Yeah, the lovely and talented Kat tapped me to play her silly game and ‘fess up to which song is 100% guaranteed to make me cry.  And I’d like to keep my "Ice Queen" facade intact and say none… but that’d be a lie.  Hell, on a bad enough day, even the Sesame Street theme can make me all weepy and nostalgic!  And you really don’t want to know what the Macy’s jingle does to me – it’s so not even pretty!  But after all that, there is this one song that’s guaranteed to bring on the tears, no matter what.  Here for your listening pleasure I bring you the worst video attached to the best song ever written by John Prine.  I give you……. Angel From Montgomery.

There, now I’m crying, and this keyboard isn’t waterproof.  Are you happy Trish?  Damnit, go look at this and talk amongst yourselves while I take a moment to find the mop. 

Okay – Paula, Chris, my Thi Thi’s friend Abby, and Sista – TAG you’re all it!  Go forth and make us blubber with your heart-breaker songs!

Okay, thanks Thi Thi!  Now remind me again why I turned you onto this blogging thing?  That’s right, so you could expose my deepest secrets or blackmail me.  One or the other, they both work, right?  Anyway, blah blah, link to half the world, blah blah, tell embarrassing details of your life, blah blah, open yourself up for public ridicule, the end.  Basically that’s it in a nutshell.  However, I’m going off the reservation and not tagging anybody.  Mainly because you’ve already tagged them all.  So, play along at home campers, and nobody laugh too loud.  Yeah, you there Mr. Smileyface, I hear you.  Don’t even think of unleashing that guffaw you’re working up.  Okay, here goes, my six most innocuous quirks:

1. My Fridge and Pantry must be full to overflowing at all times.  Don’t know why, not a child of the depression, but that’s just how it is.  A few times a year I actually have to purge because of the overflow.
2. I will not drink or use milk past the expiration date. Not even going to discuss why… because there’s a disease capsule in every gallon that will release it’s nasty gift at midnight of the expiration date maybe?  I think so anyway.  So, all cow juice is pitched on exp. date. No discussion.
3. I am terrified of oversized objects of any sort.  I cannot pick up or even look at those big Sunglasses or Pencils in gift shops.  Again, no explanation available.  Childhood fear.
4. I have to drink or take a pill or 12 (preferably both) in order to get on a plane.  To be clear, I’ve been flying since I was 9, and I hate it more today than I ever did back then.  I have former co-workers who can attest to the speed at which I can slam a drink during a short layover.  Just. Hate. It.
5. I have food texture issues.  If a food is too mushy or gummy, can’t eat it.  Will spit it out.  Although I love everything else about them, I will not eat the chicken in a Chicken Pot Pie.  Just gross.
6. I do not like Spaghetti and Sauce together.  I want them separate.  Noodles should be covered with cheese.  Sauce also.  And don’t throw any damned meatballs in there either.  Serve them separately.  Yes, in my stomach there are tiny bins where everything goes… keep it all divided up always.

There, now you all know I’m crazy.  Confirmation given and received.  Share your oddities amongst yourselves.  Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to go to the store, I’m running low on rice mixes – I only have 5.

Okay, I stole this from Monkey In a Suit.  For repayment I think I should probably overnight her a Krispy Kreme… because she’s never had one!  Deprived I say, definitely deprived.  Anyway, this is pretty easy for me, since I’ll eat just about anything… within reason.  I’m going to tag Overtly Trite, my Thi Thi, Ms. Retromodern, Ms. Krisha, and anybody else who is brave enough to play along!

The rules are pretty standard:
A. List of 100 items
B. Bold items you’ve eaten
C. Cross out items you’d never consider eating

1. Venison
2. Nettle tea
3. Huevos Rancheros
4. Steak tartare
5. Crocodile
6. Black pudding
7. Cheese fondue
8. Carp
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush
11. Calamari
12. Pho
13. PB&J sandwich
14. Aloo gobi
15. Hot dog from a street cart
16. Epoisses
17. Black truffle
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes
19. Steamed pork buns
20. Pistachio ice cream
21. Heirloom tomatoes
22. Fresh wild berries
23. Foie gras
24. Rice and beans
25. Brawn, or head cheese
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper
27. Dulce de leche
28. Oysters
29. Baklava
30. Bagna cauda
31. Wasabi peas
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl
33. Salted lassi
34. Sauerkraut
35. Root beer float
36. Cognac with a fat cigar

