cold cereal & dogs

There are few things in life like a good bowl of cold cereal. Me, I'm a sweetened cereal kind of guy. Always have been, always will be. Mom bought my brother & I all kinds: Fruit Loops, Apple Jacks, Alpha-Bits, Sugar Smacks, Honeycomb, Frosted Flakes, Cap 'n Crunch (original, crunchberries, and my all time favorite peanut butter), Cookie Crisp - I didn't like the chocolate chip kinds, only the vanilla wafer kind and those were really rare. Every once in a while she'd bring home regular Rice Krispies or Corn Flakes, and those were good and fine as long as we could heap the sugar on there so that when we got down to just the milk and you'd tip the bowl back to drink it down there'd be a nice big goo of milky sugar waiting down there. Mmmm, milky sugar. Mom would never buy the Frosted Krispies and they were really good. I don't know why, they must have been too expensive or there weren't coupons for them or something. Anyhoo, I remember going to a friend's house to spend the night and the next morning sitting down to breakfast and reaching for the Honey Nut Cheerios and trying to put more sugar on them and his mom said, "No, no, son, these don't need anymore sugar". What? Why not? They're not that sweet, they could always use some more.

All through high school and college, cold cereal was always a favorite. I was so excited when I got to my first year of college and the cafeteria had the big dispenser of cereal with four really good sweetened ones and then Raisin Bran or some other lame cereal. Oh man, I'd go back three or four times. What was best about that is that the cafeteria always had the coldest milk. Nothing ruins a bowl of cereal like lukewarm milk. Well, buttermilk ruined a bowl of Cap 'n Crunch pretty badly one time, Dad got a big laugh out of that, but overall, lukewarm milk with cereal pretty much takes away the whole joyful experience of it.

Where did your family keep the cereal? Mine was always in the cabinets above the stove and whenever I got old enough to get it myself on Saturday mornings I would pull out the stepping stool, climb up there, shove aside the cookies and the boring cereal and grab whatever sugary sweet goodness there was back there. In desperate times when there was no cereal I would resort to taking Graham crackers, breaking them into their 4ths sections and then breaking those in half. I had to eat them superquick because those things soaked up the milk like nobody's business. Like I said, desperate times. Where am I going with this? You got me. Alls I know is that to this day sometimes I'll skip a meal if we've got some good cereal in the pantry above the fridge, that's where ours is now. My kids aren't into the cereal like I am, but that's another story. Jerry Seinfeld liked cereal a lot, and he always had a really impressive selection in his apartment. Superman and Cereal. Those are two good things to be known for, I suppose. Hmmmmmmm...

Dogs come into conversation a lot and usually there are great stories about how great someone's dog is and how great it is to have them around and they're great with the kids and they're great to have when my husband's out of town and blah blah blah. Well my current dog is not so great. He could be worse, mind you, but he's a long way from great. He falls down the stairs a lot. I think it's because the hair around his feet is kind of long, so it makes it kind of slippery for him, and I'd feel badly about this, but he seems to take it in stride pretty good. He never cries out in pain, he always just kind of looks up at us like he's saying "What the hell? Not again." Plus, he has this game he plays with his ball or his deer antler chew thingy where he stands at the top of the stairs and drops them and watches them as they go down the stairs - bounce, bounce, bounce or clunk, clunk, clunk depending on the thing. Those deer antler things are surprisingly loud. Anyway, he stands there, watches the things go down, and then he goes down the steps gets them, comes back up the steps and does it again. The ball is not so bad, it's not so loud, but those deer antlers. Man, after a couple of times doing that we've all had enough. We've got those things in various high places in the house because we have to take them from him. Otherwise he'll just do that again and again and again. And if he's not dropping them down the stairs he's just dropping them over and over on the hardwood floors. Stupid dog - imagine Eustace Bagge from Courage the Cowardly Dog saying that - dropping things on the floor.

Hmm, cold cereal to stupid dogs. Not a great one, but better than nothing I suppose.