had to cheapen themselves by expanding to other Holidays.  No one wants your stupid snowman peeps and red heart peeps just look ridiculous.  Anyway, by far the greatest Easter Candy is the Bunny Basket Marshmallow Eggs.  If you are not familiar, these are the colorful little egg shaped candies that are about an inch long and have a firm marshmallow center.  These candies are the greatest and they do not get the respect they deserve.  Anytime I talk about them with people, they always say “yuck.”  I don’t get it.  Why do so many people have such poor taste? 

I have already had my share of these candies this year, but I have also sampled almost every jell bean that I could get my hands on.  In fact, Rachel and I decided to get one or two bags of jellybeans each weekend for about the past five weeks so that we could sample them all.  Here is the list we have tried: 

-          Sweet Tart

-           Starburst Tropical

-          Sour Patch Kids

-          Brach’s Traditional

-          Jolly Rancher

-          Lemonhead and Friends

-          Brach’s Speckled Egg

-          LifeSavers

-          Hawaiian Punch

We are still on the hunt for the elusive Nerds Jellybean.  We saw them once at Gordman’s, but didn’t buy them because we were not aware at the time how rare they were.  I think that all of them were pretty good, but the Sweet Tart Jellybeans probably take the top spot.  As boring as it sounds I think the runners up were the two Brach’s variety. 

So hopfully  (ha ha, that is a pun not a misspelling) the Easter Bunny will be bringing a basket of goodies so that I can eat myself into a sugar induced coma this Sunday.  Easter comes but once a year and the really good candy (that’s right Peeps, I am calling you out) only shows up on this glorious occasion. 

Crashes, Cycles, and Coop

Last weekend started off with a bang….. literally.  Rachel called me on Friday afternoon and said, “Some guy rear ended me.” She was calm and I told her to call the police, so that they could come out and do an accident report.  Since she was just outside of our neighborhood, I decided to drive over and take a look.  She completely understated what had happened!  I pulled up to find traffic backed up and saw that her Pathfinder had been nailed by a big F350.  I saw that she was fine and walked around to the back of the vehicle and assessed the damage.  The back of the vehicle was TRASHED and it ended up having to be towed away.  Fortunately, everyone was fine and Rachel didn’t have to go to the hospital.  Now we just have to mess the with guy’s insurance company to make sure we get everything taken care of.  The only funny thing that came out of it is that Rachel has no choice but to ride around with me in my Jeep because it is our only vehicle.  I have had the top off all week and she hates it J

We woke up Saturday morning to assess how Rachel felt as we had signed up to ride the 33 mile Red Bud Classic Cycle tour.  She was a trooper and demanded that we go and do the ride despite the wreck on the previous day.  The ride was really cool.  We had never done one of the Red Bud Classic events, so the route was new to us.  It was a great ride with the wind at our side most of the time.   The best part of the event was that Big Truck Tacos was out there with the mobile truck, so I got to enjoy a breakfast taco after the ride.  It was a really nice morning, so we took our time on the way back to Guthrie, driving on the back roads all the way home so that we could enjoy the ride.  Along the way we stopped at Starbucks (big surprise) and Cup Cakes a Go Go so we could have some treats for our weekend guests. Finally we had to get home and clean up because a group of ten of us had a tour scheduled at the Coop Brewery. 

The tour of Coop was great.  They are one of only nine breweries in the state and the brew master really knew his stuff.  He used to be a teacher and it showed because he was very good at explaining the production process of their business.  As part of the tour, we got to taste all of Coop’s beer.  By far the best beer was the Farmhouse Ale.  This was a beer that actually came out of a batch that had some mistakes, but rather than throw it away, they added some tart cherries and reworked the flavor.  Unfortunately it is limited in supply since it was an off the cuff creation, but it was amazing.  Most beers that have fruit involved are a little bit sweet and really get annoying after a few drinks.  This ale was really different because it didn’t have any sweetness to it, just a nice tart taste. 