37. Clotted cream tea
38. Vodka jelly/Jell-O
39. Gumbo
40. Oxtail
41. Curried goat
42. Whole insects
43. Phaal
44. Goat’s milk
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more
46. Fugu
47. Chicken tikka masala
48. Eel
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut
50. Sea urchin
51. Prickly pear
52. Umeboshi
53. Abalone
54. Paneer
55. McDonald’s Big Mac Meal
56. Spaetzle
57. Dirty gin martini
58. Beer above 8% ABV
59. Poutine
60. Carob chips
61. S’mores
62. Sweetbreads
63. Kaolin
64. Currywurst
65. Durian
66. Frogs’ legs
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake
68. Haggis
69. Fried plantain
70. Chitterlings or Andouille

71. Gazpacho
72. Caviar and blini
73. Louche absinthe
74. Gjetost, or brunost
75. Roadkill
76. Baijiu
77. Hostess Fruit Pie
78. Snail
79. Lapsang souchong
80. Bellini
81. Tom yum
82. Eggs Benedict
83. Pocky
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant.
85. Kobe beef
86. Hare
87. Goulash
88. Flowers
89. Horse
90. Criollo chocolate
91. Spam

92. Soft shell crab
93. Rose harissa
94. Catfish
95. Mole poblano
96. Bagel and lox
97. Lobster Thermidor
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
100. Snake

Yep, cleaning out the Meme closet, because it’s a heck of a lot easier than the shoe closet or the attic!  So, I got tagged by Molly with this one, which means I can’t tag her… whatever shall I do? Sigh, moan.  Anyway, thanks Blog Buddy, this one’s pretty cool!  The fact that I only get tagged for cool memes must mean that cool friends or something, right?  So, with that reasoning, maybe I’m everybody’s token freak friend… we all have them, now I are one!  Anyway, don’t have a funny story to go with this one… and those of you in the back can stop with your applause, I hear that you know! 

Anyway, here we go!

Name one thing you do every day: Read at least one chapter in my book du’jour – right now it’s the biography of Lucrezia Borgia.

Name 5 things/people that make you feel good: Chocolate (ditto Molly), The Bob when he scratches my back, shopping at Sephora with my Thi Thi, laying in my sandchair at HHI and listening to the waves, cuddling with the dogs on the couch and listening to them snore.

Name 4 things you love to eat but rarely do: Anything from The Palm Steakhouse because we don’t have one; Homemade Potato Chips with warm Blue Cheese Sauce from Market Street Cafe in Celebration; the Choco Chip Pancakes from Market Street Cafe in Celebration – the best in the world also; Godiva 70% Dark Chocolate Squares; Peach Sangria, because it’s hard to make and I’m lazy… but it’s so sybaritic!

Name 3 things that remind you of childhood: Old Spice cologne; Disney World; Rice-a-roni and Asparagus

Name two things you wish you could learn: Spanish, more than un poco anyway; how to train dogs to poo in the toilet!

Okay, I’m tagging the following five folks- Byron, Nobody, Frank, Thi Thi and Sista Smiff !  Why? you ask.  Because I can can can!

It’s time, time to get caught up on my memes, and first up is the Message in a Bottle Meme that Kat tagged me with this weekend. 

Now, to be honest, this meme made me laugh out loud.  I too have a  “message in a bottle” story from my misspent youth.  Yeah, because, you know, I was more than a little stupid back in the day.  Oh, and more than a little into miss-spending my youth.  Yeah, more than a little on both of those.  Yes, I know, it’s completely shocking to learn that I had a miss-spent youth, upstanding citizen that I am, but yes, I most certainly did.  I’d really like to lie to you now and say that I learned a lot from all that miss-spending, but that’d be wrong.  Let’s just say I usually didn’t make the same mistakes twice, that’s something, right? 

