A little of this, a little of that

“Drive south until the butter melts.”  I heard that saying last week for the first time and I dare say I was charmed by the enticing “get in your car and go” imagery it evoked.

I could use a warm little holiday like that right about now.

Heaven knows if I were to put the butter dish in the front seat of my car, even with the heat on, it wouldn’t melt anytime soon.

In my neck of the woods, the butter dish—just sitting in its little spot in the kitchen cupboard—is as good a weather gauge as the thermometer is that’s in the unheated porch.

It is all I can do to break off a decent piece of butter for my toast slice in the morning and by the time I’m done raking the brittle chunk back and forth with a knife, my poor piece of bread looks like it did battle with the cheese grater.

Everything is cold these days and thus I find myself in frequent abandon of my “don’t touch the thermostat” rule in the house. My showers are lobster-hot and I am compelled to heat up my bath towel and my pajamas in the dryer before they come into contact with my skin.

And I am driven to chocolate. Lots of chocolate.

Given my instinct to “feed my furnace” during the winter must mean I come from caveman stock. Why else would I voluntarily eat a full course meal followed by two chocolate bars?

Mitochondrial DNA. That’s the magic gene stuff that only females carry and what is used to track family lineages through time. I’m quite certain that if genealogical researcher John Ashdown-Hill (whose scientific know-it-all helped peg the recent identification of the 500-year old bones found buried under a parking lot in England as those of King Richard III) were to culture my spit DNA in a petrie dish it would grow a Neanderthal look-a-like with a flare for cocoa beans.

Balance. Sometimes I do it well. Sometimes I do it appallingly.

Sometimes I can balance my life like a horse jockey perched to win ‘round a racetrack. Sometimes, and especially where my winter calorie intake is concerned, I am as unbalanced as I would be if two Great Danes dragged me down the street.

Yet, at the best of times I am a wonderful mess, or at least I was a couple of days ago when sitting in my car during my lunch break attempting to reconstruct my eating habits by munching on raw carrots, when suddenly I sneezed.

I opened my eyes a microsecond later to ground up orange debris spread right across my dashboard and the inside of the windshield. What a mess. I laughed so hard I lost all my mascara. I’m still laughing about it three days later.

What are some of the best decisions you’ve ever made? Sometimes you know right away when you make a decision like that and sometimes it takes a bit of hindsight to see that you did.

In my case, I’m just glad I didn’t decide to eat the “Lindt” dark chocolate bar first. Good heavens, what a waste of good food that would have been.