Combed & Frozen

About ten months ago, Crunch ate my favorite wooden comb. It's my fault entirely. I left Crunch out of his crate while I went out and I left my comb on the coffee table and you can't mix the puppy/comb equivalent of ammonium nitrate with fuel oil and not expect a reaction. (That reaction being, of course: Ka-boom!) When I came back home I found that my comb had been relieved of its teeth by a certain pup. I was pretty sad to see it go because I had had it for several years and I really like using wooden combs. I replaced it with some pale imitation from Bass, but it wasn't the same. I missed my comb!

Then one day on a whim I typed "wooden comb" into Amazon's search window and there it was, my comb! Yay!

It arrived today:



Wrapped in brown paper and tied with a bit of twine, packed in styrofoam packing peanuts.



My comb! Resurrected!



Complete with a bird--?

The comb was made in China, but here's a bit of Japanese comb trivia for you:

In Japanese, the word for comb is kushi. If I remember correctly, ku means suffering and shi means death, which makes combs just about the deadliest things in Japan aside from fugu. (In fact, shi is so unlucky that the word for four in Japanese is shi, but Japanese won't use the word shi when they say four. They say yon instead. The same thing happens with the word for seven, which is shichi. Because of the shi in shichi, Japanese say nana instead of shichi for seven.) With combs, kushi, it's bad luck to ever give someone a comb as a gift, and it's especially bad luck if you drop your comb, to pick it up. Tokyo is a very, very clean city at the street level because every little bit of trash gets picked up--except for dropped combs. It was not unusual for me to see a couple of dropped combs in the street each week. People just absolutely refuse to pick up a comb if they drop it, even if it's only to put it in the nearest trash can.

Usually They're Not So Boring

Yesterday's prompt asked for five things in my refrigerator. YAWN! Today's writing prompt asks for five things in my freezer. YAY!

Hahaha.

But you know what? I'm going to do it anyway:

Ice There are two ice cube trays, yes, but there's also a damn lot of ice built up on the freezer walls. I hate defrosting freezers, so it never gets done until the only thing that fits in the freezer are the two ice cube trays.

Quorn ("naked chik'n cutlets" and "chik'n nuggets") What? You don't know what Quorn is? Quorn is a kind of processed mycoprotein for vegetarians. I'm not a vegetarian, but I still eat it because it's fast (90 seconds in the microwave) and a good source of protein. I sound like a commercial for Quorn. It's kind of a hippie turned yuppie food--or maybe it's a yuppie turned hippie food. You can get it in the co-op/granola-y groceries like Whole Foods, is what I mean.

Broccoli There are probably five or six bags of frozen broccoli in the freezer right now. I go through phases of broccoli consumption. Some days I can eat a pound of frozen broccoli. No joke. I put ketchup on it and eat it with chopsticks. That's normal, right?

Tortillas While Dave was out of town, I went to the grocery store and bought a bunch of random stuff to eat. I bought two bags of chocolate-covered pretzels and called them lunch (one bag each day for two days). Then I just broke down and bought a bag of Paul Newman pretzels and a bag of Ghiradelli dark chocolate chips. (I melted the chocolate chips in the microwave and used it as a dip for the pretzels and called it dinner.) I bought a family-sized box of that horrible, cheap, frozen, fried chicken (Banquet, I think) and ate that for about four meals in a row. (Just the chicken by itself--with ketchup, of course, to dip it in. What? Reagan said ketchup's a vegetable.) I bought a bag of organic blue-corn tortilla chips and used them to eat the last of the chipotle chevre that we brought back from the goat farm. And I bought a pack of whole wheat tortillas to use to eat fried eggs. There is nothing better than eating a couple of over easy fried eggs with a tortilla as your only utensil. That is a wonderful thing to do. The last of the frozen tortillas are the only things left from the past few weird binge-y days.

Ravioli There are a couple of ice-bound packages of frozen ravioli that Dave bought and never ate. They're strange flavors like mushroom and gorgonzola, or peppermint parmesan. I don't know. Something. Some strange flavor combinations. I won't touch them and I think Dave forgot about them, but they're there.