Mother's Milk Tea Warning

I live with an array of housemates which includes a couple and their one-year-old. I mention this because as I was rooting through a take-what-you-want house shelf I found a couple of sacks of "Mother's Milk" tea. I'm an adventurous sort, so even though Chamomile was hardly a stretch difference, I went for MM.

I will never make that mistake again.

This was easily the nastiest tea I have ever had. I thought tea had a baseline decency. It's just boiled leaves or herbs, maybe fruit. It's not a complicated matter. To throw out this juxtaposition, I've made decent tea from pine needles.

I think MM should have a warning on it, it's that bad. I wish I could get more specific, too, but if someone forced me to lick dog poop, I doubt I'd stop to contemplate the subtleties of nastiness. If you're in the same boat, that makes you normal.

So that's it, a warning. It's not too much to ask. And in case you were wondering, the mom in the house loves the stuff. Like a hardcore fan, a warning would not deter her interest.

Mom Makes Mittens

(For anyone unfamiliar with the saga of the Texas Perimeter Hike Mittens, please refer to my blog post about right here.)

A while back, my mom made me some mittens while I was freezing my butt off walking east to west along the Red River in North Texas.  The mittens, truth be told, were very warm, but there was one unfortunate, aesthetic problem: the thumb was about as long as a donkey's dong.  My thumb, poor thing, couldn't even reach the hole that was made especially for it.  Anyway, I figured out a way to make the mittens work but retired them after that winter.

Well, there's good news for those who loved them the first time around: They're baaAAaack!!

As you can see from the above picture, she has remedied the obvious problem of the elongated thumb by a procedure that those in the industry would refer to as "slice and dice."  Unwittingly, she has made a curious new aesthetic mitten with which one must pause to fully appreciate.  Turning it sidewise, you might see what I'm talking about.

It looks like Moby-Dick!!!!  I swear, I didn't think it could get any better than the Pac-Man ghost (as seen on the TPH blog), but my mom's got some tricks up her sewing and knitting sleeves.  

Up close, you can really see that the sewing and cutting that she had to do to "fix" the thumb was necessary to create this unusual effect.  There aren't any teeth, but the shape lends itself to the idea of teeth.  And this got me thinking about it once more: What else do the mittens remind you of?

Yes, my oh-so-innocent mother has given me a pair of Alien mittens.  I know they're not familiar with that movie or that super famous cinematic scene, so I'm throwing down a link for it.  Frankly, I prefer this version.

So you might be wondering why I've included this post on The Idea Train.  It's pretty simple, actually.  I don't think my mom should stop making mittens.  The best way to get better at something is through trial and error.  But these mittens, the former Pac-Man/Moby-Dick/Alien mittens cannot be saved.  I will use them and keep them, maybe even mount them on the wall next to pictures of me spearing them in the Corpus Christi Bay.  But altering them further will not bring them back from the brink.  I think they should stay the way they are.

Dogpooling

As I walked around this morning, there must have been half a dozen dogowners walking a single dog.  I was no different.  The dog walk is a wonderful thing, a time for the master and animal to bond.  But I thought it was a bit much in the moment, that there was some little improvement that could be made.

And so there is: dogpooling.  I used to carpool with my neighbors; my dad got the mornings, and my neighbor's mom got the afternoons from school.  Why aren't more dog owners doing the same thing?

This is an easy one.  Find someone pinched for time but on opposite schedules as you.  Post on Craigslist or simply put up a few fliers around the neighborhood.  Offer to do a dogwalking trade for a few days as a trial run.  It certainly couldn't hurt.

The two dogs (for the moment in this perfect example, there are just two) get a little socialization, they get to poop, they get a break from you and you from them, and they still get their normal exercise.  If your neighbor's dog doesn't get along with yours, find another who will.  This simplification of the day-to-day hubbub has the potential to make everyone's day a little easier.

I'll give this a try and get back to you.  It might just turn into a dog-walking gig, which isn't a terrible thing, but for the moment, I'm hoping for something more.  Woof!