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RTDNTOTO 🐻 Random Thoughts Deserving No Thread Of Their Own 21 (2026)

Some days I feel like a decent mom and other days I feel like I am failing her horribly. 😥
The Mrs. here says the same.

Glad to see my grocer has loaves of bread in a "half-loaf" size. I made that comment on our way to the store that it would be nice since we usually don't go through a loaf before it becomes a science experiment. Pleasantly surprised.
 
Some days I feel like a decent mom and other days I feel like I am failing her horribly. 😥
Season 9 Hug GIF by The Office


We all do the best we can or are able. My teen boys are officially in the You've been given the tools over the last 15 years...it's now up to you to use them correctly stage

You Got This Do It GIF by Lucas and Friends by RV AppStudios
 
I just consumed an obscene amount of baby carrots
My mother briefly followed some kind of weird diet when she got diagnosed with cancer. One of the food items was large quantities of carrots (high in beta keratin). I noticed she was starting to acquire an orange complexion and mentioned it to her. She immediately stopped after that.

Are you by chance looking more orange than usual?
 
My mother briefly followed some kind of weird diet when she got diagnosed with cancer. One of the food items was large quantities of carrots (high in beta keratin). I noticed she was starting to acquire an orange complexion and mentioned it to her. She immediately stopped after that.

Are you by chance looking more orange than usual?

Ha no, not yet - just trying to keep healthier snacks around the office
 
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb was released today in 1964.

 
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Ha no, not yet - just trying to keep healthier snacks around the office
On the note of orange foods that make you turn orange, a sweet potato, microwaved for a couple of minutes and eaten out of its skin with a fork and some salt is actually a totally reasonable office lunch and more filling than my usual piece 'o fruit. Good for you, filling, simple, dirt cheap. And if you do it too often you turn orange!
 
Chocolate Zingers were my favorite. I always thought I liked Ring Dings and Ding Dongs and HoHos more than I actually do.

My mom got us Ho-Hos for our lunch - sometimes I would trade them for a bag of Fritos, though - our lunchroom looked like the floor of the Stock Exchange with people waving their items for a trade deal

york stock GIF
 
Chocolate Zingers were my favorite. I always thought I liked Ring Dings and Ding Dongs and HoHos more than I actually do.
Growing up in the 70s and 80s, we rarely at school lunch (hot) and had the alternative of sack (cold) lunch. Of my first of two grade schools, in my homeroom was coffee can in which we'd take a clothes pin by our name and drop into the Hot or Cold can to give the lunch ladies a head count on food prep. I had cold lunch 90% of the time and it almost always consisted of a sandwich (PBJ for me and my sister while brothers had lunchmeat/Miracle Whip which sat in a cubby for 4 hours) chips, sometimes a pudding cup, and Hostess treat; Twinkies, Cupcakes, Ding Dongs, Ho-Ho's, or Snowballs were the usual. Milk at that time was 5 cents with chocolate milk maybe every two weeks. Mom never bought the Hostess fruit pie and always wanted her to - maybe that could be one thing I'll never forgive my mother for...maybe. And, I was to always bring back the paper sack to use again.
 
Growing up in the 70s and 80s, we rarely at school lunch (hot) and had the alternative of sack (cold) lunch. Of my first of two grade schools, in my homeroom was coffee can in which we'd take a clothes pin by our name and drop into the Hot or Cold can to give the lunch ladies a head count on food prep. I had cold lunch 90% of the time and it almost always consisted of a sandwich (PBJ for me and my sister while brothers had lunchmeat/Miracle Whip which sat in a cubby for 4 hours) chips, sometimes a pudding cup, and Hostess treat; Twinkies, Cupcakes, Ding Dongs, Ho-Ho's, or Snowballs were the usual. Milk at that time was 5 cents with chocolate milk maybe every two weeks. Mom never bought the Hostess fruit pie and always wanted her to - maybe that could be one thing I'll never forgive my mother for...maybe. And, I was to always bring back the paper sack to use again.

I went to Catholic School, so I also didn't have a full cafeteria and brought my lunch - but on Wednesdays, the Italian Moms would come in early and make sauce, and we would either have spaghetti and meatballs or homemade pizza for lunch - I had no idea how spoiled we were to get that, but I do remember loving the smell coming down the hallways in the morning
 
My WASP mom never made (or knew how to make) spaghetti. We also only got to eat Roman Meal whole wheat bread. During elementary school, 90% of the time I had to bring lunch but every now and then I could buy lunch. I was always so happy when it was spaghetti day mostly because they served the spaghetti with a slice of buttered white bread. I would put the spaghetti on the bread and make a spaghetti sandwich. Sooooooooooooooo good.
 
We were on split sessions in HS, so we had no lunch period. If you had a study hall, you could get snacks at the cafeteria, but that was it. We were only in class about 4.5/hrs day, so we made do.
 