We spent the rest of the day hanging out with our friends and relaxing.  It was a jam packed day of leisure and fun so to make up for all the fun, I worked in the yard all day Sunday to balance it out. 

Toys in the Attic

I have fully repaid my debt to my parents for their assistance a couple of weeks ago cleaning out my Tahoe.  I made a trip back to Fairview last weekend  to help them.  The task at hand…… cleaning out the attic.  My parents have been going through a major spring cleaning at their house.  My mom even convinced my dad to clean out and organize the garage.  Ultimately, the goal is to have a giant garage sale.  With nearly 30 years’ worth of goods building up, a garage sale is a great idea. 

The attic was one of the last areas to get organized.  I am not quite sure how I got myself volunteered into this chore, but when I went up the attic stairs for the first time, I knew I was in for much more than I bargained for.  At the top of the stairs was an entire civilization of cardboard boxes with very little room to get around.  I started handing boxes down the stairs to my wife, dad, and mom.  This lasted a good five minutes before my mom and Rachel started to get preoccupied with what was in each box rather than taking the other boxes from me. 

The boxes were divided into piles of my mom’s stuff, dad’s stuff, my stuff, house stuff, and garage sale stuff.  The folks were willing to discard a lot of the old things which was good.  I know it was hard to part ways with the old orange blinds from 1983, but it was time.  Once we got all the boxes down, it was time to sort and organize.  I was tasked with going through all of my old toys and keep sakes. 

This was a lot of fun.  We went and bought several plastic containers so that once the goodies were sorted, I could store them safely and hopefully preserve their condition.  My full intention was to go through all of my stuff, organize it and then put it safely back into my parents  attic rather than having to take possession myself.  There was something that I was hoping to come across and take with me, and that was all of my old concert ticket stubs.

 To my excitement, I found them in the first box I went through.  There they were in all of their glory – the mix of all of the glorious late 80s and 90s bands that I went to see in high school.  Everyone from Poison, Metallica, Bush, No Doubt, Smashing Pumpkins, Prince, Aerosmith, and many, many others were represented.  Now the question is, “what do I do with them?” I don’t think Rachel will let me hang them on the wall in my bedroom like I used to do. 

After my victorious find, I began to go through my boxes of toys.  I was really into action figures when I was a kid and the ones that I liked were He-Man, G.I. Joe, Transformers, Star Wars, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Super Heroes.  I was hoping to find toys in a condition that might be worth something to collectors, but all of mine were definitely played with.  The He-Man Figures were in pretty good shape and so were the Ninja Turtles.  The transformers could probably be alright if I wanted to go through all the parts and put them back together, but the G.I. Joes were in terrible shape. 

If you remember back to when you were a kid, the G.I. Joes were put together buy a rubber band that connected their legs to their torso.  This made for a fun toy that twisted around and was great at doing battle with other toys, but 20 years later, it makes for a toy that snaps in two because the rubber band rots. 

I spent a lot of time looking through the Star Wars figures.  Aside from a little mold that has grown on the Millennium Falcon, the Star Wars collection was in good shape.  All of the action figures were safely stored in the giant C3PO and Darth Vader shaped containers and I was able to finally add the Hammerhead figure from the house.  You see, the Hammerhead figure was lost in the dirt many, many years ago and we just found him a few years ago while building in the backyard.  I really got a kick out of finding the  Rancor monster and shaking him to hear all of the stuff that was stuck inside his stomach because I had put the arms and legs of many an unlucky action figure into his mouth.  In fact, to try to replicate the scene where he was trying to eat Luke Skywalker in Return of the Jedi and Luke thwarted his efforts with a giant stick that held his mouth open, I used to steal branches from my mom’s decorative plant and use them to hold his mouth open. 

The toys are now all safely resting in clean, sealed plastic containers.  They definitely served their purpose and they were all very used.  I used to love to use my imagination when I was a kid and come up with different adventures for my toys.  At the end of the day, most of them ended up in the belly of a large plastic shark because what I loved to play more than anything was Jaws!