Really Drunk Gummy Bears; A Pinterest Fail

If a little is good then more is better right?  We all know someone who thinks this way and I am married to one of those someones.  It rarely if ever ends well and thankfully I have learned to laugh about it unless real damage is done. 

A few weeks ago I was in the middle of making my husband drunken Gummi Bears from a recipe I found on Pinterest when he decided to get involved in the process. The results have had me chuckling all afternoon.

These are really simple to make...if you follow the recipe; a bag of "Haribo Gummi Bears", some good vodka, a pan.  Put the bears in the pan, pour just enough vodka over them to cover them.  Stick them in the fridge for three to five days and that's it. 

The bears had only been soaking in the pan for 3 hours when Ben got home from work and got nosy. "What is this?"  He looks at the pan and picks out one of the vodka soaked bears that has already swollen to about twice its size.  My wifey alarm goes off at that smile.  "These are pretty good." He is smiling bigger now and munches down three more.  He hands me one to taste.  They taste like bad cough syrup to me. "Glad you like them, they are all yours." I tell him.

My telling him that was not such a good idea as it only fueled him and the next thing I know is he is springing into action, grabs a jar off the drainboard and the vodka bottle.  "What are you doing?", I try to get him to confess to his plan.  Instead he smiles at me and winks.  I've been married to this man for over twenty years and yes I know he's going to pour more vodka over them but the question has become ritual in our relationship.  I quickly mention that the extra vodka will just melt them knowing full well it is pretty much impossible to reason with him at this point.  I decide to leave the kitchen so I won't get frustrated by his intrusion on my project.

What I know is going to happen.

He seems sure that if a little booze is good, more booze will be better and transfers the bears to the jar and pours enough vodka over them they are not just floating but drowning in it.  He lifts the jar with the drowning Gummi Bears with a proud smile and another wink, then places it in a prominent place where he can keep an eye on it's progress and proceeds to pretty much forget about them.

It's about a month later and I had the urge to purge today.  So I decided to see how his drunken bear "science project" was doing.  I picked it up and looked at it.  Not a single green, red, yellow or whitish bear to be seen anywhere...only an orange gelatinous goo.  (Oh yummy)

What happens when a man doesn't listen to his wife.

The lid was stuck shut so I ran hot water to loosen it.  That was a mistake.  When it finally did come off the alcohol wafted right up my nose making my eyes watered it was so strong.  By the way, if you need a good way to clear your sinuses you might want to use this recipe...it works great!  I pokes around in the jar with a spoon, poured some out on a plate and here wasn't a single survivor in this science project.

So Ben gets home after work today and I tell him to take a look at his little science project, pointing to the jar of drown bear goo.  He picks up the jar, opens it, smells it and says "What's wrong with these?" which means there is nothing wrong with them in his mind.  Then he grabs a mug, dumps half of the orange goo into it along with a good splash cherry juice, smells it and urges me to give it a sniff.  I hate when he does this but I know better than say no or he'll be asking me over.  It still smells like bad cough syrup.  Then he grabs a beer and pours some into the juice/goo mixture, picks up the mug swirling it a bit to blend it and drinks it down and likes it! Yes...I live with a funny and sometimes strange man and the results have had me laughing all afternoon.


Copyright © 2012 by Patty Hicks
All rights reserved. No part of this blog may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including printing, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system without written permission from the author, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review. All reviews must include author's name and a link back to this blog.

Pinterest Pinsanity

My Pinterest O how I love thee.

It is utterly "pinsane" how Pinterest has taken over my life.  Oh excuse me, I should back up a bit for those of you who don't know about Pinterest yet.  It is the latest hot thing on the Internet, a real barnstormer of a visual social media site that enables you to create a collection of visual bulletin boards.  You get to have as many boards as you want, for as many categories as you want and can pin as many things to them as you want.  This means that when you are on a website or blog that has an image or idea you want can capture it or “pin” it to one of your boards along with the link to site with the idea along with a beautiful image to inspire you to use it.  And yes...it is absolutely wonderful, simply “pinspiring” capturing all those beautiful, wonderful, magical, practical, unbelievable things one finds on Pinterest.  Those of us who have discovered this have all been so over the moon about it so much so that it has been call “visual crack” for the creative types and even equated to Internet hoarding it is so addictive in its appeal.

Not long after I started using Pinterest I created a Facebook group called “Pinterest Enablement and Support (PEAS)” after being unable to find an answer for a question I had about getting a problem resolved on Pinterest.  (I love the twisted little name of the group and how it alludes to Pinterest possibly being addicting don't you?).  Pinterest is a great tool with a lot of potential but after seeing myself and other pinners not using what we were gathering, I decided to try and encourage the members of our group to share what they have used from their pins.  That didn’t go so well, I think I got one or two to share, but then I am as guilty as they are and the question began to nag me, is it really hoarding?

Call me crazy but I thought it would be fun to figure out how long it would take me to use every pin I had captured on my boards if I did only one a day.  Wowwie zowwie…wake up call!  It would take me TEN YEARS to use what I had pinned at that time.  The very next week someone posted a joke poster of Facebook that stated pinners were just Internet hoarders.  I laughed, we all laughed, a little nervously I think as we realized the delight of Pinterest did seem to overtake all sense of reason at times.  We pinners like to say we are "pinning our brains out" which pretty much sums up what happens to a lot of us.  I get caught up in pinning my brains out more than I’d like to admit and I guess my rational has become, if it is fun, the information good, the pictures so inspiring, how can it possibly be a bad thing.

I remember visiting a farm once where the farmer was as frugal as the day is long and in his frugality had amassed quite a large pile of old parts from who knows what types of mechanical things in a pile near the barn.  His shop where he did the fixin’ was stacked half full too.  In reality there was no way that he was ever going to use all that stuff and it was obvious that some of it was nothing but unusable junk.  As we approached his cache he proudly stated “I don’t like spending on things if I don’t have to so I’m saving this just in case I need it.”  The greater portion of this stash was saved for nothing more than the notion of having it just in case...just like my stash of pins. (ugh)

My attitude resembles that farmer's a little too much I'll admit, but still, as I look at my boards, which are mostly filled with ideas I might use some day and see how pretty they look, its hard for me to recon it as an obsession.  However, recently I have even been haunted by the guilt of not using the ideas I have pinned which makes me wonder about that.  These seemingly innocent pins have turned into the Internet equivalent of those projects sitting around my house that I intend to do someday or the mail that doesn’t get tossed because I can’t make my mind up what I need to do with it at that moment.  Sound familiar?

Yeah Baby!  Love those boards!

Want to see for yourself what I am talking about?  Here is a link to my Pinterest boards so you can go have a peek.  Before you do I want ask that you try to visualize every pin on my boards as being a single sheet of paper or a small manual or a little box, I’ll wait right here.  So what did you think?  When we put spatial relationships on them it’s amazing how our perspective changes isn’t it?  By the way, you actually cannot see everything I have pinned without clicking on each board and that would take way too much time unless you have nothing else to do for a couple days.

That didn’t do it for you?  Here’s another example. If I listed my pins in a column on a legal pad…that’s 28 line items per page, divide that into 5000 which is about what I have now.  Let me see...that is 178.5 pages of things to get done.  That is some to-do list!  I think I need therapy.

Happy pinning!

Copyright © 2012 by Patty Hicks
All rights reserved. No part of this blog may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including printing, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system without written permission from the author, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review. All reviews must include author's name and a link back to this blog.