Three words:
School
Lunch
PIzza

Now you can reproduce the glory of childhood in your own kitchen!
Wifey and I occasionally enjoy fish sticks and tater tots for dinner. We call it "school lunch."
 
There is a reason I keep a basket of fruit on my desk. I have a sweet tooth, so I reach for the orange instead of the Twinkee.
This post made me realize something about myself............that I had NO IDEA that's how Twinkee was spelled.
 
Three words:
School
Lunch
PIzza

Now you can reproduce the glory of childhood in your own kitchen!
I made Detroit style pizza using Serious Eats recipe. I recommend it.
 
In my high school the lunch ladies were expert at maximizing the use of those #10 Cans of Butter we got from the feds- mostly by baking fresh yeasted dinner rolls every day- with lots of butter in the dough and the tops brushed with melted butter. You could buy just rolls for a quarter apiece and they often started selling them a few hours before the actual lunch period.

So, all of us runners on the XC team would take our $1.50 lunch money and buy a six-pack of warm buttery carbs for "lunch" at 10:30 in the morning (at which point we were all starving).

Oh, to be able to eat vast quantities of buttery bread with impunity again...
 
Evidently, baby carrots are just misshapen regular (adult) carrots shaved down since they were not uniform enough to be sold as such.
And they are soaked in preservative liquids and rot too easily.

We reverted to simply peeling and cutting whole carrots into sticks for eating/snacking. They taste why better and are much less 'processed'.
 
Super Bowl LX commercials cost north of $10 million for a 30 or 60-second spot. In most of the commercials, I don't even remember the product.
 
On the note of orange foods that make you turn orange, a sweet potato, microwaved for a couple of minutes and eaten out of its skin with a fork and some salt is actually a totally reasonable office lunch and more filling than my usual piece 'o fruit. Good for you, filling, simple, dirt cheap. And if you do it too often you turn orange!

I love eating sweet potatoes like that but haven't done so since the fall. Now I'm gonna have to buy a few and start having them again.

Three words:
School
Lunch
PIzza

Now you can reproduce the glory of childhood in your own kitchen!

Our school lunch pizza was terrible... we did have a taco pizza that was pretty good though! I was talking about it with our kids the other day and found some pictures of the ones we used to have and a recipe and they both agreed that it looked disgusting.

In high school, the best thing in our cafeteria were the french fries. I don't know if it was the copious amounts of salt or grease but we all agreed that the school's fries were 100x better than any restaurant in the area. They were a big seller too, even a lot of kids who would bring a lunch from home would stand in line to get an order of fries to go with whatever they brought.
 
On the note of orange foods that make you turn orange, a sweet potato, microwaved for a couple of minutes and eaten out of its skin with a fork and some salt is actually a totally reasonable office lunch and more filling than my usual piece 'o fruit. Good for you, filling, simple, dirt cheap. And if you do it too often you turn orange!
Butter and brown sugar. That is a staple of our Thanksgiving meal. I cook sweet potatoes and the slice and sauté in a butter/brown sugar sauce. Margarine does not cross these lips and have not since 1997. My mother always made at Thanksgiving and we've continued the tradition along with her sausage and apple stuffing. And, my mother always called them yams but always used sweet potatoes. There is a difference.

AI: Yams and sweet potatoes are not the same thing; they are different plants from different families, but in the U.S., the term "yam" is often mistakenly used for orange-fleshed sweet potatoes due to historical labeling by the USDA to distinguish them from lighter varieties. Real yams are starchy, have rough, bark-like skin, and white flesh, while sweet potatoes are sweeter, have smoother skin, and can have orange, white, or purple flesh.
 
Chocolate Zingers were my favorite. I always thought I liked Ring Dings and Ding Dongs and HoHos more than I actually do.
I'm afraid to eat a Hostess Cupcake or Ding Dongs because I worry they won't taste the same. My parents gave them to us for breakfast. If they wanted us to have something more healthy it was waffles, apple turnovers, or kids cereal.
 
Can you say Darwin Award Canididate ?
 
I love eating sweet potatoes like that but haven't done so since the fall. Now I'm gonna have to buy a few and start having them again.



Our school lunch pizza was terrible... we did have a taco pizza that was pretty good though! I was talking about it with our kids the other day and found some pictures of the ones we used to have and a recipe and they both agreed that it looked disgusting.

In high school, the best thing in our cafeteria were the french fries. I don't know if it was the copious amounts of salt or grease but we all agreed that the school's fries were 100x better than any restaurant in the area. They were a big seller too, even a lot of kids who would bring a lunch from home would stand in line to get an order of fries to go with whatever they brought.
No one ever remembers taco pizzas. It was delicious, but apparently not served down here.
 
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