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The End of 2022 vs. The End of Me
As usual the period between Thanksgiving and the New Year saw a lot of calories enter the house. As we roll, both literally and figuratively, into 2023 the person who is responsible for this will then revert to her natural state of reminding me that I have to lose weight. As the kids scatter to the wind to tackle their own problems I will be left staring at the leftover temptations such as the half dozen Coffee Crisp bars my youngest gave me.
This outrageous confection is a Canadian thing from Nestlé. It’s basically a giant Kit Kat that spent the morning lounging around a Starbucks and is generally unavailable in the US except for some specialty import shops and in Florida where Publix serves the Canadian expat market. That’s not a complaint, mind you, as its unavailability is a good thing for my overall health.
Whether or not the end of me will eventually be the end of me, December 31 marks the end of 2022. It’s an arbitrary number that’s supposed to reflect the years past the birth of Christ but even most Christian scholars agree that’s about 30-odd years off. The Chinese say it’s 4721 and the Jews say it is 5783. All I know is that most days I wake up I don’t even know if it’s a Tuesday or something else. And with all the conflicting counters one cannot even find comfort in numerology.
When I was a young man I wondered about what a new year would hold. But “Will this be the year I find love?” has been replaced with “Is this the year on the tombstone?” Dark thoughts? Sure, but a month of Dickens and It’s a Wonderful Life will do that to you.
I would count my blessings that 2023 is not considered a political year but we all know that the 2024 campaign is already two months old and things aren’t going to get better in Washington or around the world anytime soon. For those of you that listen to London Calling, I entered the year #TeamToby and find myself pushed towards #TeamJames.
Seeing news reports that Volodymyr Zelenskyy is busy preparing for Davos and the World Economic Forum will do that to you, too. No one yet has convinced me that this war is in America’s best interests and everything that we throw down that rabbit hole is something we won’t be able to throw the way of the Taiwanese. If there’s a threat to America’s interests it’s located in Beijing, not Moscow. But our Secretary of State said that we wouldn’t even be able to do what we’re doing for the Ukranians if we were still in Afghanistan. Hell, he might as well send Xi an engraved invitation to cross the Taiwan Straight tomorrow. But the Washington establishment has been building up Putin as the new Hitler since 2016. They can’t back down and admit it was all a farce now. Nope, they laid miles of track and don’t care a whit that it all leads off a cliff. Throw some more coal into the boiler. Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!
When you consider all of that, plus Dementia Joe in the White House, the current state of the culture towards depravity and the rise of both censorship and the biosecurity state, there is only one real answer. More chocolate. Which takes me back to the end of me.
Published in General
As usual, the English are to blame. :-)
My mother’s favorite ! We would never leave BC without a box for her. The last time was about eight years ago, in Sydney By The Sea.
We are debating when to go back to the scene of our honeymoon, now that Ray is allowed across the border.
You make it sound like the statute of limitations ran out!
She doesn’t tell us EVERYTHING!
Ray is not jabbed. Until very recently, he was forbidden to enter Canada. And I refused to upload my sensitive medical information to the police state website.
Ahhh. I liked my version better. The honeymoon was so wild that Canadian authorities escorted him to the border.
Funny! Our honeymoon in October of 2003 just happened to coincide with Canadian Thanksgiving. We were lucky to find an Indian restaurant that was open for dinner.
What tribe?
In Canada, there’s a difference between Indian and First Nations.
What gets me is that it’s not consistent. The chocolate Hershey uses in Mr Goodbar seems different from – and inferior to – that used in other Hershey items.
With coffee, consistency is an enemy of quality. If you want the best quality, you won’t get consistency. I think that’s true with some other food products, too, but I don’t have any information to say it works that way with chocolate.
Part of the deal with coffee is that the weather is not consistent from year to year. So the best coffee may come from one region in one year, and another region in the next. And different varieties are grown in different regions. Necessarily.
Big coffee companies need consistency, and they get that by going for a blend that they source differently each year. The people who do the work to get that consistent blend are very talented, but they have to give up on some quality in order to get something they can produce consistently.
I don’t know if chocolate beans have that kind of seasonal and regional variability.
I think companies like Hershey strive for consistency too, because if someone likes their candy bar one time and doesn’t like it the next time, it might be a long time before they give it another chance, if ever.
So far, I haven’t noticed any significant differences between the standard Hershey Bars (with almonds, etc) that I get from one year to another. But the Mr Goodbar chocolate seems… consistently DIFFERENT from… their other milk chocolate products. Maybe that’s because they acquired Mr Goodbar from some other company and need to maintain consistency of Mr Goodbar for people who like Mr Goodbar and expect it to be the same each time.
It’s actually the little chunks of Diane Keaton that make it inconsistent. She’s not getting any younger.
But it wasn’t acquired. It has always been a Hershey product, but not always marketed under the Hershey name.
Since I retired every day has been SunMonTueWedThuFriSat and I mostly have no idea what the date is (neither day or month). Surprisingly, I usually remember what year it is (starting somewhere in March).
Nice to see you RandR, we don’t hear from you very often!
I’m touched. Thank you. We have been out of the country on cruises and working (unpaid) as a cat sitter for daughter and SIL. And we have 35-day and 30-day cruises booked for the first half of 2023 so I won’t be able to participate as much as I used to. I miss this wonderful “place” but just can’t keep up with both PIT22 & 23, with limited connectivity, for the time being but I visit as often as I can.
Barbara Hershey?
No. But my wife’s maiden name is Hershey. No relation to the chocolate man as Milton Hershey and his wife were childless, leaving Hershey as one of the world’s largest philanthropic organizations. The majority of voting stock is held by the Milton Hershey School Trust.