I always thought MacArthur Park was a silly song. You know the one. Richard Harris sang it, then Donna Summer disco-fied it:

All the sweet green icing flowing down
Someone left the cake out in the rain.
I dont think that I can take it
Cause it took so long to bake it
And Ill never have that recipe again!

Watching for the weather is very important for My Favorite Guy. He farms, and if the weather is not quite right, he can’t bale. In fact, there has to be a good two to three stint of no rain to be able to cut the hay. Otherwise, the hay won’t dry. Looking at the sky doesn’t do it. The Weather Channel is good, but its annoying because when you really just want to know what the weather is, they put on a show. I know they are trying to get some viewership, but that’s not why people watch it.

AccuWeather has real time forecasts and a variety of other media, so that you can get whatever kind of forecast you want when you want it. If you want to know what it is like right now in the town your relatives will be in, or you want to find out what the weather will be like in several days in your town, it will do that, too.

How accurate is the weather, really? Of course there is no one who can predict it precisely, but you can use your best judgement looking at where the globs on the map are headed. While you may personally be a little off on time, if a big colored glob is heading towards your town, you know not to plan an outdoor barbecue that day. You could, but your french fries won’t be so crispy.  Accuweather can be accessed online at Accuweather.com, which sure beats having to wait the five to fifteen minutes to see it pop up on local television.  Of course, someone just started an interesting story and you missed it.

So…anyway…I guess where I was going with this is that it would be a shame to leave your cake out in the rain. The hay will dry eventually, but you’ll never have that recipe again.   AAAA-GAINNNNNNNN

Recently, I wrote about a friend of the family who had passed away. I frantically called my cousin to make sure that she heard about the passing from someone’s voice rather than a Facebook status update. It is quite disconcerting to find out about deaths that way.  Finding out about the OD or the untimely trampling by a zoo animal of a celebrity that you will never meet is one thing, but it is a bit weird if you actually knew the person and would normally hear through other channels.

The funeral was equally as unconventional.  Granted, I had seen it all.  One day, I will tell you about my brief stint in working at a funeral home but that’s for another day.  Some people wanted Frank Sinatra and a smog machine.  Of course, not the REAL Frank Sinatra because he’s dead, but his music.  There aren’t too many Sinatra impersonators, are there? Well they are, but they don’t call them that.  They call them “tributes” and “memories of Sinatra” versus “JimBob the Sinatra Impersonator.

At any rate, the funeral was actually quite tasteful. It was the various behaviors that made it a day we won’t forget for a very long time.  There was a child in the family that was quite amok.  Now, I love kids but I think there is a time and a place.  When I was two or three years old, I would have had a babysitter.  If I made an actual appearance at a visitation or a funeral, it would be brief and not every day of the three day affair.  Nerves ran thin and it was assumed that a three year old was capable of making her own judgement calls. Crackers, french fries and toys were all over the place.  On top of it, since apparently she had been encouraged to sing into the microphone the night before, the funeral guests were treated to shrieking and wailing during the service.  I nearly split an ear drum. A gentleman who I presumed was a family member deftly twisted his hearing aid to “off” for the rest of the ceremony.

It just went downhill from there. The tot was running around and jumped up on the kneeler to dangle her body into the casket. Not only did a parent not remove her, fearing that a major tumbling would come down, but they actually encouraged it.  They thought that she must be “expressing her grief.”  Apparently, she was smothering french fries all over her grandmother’s face, and was shrieking because her grandmother wasn’t “eating the french fries.”

I am not one to criticize other people about their parenting skills. Okay I am.  But I don’t have room to talk because I do not have children. However, I think i have at least one pinky finger of common sense.  Actually, its a different finger, but it would be very rude to hold it up to show people.  That would be crossing a line.

I receive a whole sackful of emails every day about this wellness solution, that supplement or that healthful tip every day. Well, of course it is not a sack, since it is email. If I printed them all out, it would be a sack. Okay, a virtual sack. That would be wasteful if I printed them out just to prove a point. Those burlap or canvas sacks are something I miss, however. Makes one feel like Santa Claus, or at least a Beatle. At any rate, sometimes I nod and say “oh, that’s nice,” but sometimes the siren song shrieks and I must click a link to read more, or I must google or yahoo or whatever the generic term is in order to see if there is any debunking going on. If I had to guess, I would say that I waste a total of one hour a day on it.

My biggest consideration right now is looking for ways to increase my Vitamin D intake while still slathering on the sunscreen, inventing a magic wand to make dark chocolate even more antioxidant rich and also giving it powers to magically clean my office, and toning my problem areas.  I don’t know if I will be able to ever accomplish #2, but I found some solutions for number #1. With my grandfather having osteoporosis, I better start cramming myself with it now.

Luckily, there is www.wellnessdaily.com. It is a new site that extrapolates all the Twitterful, Feed-ed, and Spooled health information from all over the ‘net. All I need is to go there, find what I want and avoid reading what I don’t. Honestly, I don’t know what “Spooled” means in this context, but it sounds better than to say that I am unraveled.