Anyhoo, my bottle story begins like all high school stories, with my folks going out of town.  Isn’t that where everything usually goes wrong for teens?  Maybe there should be a law that teens can never be left alone for more than 24 hours in a house with liquor and/or fake IDs.  It’s pretty easy, from that beginning, to see where this will go, right?  Yeah, it went straight from “party at Missy’s house tonight” to adding big sales numbers to the ABC Liquor Store’s bottom line for that weekend.  They really should have sent me a birthday card and a gift certificate when I turned 19, since I’d been a frequent customer since 17 and two years of steady business should have counted for something, right?  Yeah, that’s what I thought too.  Anyway, won’t go into party details, mainly because I really don’t remember them, it’s enough to say “drunk teens, loud music, a broken light cover, maybe an African Violet was fed something other than plant food, oh, and there was probably some making out in there somewhere, but I’m not sure.  The boyfriend and I may have just decided to have a big fight instead, because that’s the way we rolled.  Anyway, at the end of the weekend of drunken debauchery, it was clean up time.  I drafted two of my girlfriends and probably Thi Thi, just because I was mean like that, and we all got busy and made the place look just like Mom’s Housekeeper had been there two days before.  And that was because she had been, and we had no choice but to make it match up to her quality of work.  The clock was ticking, we had less than an hour, when suddenly we realized that we had a huge disposal problem that wasn’t going to just go away on its own.  Yeah, you know, because of the massive amount of consumption from the weekend o’ debauchery, there was a huge pile of liquor/beer bottles and no place to put them.  I mean, yeah, we could just throw ‘em in the trash, because you know, my Step-Dad would never have noticed a trashcan that clanked all the way down the driveway and weighed a ton.  Yeah, that’s not going to work out too well.  Next plan, and fast!  Not sure how long it took us, but finally somebody remembered that our house was on a lake… probably came up with that when we were in the backyard considering sailing away and never coming back because my folks were going to kill us all.  Like I said, not the sharpest spoons in the drawer, commonsense-wise.  Remember I said at the beginning that these were lessons learned through stupidity.  But anyway, after that stunning realization, we started tossing bottles as hard as we could, not stopping to consider whether this solution was in fact a good idea.  Hell, it solved our problem, finished the perpetration of our scam, and we were golden when my folks pulled in the driveway that afternoon.  What could possibly go wrong?  I mean, with all that work, there was no way my ‘rents would ever figure out that their lovely home was party central for two days.  I mean, come on, they’re parents, they’re not that smart, right?  Well, actually, wrong.  Oh, everything was going just great, up until my Step-Dad walked out into our backyard and found 15 bottles washed up on shore.  His quote:  “Somebody out there must be in one hell of a mess, eh?  That’s sure a lot of messages they’re sending out!”  Yeah, he joked about it, then.  You can be assured, however, that he changed his tune a few days later.  You know, when our Neighborhood Homeowner’s Assoc. let my parents know that during their Crimewatch Weekend (you know, the weekend my parents were gone, and every teen in Lakeland was drunk in their living room?), 98.3% of all the traffic that came into our neighborhood came to our house.  Yeah, that’s right, I forgot to read my Mom’s calendar, where she had that marked, in red ink.  And with that conclusion, so ends yet another one of those meaningful learning experiences I talked about before.  And it was conveniently topped off with two weeks of being grounded, so I could think about my sins.  Anyway, needless to say, whenever I see a bottle on a shore, I smile, and remember that I too was once a young and stupid teen.  Then I give Miss C a break on whatever she does next, because she’s supposed to do this stuff, it’s the circle of life. 

Now, back to the meme.  Here’s the dealio!

Message in A Bottle Meme:

1. Compose a message to place in your virtual bottle.

2. Right click and SAVE the blank graphic below.

3. Use the graphics program of your choice to place your message on the picture.

4. Post the Message in a Bottle meme and your creation on your blog along with these rules.

5. Tag a minimum of 5 bloggers – or your entire blogroll – to do the same. Notify them of the tag.

Your virtual bottle will remain afloat in the blogosphere ocean for all blogernity (That’s a Mimism for blog + eternity.)

So, if you are tagged by me, go over to Mimi’s and ADD your site to her Mr. Linky list and place your blog’s name and url in a comment here to let Mimi know you’ve completed the meme. Mimi will add it to the master list of message bottles. Email mimiwrites2005 at yahoo.com if you have questions. Participation is optional.

Here, without any further ado, is my message in a bottle!

I’m tagging Nobody, Thi Thi, Newscoma, Rima, and Molly!  You’re it!