No more aspartame in Diet Pepsi

Was it butter or just something yellow?

 

Butter!

I think my mother may have tried to switch us at some point, but we resisted.

I can still only use real butter, and I still love a ton of it on popcorn.

 

Raise your hand if your morning orange juice looked like this:

 

Was it butter or just something yellow?

I made that a lot as a kid.

 

I never had a juice that didn't come from that concentrate until I got married.

 

You might be a redneck if you find your wife staring at the orange juice because it says 'Concentrate'.

 

Vegetables:

 

Sorry for continuing to traipse down memory lane, but seeing that Country Time can triggered this one ...

In my little town there were two chain grocers -- an A&P and a Winn-Dixie. My mother shopped at both, using the Wednesday newspaper circulars to craft a list of what she'd buy at A and what she'd buy at B. One year, the A&P store moved out of the chain and became an independent. They sold off a lot of inventory and my mother seized the opportunity to do some speculative buying. One of the things she bought was a whole carton of Kool-Aid pink lemonade packets. I don't know how many packets were in a carton, but there were enough such that we had pink lemonade EXCLUSIVELY for over a year. Before that summer I liked pink lemonade ... since then I've had 'nary a drop.

 

Diet pop (Midwesterner pride!) was a great bridge for me. I used it for six months to go from drinking about six cans of regular pop to diet pop and eventually weaned off all of it completely. I'll from time to time drink a zero-calorie sports drink for something with flavor, but usually just water. Used that way, diet drinks are helpful. I'm not sure they're helpful if you lean on them as a dietary crutch for years.

 

Ha-ha. Love it.

My worst speculative investment...

I get off the subway, and it's pouring. People in suits are crowded in the stairwell looking to see if the rain will let up.

I decide to make a dash for it to a shoe repair shop across the street.

Small foldable umbrellas are on sale for $15.00. I ask him how much for 10 umbrellas, and purchase 10 for $100, thinking I'll flip them for $15.00 a pop to the poor souls in the stairwell.

I buy them. The rain stops. No one buys an umbrella for me.

 

I have about 40 or so Cal Ripken rookie cards (Topps, Fleer and Donruss), bought around 1989 when I figured in a few years it'd be a big deal when he broke Lou Gerhig's ironman record.

The record was a big deal.

The cards aren't.