Science fiction, fantasy, mystery and what-not
Floofdude (floofinition) – animal lover.
In use: “The floofdude kept food and treats in his bag so that he could feed any cats and dogs that he met, and carried nuts and seeds for crows and squirrels. They all started looking for him. It was like Mr. Doolittle was walking down the street on some days.”
Foodiefloof (floofinition) – a housepet who displays loyalty to whoever has the food; a housepet who is fond of food and eating.
In use: “Titus is sometimes a dudefloof, but when I’m cooking, he becomes a foodiefloof, and then, he’s all mine!”
I was eating some dandelions the other day. It wasn’t quite a whim. It’d begun with yard work.
We have lawns. We don’t pesticides or fertilizers on them, except some fertilizer from our compost barrels. We compost a lot of kitchen waste.
I used to pull the weeds from my lawn. We stopped doing that as we read about the bee decline and witnessed how the bees enjoyed our dandelions. Butterflies, too. But, for fire reasons, we cut the grass back to four inches high. That height also protects the roots so watering the lawn isn’t required often. In the even of drought or water shortages, of course, the first thing I do to save water is to stop watering the grass.
While I was doing the back yard cutting the other day, I was taking stock of all the dandelions we had. I knew that people used to eat dandelions as part of a basic diet and wondered about dandelions’ health impact and their taste. To the Google! Sites claim that dandelions are tremendously healthy. Here’s an excerpt from Nutrition-and-You.com:
Sounds impressive. Curious about how they taste, I went out in the morning, harvested some fresh dandelions from the yard, and chowed down on the raw leaves and flowers.
Turns out that they taste like mildly-bitter Romaine lettuce to me. Super, I thought. I liked being able to eat it because. It’s a great added bonus to helping the bees, and it helps reduce our yard waste. I guess I have a new pastime this year, harvesting dandelions and trying new recipes. Bet they’d be pretty tasty on a grilled pizza.
I’ll let you know.
Hibble (floofinition) – term housepets use for the foods that people eat.
In use: “Hearing the plastic bag rustle in the other room, the cat and dog recognized that she was getting one of her favorite hibbles, corn chips, out, and prepared themselves to beg for a few themselves, as the salty snack was one of their favorite hibbles, too.”
“What are your goals today?”
It was the female without an accent asking. Accents and the apparent sexes their voices displayed were the only way of identifying the daily taskmasters. Identifying was a weak expression, as they remained nameless and without form.
He scratched and swallowed. He needed to get up and drink water but also pee. Was that ironic? No, coincident.
Goals. “I want to get up and pee.” That would get him no points but they didn’t remonstrate him. Still, sharp past responses made him moderate his approach.
“Write, of course,” he said.
“You always do that,” she said.
Did he imagine that she sighed? “Still counts,” he said.
Silence answered. They weren’t pleased.
He said, “Wash, vacuum, and gas the cars.”
A male overseer said, “Good,” with boredom as thick as flies on shit.
“Yard work.”
“Hmmm.”
“Finish reading a book.”
“Oh.” The female. “What book?”
“Donna Leon, The Waters of Eternal Youth”.
“Very good.” Happiness seemed to shower him. “That’s a good goal. Good luck.”
He was released. Opening his eyes, he sat up. Of all that he’d said, what would most count was reading the book. That was his number one priority. He was hungry and needed enough points to get a decent meal. He sensed that if he failed to read the book, they’d punish him.
Draining his bladder in the water closet, he snorted and chortled. His mind was a strange overseer.
Floofzing (floofinition) – napping in a semi-somnolent state, with senses alert for intrusions, threats, or someone eating something.
In use: “The floofzing cats’ ears turned when he drew a bag of granola from the cupboard, tuning into the sound as they napped and waiting to see what developed.”
I’m fighting waste and ageism wherever I find it and have realized an amendment is in order.