Right now, there is a Twitter contest. You can earn a year’s supply of Jennie-O products or even a gym membership Just follow @wellness_daily & RT this! http://bit.ly/tbd123.  There is a complete list of rules HERE.

In 2008, Richard Hammond, of Top Gear fame, suffered crash injuries that flipped a switch in his brain.  According to the Telegraph, Hammond remarked, “The only difference between me now, and before the crash, is I like celery now.”  It seems that Mr. Hammond is part of the pro-celery movement. Of course, fellow Briton Fearne Cotton is staunchly in the anti-celery movement. Why do the British folks seem to be the ones to flaunt their cruciferous affiliation more vocally than the normally more vocal American?

I hope I never hit my head badly, but if I do, I hope I crave healthy food and don’t suddenly crave chocolate ants a la Andrew Zimmern.

However (remember I said I “planned” to write about Twitter), plans changed yesterday when a friend of the family passed away at her home. Just clarifying that it was her home. She was not over at my place, so no reaction to really bad recipes was involved. Though she was never a picture of health, it was a shock to us all. She leaves behind a husband, two children, a son-in-law and a little grand-daughter.

She was on Facebook and so is her daughter. Her daughter is a friend of mine on Facebook.  I called my cousin to let her know what happened, as I didn’t want my cousin to find out what happened based on people saying they were sorry on the Facebook wall of the daughter.  At this point, I really think I should have given everyone fake names, because its going to get too confusing to sort this all out, even though I am very clear in my mind who is here.

So I called Bictoria (not her real name), my cousin, to tell her the news before she found out on Facebook or casually posted to Velissa’s (not her real name) Facebook wall something silly not knowing what just happened. Of course, Bictoria told her parents, Jharlotte and Vohn, what happened.

The news got around to my 82 year old Grandmother, who told us, “When I die, don’t put me on Facebook!”

Grandma is a hot ticket; the type that will live to 110. I said, “Don’t worry Grandma, when you die, Facebook will be passe’ and there will be something even better.”

To me, it does not even hold a half melted birthday candle to the genius that is Nannerpuss from 2009. It has the charm of a 1983 5th grader created stop action film. You may disagree, but I am hard pressed to find anything that compares.

I am in sort of a funk today. There are a few reasons for my malaise. I am beating myself up about a few things that I haven’t said to people. The right opportunities just seem to slip through my fingers. It may be better to not wait for the perfect moment and just blurt it out, by I am so worried about rocking the boat.  Then, of course there are untimely events in the female cycle that make one a little cranky. Not THAT time of the month, but different times of the month. Slush on the ground doesn’t help, either. The weather doesn’t factor in, I suppose, but it certainly adds insult to injury.

I have been reading up and basically, to cure all of my troubles, I should be eating mood enhancing foods, such as sweet potatoes and shrimp because I will be so loaded up with B vitamins and fish oil that I couldn’t possibly be in a bad mood.  Well, I could always pop some supplements as an insurance policy just to make sure I was getting it all. Of course, nowadays there are not just multivitamins, but Vitamin B inside of Gummi Bears for the kid in me. Don’t forget the “destress complex.”

If I were not able to get enough during the day, I could get it in my sleep. I found some shampoo over at VitaDigest (They are offering some great deals such as free shipping on orders of $100 or more).  Okay, it is not solid Vitamin B shampoo, but it contains several Vitamin B factors, such as panthenol and niacin, which are very beneficial. I don’t really know how it works in shampoo. Do the vitamins help scrub off all of those toxins, or do they just sound fancy, influencing us to buy it? Afterall, they are on the outside of the body instead of in. Vitamin E has benefits when applied topically. I need to do a bit more research when it comes to others.

If I were an amphibian, can you imagine how perfect his would be? I could eat chocolate all day long, but as long as my hand was immersed in liquid Vitamins, or it was sitting lathered on my scalp, it would absorb right through my skin. That might sound a little gross, but scientifically, that would be life as a frog or salamander, wouldn’t it be? There certainly would be some complications to it, such as being much more sensitive to temperature, and having to stay moist, which I am sure moisturizing creams are for, but on the whole, there would be no excuse not to eat…absorb…your vitamins.

What is a scatter rug?

Well…they scatter. Sorry you asked, right? An area rug is something that stays put, while scatter rugs may be braided affairs that sort of bunch up. The dog arranges it into a ball and you trip on it. In fact, my first dachshund had the predilection for collecting them from around the kitchen and hall and making a comfortable mound of them. I can support their use in the kitchen, as they can be washed, but why are they used? Are they to cushion the feet while standing for hours scrubbing dishes? They don’t seem to have enough cushion for that, so perhaps it is merely a decorating statement?

