Day 34: Pez!!

Posted by: Cris

As some of you have seen in pictures of our house, we have a beautiful grove of bamboo out in front that is super tall with 2-3" diameter bamboo poles. I actually love this part of our landscaping even though keeping the bamboo from overtaking the entire hillside takes some persistent monitoring. But, after a nice rain and wind storm last night, I wasn't so fond of the bamboo when I came out to my car this morning and found it almost engulfed by this: But, it was 6:00 am and I wasn't going to mess with it then so I waded through the branches enough to get in the car and decided to deal with it when I got home. Fortunately, not even bamboo is a match for a reciprocating saw but it still was a pain in the butt to clean up this afternoon.

Today we opened another present from Grandma and Grandpa Stickley's care package and found another of the girls' recent favorites - PEZ!

They were particularly thrilled with the Tinkerbell Pez dispensers - especially Nova.

As soon as I could get the Pez actually loaded (they are hard to load), they set to work on unloading them.

As you would expect, they don't just eat them a little at a time - they keep opening the top and popping them out one after the next until they are gone.

They don't look like much now, but we are up to 4 pineapples growing on the lanai.

There was one important component of Emilie's care package that I forgot to mention that I must include to day if for no other reason than to give my native-born German Aunt Wally a hard time: 2 packages of gummie candies from Germany that Emilie picked up on her way over. One of them was a German version of my much beloved Haribo gummie toads...so, even though the packaging was in German, I can deduce what it all says and I can't wait to eat them. The other package was something that I can only assume is a gummie version of trail mix - it has normal gummie bears in there that taste regular enough but then there are several other things in there that are really pretty disgusting. Nova put one in her mouth and immediately spit it out accompanied by the nastiest face ("I dont like it"). I couldn't help but think back to 5th grade when, for a class project I did on Germany I had to bake these German Anise cookies that were far from what I'd consider tasting like a cookie.

I'll have to have Aunt Wally translate the packaging but I can only assume that is says something like: "Don't eat this candy...it is gross." But, I guess when you consider that David Hasselhoff is a pop music idol in Germany (which further proves my point: "Germans love David Hasselhoff"), it is not surprising that the standard for candy might be a little lower as well :)