I think everyone is familiar with the five-second rule. To ensure we’re addressing the same rule, the five-second rule states that food items dropped on the floor can still be consumed if they can be retrieved before five seconds expire.
This discriminates against older people. Our elders can often encounter problems bending over and picking things up. Hell, just noticing that they dropped something can take several seconds.
Therefore, I’m proposing an amendment to the five-second rule. Individuals over fifty-five years of age will be allotted one extra second to the five-second-rule.
Examples: a person of sixty years of age will have an additional five seconds. That gives them ten seconds to notice they dropped food, find it, pick it up, and eat it. Someone who is seventy will have an extra fifteen seconds (twenty in total).
Of course, if you’re over one hundred, you can take all the time you want, sugar.
The floor is open for discussion.
After moving out of Mom’s house when I was fourteen and moving in with Dad, I missed my old home and Mom’s cooking.
Dad, a bachelor, was in the military. He’d just returned from an assignment in Germany. Besides his military day job, he had a second job running the small base’s all-ranks club, so I rarely saw him. That lasted three months. Then he retired and we moved to southern WV.
I’d mentioned missing Mom’s cooking to her on one of our phone conversations. Mom bought me Betty Crocker Cook Book as a present so I could make the stuff she had.
It was a humbling lesson. Mom usually used a recipe in her head. I had to plod their detailed instructions. Whereas her measuring skills were fast and effortlessly, I labored through cups, tsp, tbs, and their incremental differences.
But I weathered it, making myself stuffed green peppers, meat loaf, pot roast, spaghetti and meatballs, along with side dishes, and eventually baked cakes, cookies, pies, and other desserts. I never made fried chicken, odd in retrospect. I preferred roasting or grilling my chicken. In fact, my favorite meal became over-roasted thighs with buttered red potatoes and broccoli.
Don’t know why I never made the fried chicken. Maybe I was lazy, or maybe, subconsciously, I knew that some things couldn’t be duplicated.
We heard a story…
Everyone had grown up and left the home, nurturing their lives, careers, and dreams. Somehow, though, they began having Sunday dinner together every week. Mom was so overjoyed that she made their favorite every week, which was southern fried chicken.
I immediately recalled watching Mom go through her fried-chicken process in our little ranch style home in the mid 1960s. Starting with a whole chicken, she would wash it and rub it down with cold water and then burn the remains of the feathers off over the gas burner. Truthfully, I never saw any feathers. I don’t know if Mom saw any, either, but this was her process.
Next, she washed the chicken again, and then dried it, and cut it into pieces. The pieces were dipped in egg, and then rolled in white flour with salt and pepper. She fried it in grease from her drippings collection in a big electric skillet. (Crisco later replaced the drippings.) The chicken was vigilantly watched and turned. When judged ready, they were removed and put on paper towels so excess grease could drip off.
I know her process well, and know how her fried chicken tasted as well. Nothing like grabbing a cold piece of fried chicken out of the refrigerator for a late-evening snack. Like many things she made for us to eat in those years, it ruined things for me later. I’ve always been looking for something that tastes as good as Mom’s. When you’ve had the best, it’s imprinted.
So you know that they’ve come out with Genius Coffee. It’s about time, innit? But, I hasten to inquire, where is our genius booze? I’d like to walk into my fav beverage hangout and ask for a Genius IPA.
Wouldn’t it be excellent if McDonald’s and Wendy’s began selling genius milkshakes? (Picture those television commercials.) Have a Genius Coke with your Jack? Prefer a Genius Red Bull? No doubt we’d need to have genius wine, vodka, tequila, to be fair, along with genius water, for those who don’t partake.
Maybe, then, if all these genius beverages work, we can make progress on what humanity is doing to each other and the rest of the world. Doubts force me to say, probably not. More likely, some will declare, “I don’t trust geniuses, so why should I swallow a genius drink?”
I don’t blame them. I’d be dubious of genius drinks. God knows what I’d learn about myself that I’ve worked so hard to hide.
Michael Seidel, writer 