Technically it was three things, only one of which was directly related to Girl Scout Cookies, but we'll start with that one first.
Girl Scouts should only make Samoas (the coconut ring-shaped cookies), Thin Mints (the cookies you freeze and eat an entire sleeve of mashed up into vanilla ice cream while crying, watching Love Actually, and getting fat despite their name), and maybe Tagalongs (the cookies you wish were just a Reese's peanut butter cup). No one buys the rest and everyone complains when those other three are all gone in the first five minutes of the cookie booth.
Since my daughter isn't in Chris Rock's daughter's Girl Scout troop, I was forced to peddle the three popular and other rando unpopular boxes of Girl Scout Cookies like Rah-Rah Raisin (Nah-Nah Nasty) and Do-Si-Do's (wannabe Nutter Butters) in the foyer of Juneau's main downtown grocery store instead of at the Oscars. It was a lot colder, we made closer to $64 than $64,000, and people weren't dressed as nicely, but I'm sure they were much friendlier.
Anyhoo, while standing there among a shopping cart of 50% off red, pink, and white Valentine's Day M&M's, I discovered a rack of Easter candy on which the abominable marshmallow "Peep" was featured. No longer content to exist in non-flavored yellow and pink, there are now blue "birthday cake" flavored Peeps (not pictured), and, most egregious of all, GREEN SOUR WATERMELON Peeps.
The only thing more abhorrent than eating a giant marshmallow shaped like a baby chick is eating a giant marshmallow shaped like a baby chick that has been dyed bright green and made to taste like fake "sour watermelon."
That was one thing I learned.
The second thing I learned: There's a genre of mass-market paperback books--apparently targeting semi-depressed, menopausal shut-ins who smell vaguely of rose water and fungus--called "Cat Food Mysteries." (There is also a genre called "Paranormal Romance," but that's a subject of another blog post). I don't know if that's the official name for this genre actually, but with titles like "Murder Most Finicky: a Pawsitively Organic Mystery" (including cat food recipes) and "Faux Paws: a Magical Cats Mystery," what else do you call it?
My grandmother (R.I.P.) would have totes loved these books as she was a writer and editor for Gourmet magazine back in the day who was way into cats, recipes, and mysteries. Sadly, she and her squad of "girlfriends" (as she called them) were forced to make do with Agatha Christie and marked-down Fancy Feast, that brand where the cat in the commercial ate a big, juicy scoop of wet cat food out of a crystal wine goblet.
No one thought to combine cat food, cats, and mysteries between 1917 and 1990 or so when my grandmother began her long mental decline and could no longer distinguish Angela Lansbury from her cat, Polly.
If my grandma were alive today, surely she would have found a way to write a mystery featuring a cat attacking a sour watermelon Peep, with inlaid recipes for Peep-based cat food.
Yum!
