Pickles

Todays Pickles Cartoon in the Montana sub-standard made me both laugh and tear up.

For those that have not seen it. The wife was cooking something and she tasted it and exclaims it tastes awful and then she says it's really horrible and then she takes a spoonful and asks the husband to taste it. That is something that Jennifer would and did do on many occasions. That or give me something and after I had tasted would ask "Did it taste funny to you"? Usually it did and then we would have a little tiff about it and she would get a shit eating grin on her face.

Like I have said before she could be pretty sneaky when she wanted to be and very finicky. She was a master of fishing out ingredients that she did not like in a dish and hiding them in her napkin or under her plate. It always amazed what she would not like and would like.

Her standard excuse was the texture of things. She hated peas, but loved split pea soup. She absolutely loved olives but would not touch a mushroom if her life depended on it. To me the texture of those two are pretty similar. I never got that one and we had countless discussions about that. The peas she would blame on her Mom. She said her mom would make creamed peas and she did not like those. However, she was smart enough to not say anything but would go into stealth mode. From my understanding she observed her sister Janice say she did not like something which Jennifer's dad would respond to by giving her a larger helping of it. So Jennifer being no dummy, would just take her helping and then pick out or hide the stuff she did not like. She could wield a fork like a surgeon and fish out stuff like nobody I have seen.

My nephew Heath is pretty good at it, but he could of learned more from the Master if she had stayed with us. He did a pretty good job fishing out onions from a pasty at my folks house this summer.

She had provided him a little tutalidge earlier on salty stuff. My folks had gotten a ham, one Christmas and it was very salty. One morning we were having the ham for breakfast and my Dad had asked Jennifer if she wanted any of it and she said no thank you it was too salty. Well Heath latched onto that excuse for several months. I think my sister Cindy and brother in-law Chad would have liked to strangled her. Because Heath would refuse to eat stuff for a long time because it was "too salty".

Three bean salad was another thing she hated. There was the story of when she was a little girl and sitting at the table at her sister Elaine's house in Billings for hours not eating her three bean salad. She claims she choked some of it down, but she could be damn hard headed when she wanted to be.

Anyway I got a tearful chuckle out of that cartoon this morning. Well I need to run to a quick meeting on our Rotary storywalk preparations and then off to Vegas. Let the week begin.