Book Break

It's not entirely my husband's fault, although he did buy the first four books in John Ringo's Posleen Wars series.

Monday night we all went ice-skating, and my husband and I skated holding our son's hands. Ever do about 5000 one-inch bicep curls with a 25-pound weight? I figure that's about equivalent to sharing a 50-pound child on ice skates between two adults. My right arm is sore, DH's left arm is sore. But our son was skating a lot better this time, and said he had fun. Hot cocoa probably helped!

Although none of us fell ice-skating, Wednesday afternoon I fell on the slick, packed snow walking down our driveway to get the newspaper. Ow. I think that hurt worse than the one time I fell ice skating back in December: at least when you are ice skating, you know there is a possibility of falling. I wasn't even thinking that I might fall when I started down the driveway.

So besides the funeral I attended Wednesday morning, I've mostly been reading and nursing my sore arm and wrist, and trying to get myself to go out and put the roof rake back together to clear the snow off the roof, knowing that then I'm going to be sore all over again.

This is all the knitting I did, another waffle scarf. I'm alternating rows of the "Mystic Purple" and "Magenta" colors, but from a distance it just looks purplish.

Close up, the "Magenta" color has white and black in it. It reminds me of "Black Jacks" candy, a sort of pink-white-and-black licorice taffy we used to buy. If you are a black licorice or anise fan like me, it's a yummy association with a lot less sugar, and it doesn't hurt my teeth.

Peculiar Product Review

One of the little gifts I gave one of my brothers for Christmas was something by General Foods called a "variety sampler", a box of eight packets of four different hot beverage mixes. Sometimes you give somebody something and later think, "I'd like one of those myself!" So after Christmas I bought one of these things.

Three of the beverages were things I expected to find in an assortment like this: Suisse Mocha, French Vanilla Cafe, and Chai Latte. Okay, a cocoa, a flavored coffee, and a tea, basically.

But the fourth one I can only describe as peculiar: "Vanilla Creme".

What was "Vanilla Creme"?

When I added hot water to it, it was . . . white. When I read the description on the packet, it said, "Comfort in a cup: the taste of warm vanilla and cream, rich and delicious, with full, frothy sweetness."

Okay. So what they sold me was a packet of sweetened coffee creamer. I thought selling sweetened, flavored coffee creamer as a "beverage" was pretty lame, so I dug around on their website and filled in their customer contact form.

Sometimes when you complain, they send you coupons or something, so it's usually worth it to tell a company when you didn't like a product.

So I was not surprised to get back an email that started like this:

Thank you for taking the time to visit us at http://www.kraftfoods.com/ and for letting me know about your experience.

I'm sorry to hear you were not happy with General Foods International Coffees(r) Variety Pack. I am sending you reimbursement in the mail for this product, which you should receive within 7-10 business days.

Oh, that's nice, thought I, a reimbursement. Cool. Then I read on:

The problem you described sounds like the product was not properly stored during distribution. We take care at our manufacturing facilities to ensure that our products are stored at the correct temperature and time frame until we are able to distribute them. Once our products are in distribution, the storage is out of our control. If the product was exposed to excessive temperatures it could cause the problem you described.

Huh? The development and marketing of a lame beverage product is caused by improper storage?

Sounds like somebody's been inhaling the white beverage powder to me!