I can justify an area rug underneath a table and chairs. That is different because it defines the space. I am still trying to get my head around the whole wall to wall carpet idea.  When they get stained, you can take the risk of washing cheap rugs in try out an experimental formula, but once carpet is stained and wrecked, you can’t do much about it. I know! You can get an area rug and some scatter rugs to cover the burn mark from when you dropped the Fry Daddy. Everyone will wonder why you have two rugs on top of another rug, but you don’t have to tell anybody. You can say you are trying to “define the space.” I’d back you up. I won’t tell.

This is a Sponsored Post written by me on behalf of Birdfeeders.com. All opinions are 100% mine.

A short time back, I noted how this item would make a good dish for candy or condiments in your home. Believe it or not, it is actually a bird feeder, but why should those little tweeters get all the whimsical elegance or the stately Heritage Collection of Bird Feeders? I wonder why birds would be attracted to something with a rooster on it. Unless the feeder is trying to tell us that its FOR roosters, but they don’t fly or frequent the backyard hideaways of suburban America. Of course, the exception is when they were at Donna’s* house in the 1970s and early 80s. She decided that even though farm animals weren’t allowed in the city, she was going to be known as the lady who had the rooster. There were no chickens. Maybe that is why he was so loud.

Crackles are another bird one doesn’t normally feed. They can be boisterous and pushy. My theory is they have to be to get any service. Everyone wants to feed the cute little fuzzy thing, but no one big with a off key voice.  That is why I decided that starting now, I am going to feed grackles. Whenever i bake something and there are leftover seeds, they are first in line.

Just about every bird feeder is geared to keep out squirrels and grackles, and only allows the little fuzz tufted things in.  What kind of feeder would a grackle like?  I think this Western themed model would be to their liking.  Grackles are mainly found in the Eastern United States and Canada, but their attitude is more rootin’ tootin’ than Ivy league blazer wearing. I think they would agree.  I think it should be placed near a bedroom window so their cackles and shrieks can be enjoyed at the crack of dawn. Now, wouldn’t that be the perfect gift for someone special?

If they didn’t like it, I can imagine it can be used to create one of those sand in a bottle things if the bottom was plugged up, or it could be a personal bulk food dispenser. The kids could play “Whole Foods” and not just “grocery store.” Now, that is setting up for an adult hood of health.

How are your backyard feathered friends faring this winter? Remember, if you start feeding them, do so every year. It is no fun to stick around only for the winter, only to have the buffet close.

(*= Name changed to protect the innocent. Her real name also starts with a D, and ends in an E. It contains five letters.)

Betty Crocker has undergone transformationsover the years.  The latest makeover she had was in 1996.  There was a whole scientific study done before changing her look.  In fact, a large group of American were taken, and their features were incorporated, so that Betty doesn’t look like a particular woman, but many women.   There are whole sites devoted to the racial makeup of the new Betty, some downright scholarly.

One report goes on to say: “The perception of what is typically American is also shifting. The old Betty Crocker symbolized the blending or mixing of bakery ingredients. The new Betty Crocker symbolizes the blending or mixing of races. The racial average of a population is its racial destiny, the racial future. The new Betty Crocker is a symbol of our intended future. The racial destiny of the American population is to be “Betty Crockerized,” its ingredients blended together toward the racial average, and cooked in the racial meltdown of the “melting pot.” 

The next time someone asks me about my friends who adopted two international children, I am just going to say that they have a “Crockerized” family.   I am sure that will go over well.   As far as my friends go, it is the first, and only marriage for both of them, otherwise if it wasn’t and they both came with kids from a previous marriage, I think “blended family” would just be rude.  I’ll call them a “KitchenAid” or “Cuisinart” family and people would think I am totally off my rocker or insensitively assuming my friends are such culinary aficianados that they would think the reference was cute.

More so than mulling over such serious topics, I thought it would be much more fun to ask:

Which Betty are you?

I am not so much asking what you physically look like, but which Betty Crocker embodies your attitude?

Are you the new Betty who is neat but casual, shown prominently on my site?    Are you the 1972 Betty with the Ann Landers hair, ready to dole out sassy kitchen advice?**

I think I am more like 1965 Betty.   I think I always wanted to have flipped hair, except I came of age during the era of the spiral perms and peacock’s butt hair.    My hair would have probably wanted to be more of a “That Girl” flip, though, which came later.   I would carry my proper little purse, but wear miniskirts.  Betty and me would be like Barbie and Midge. Midge was always slightly more mod than Barbie.  Or I would be Little Sister Skipper.

I would, as 1965 Betty, like to make things that required serving pieces that you only used for that particular dish and were useless otherwise.  For example, clam shell plates for clams casino, that you wouldn’t use any other time.

I know my choice is a little superficial…let’s see what you come up with.

Which Betty would you be?    

Choose from the Bettys  (Betties? Betty’s?) above.

Below: 1986 Betty vs 1930s Betty

(**= My Mom was 1972 Betty Crocker.  She taped Ann Landers and Dear Abby Columns to my bedroom door)