disappointing oatmeal

[Former_Member]

My darling daughter was kind enough to transfer her cold to me. So I napped several times today, and I woke up hungry. Hungry for oatmeal. The good kind. The steel cut cooks-for-45-minutes kind. I dragged myself to the kitchen, dug out the oatmeal and got it going on the stove. I was so looking forward to it. Finally, it was ready. I dished up a big bowl. Sprinkled brown sugar liberally. Added a splash of milk. And spooned some into my mouth. It tasted dusty. Dusty sprinkled with brown sugar. The thought occurred to me "does oatmeal have an expiration date?" Looked on the cylinder. It read "Best by November 15, 2006."

Disappointing oatmeal...

[rarebeasts]

That would be most disappointing.
I wanted a sausage for lunch on the day I had my tonsils out. I begged and begged for hours until they gave up and I got my sausage. As you can guess it turned out to be a most disappointing meal also. I guess I was only 4.

[Former_Member]

HA-
last weekend i cleaned out the baking goods cupboard and then a few other cupboards and found some winners. can of refried beans that expired in 2003. unopened karo syrup that expired in 2009- not sure why i had karo syrup in my cupboard.

pancake mix that expired in 2009. a BUNCH of soy sauce bottle half full from a sushi party I had last summer (just noticed you are supposed to refrigerate after opening) so with that rice vinegar that was also supposed to be refrigerated and a one gallon jug of soy sauce - all down the drain.

and breadcrumbs from the last house i lived in? why would i have breadcrumbs? and why would i have brought them into this house over 16 years ago.
weird.

then again after my grandma died we found jiffy cake mixes from the 1970's. they were rock hard.

[Former_Member]

i love finding old things

when i moved into this house i found an old sewing machine and a bowling pin in the crawl space.

i think the bowling pin was quite a random find
how many bowling pins have you found?

i found an old roller skate buried in my yard, it had metal wheels, like the ones that you strap on over your shoes - i had some like that when i was a little kid. they sucked.

[Former_Member]

i also found the entire foundation to an onl carriage house in my back yard, was digging and hit concrete, so I kept digging and digging
and digging...
and pretty soon I had unearthed a large rectangle of concrete, (not a slab) just the base of what was an old carriage house
i was curious
so i went to the public library and found the old sanborn fire insurance map for my house in the early 1900's and my house was actually only 3 rooms at the time and there was a small carriage house behind it.

when i was painting my house i took off the old awning on the front porch and found house numbers that don't match my current house numbers.
in 1912 the city changed all of the house numbers, it was the old house number.

[Former_Member]

I also found this in my yard.

http://www.foundmagazine.com/find/981

i like found magazine.

[Former_Member]

my grandmother gave me an old drum table when i moved into my first apartment
it had one drawer and inside the drawer were pieces of colored glass
i asked her about the glass
it was from the church she went to. they lived in the country and the church was less than a mile from their home and in 1965 a tornado destroyed the church. no one knew there was a tornado because it hit the tornado sirens before they could sound them. the glass is what my grandmother picked up off the ground at the church after the tornado.

i left the antique drum table and the glass in my apartment when i moved...
i am still pissed that i left it there and i don't know why i didn't take it with me when i moved.

[Former_Member]

in my previous house i found some vintage porno mags from the 1970's, there were hidden under the insulation in the attic...it was interesting flipping through and seeing how the times and trends have changed....

[Former_Member]

My house is a shrine to my dearly departed relatives. One of my nanas lived to be 102. The other lived to 98. She and my grampa had this little aqua camper and they hit the road every summer. They'd send us postcards. She made a lamp out of a massive wine jug filled with rocks she found and polished. I always loved that lamp and she gave it to me a few years before she died. It is awesome and I like knowing that her hands touched the on/off chain that mine now do.

I also have her dining room set. The top of the buffet is water stained from the african violets she had on there for ever. And in the top drawer is real silverware that I never knew she had since it was too good to use and piles of those little wooden spoons that come with the mini cups of vanilla ice cream and orange sherbet. She always had those in the freezer.

She never threw anything away and I inherited that trait from her. I've been going through this massive box of postcards she kept. It's a hoot finding the ones I sent her from summer camp!

We just acquired another dining room set from my mom's cousin Doris who died last month. Which means I have a table in my dining room, and one under wraps in the garage, and Cousin Doris's in the living room. I think the only solution is to open a supper club.

[Former_Member]

OMG- those little cups of ice cream with the wooden spoons that really weren't spoons but tongue depressors that were hourglass shaped

our treat at grandmas house was gingerale (yuck) in those little dixie paper cups and vanilla wafers (yummy!) that she would put on a paper towel

they lived in a big farmhouse in the middle of an apple orchard,
a cow creek running along the propertly line and a huge garden full of roses hundreds of roses...
and my grandma and grandpa knew the names of all of them.

sadly, after they died and the house was sold, the new owners filled in the cow creek, the city paved the road and took out the beautiful little bridge in which I would stand and pick up pebbles from the dirt road and toss down into the creek. all the trees lining the property are gone and then tilled over the huge garden.

it is like they never existed.
in some ways it is a very sad - the big old hay barn is gone, i remember wandering in there as a kid and dancing in the sunlight that would play out stripes of sunlight upon the floor
looking up and hearing flapping wings of a bird i startled, which in turn startled me and we would both flee from the barn
sitting on a bale of hay
wandering around the creek, looking for fish that didn't exist, putting logs across it and trying to build a bridge, sneaking apples from the orchard trees
running and playing dead when we hear the crop duster overhead...

i guess it is good they destroyed the property... the big oak tree out front, and all the ivy- that is where my mother lost her engagement ring many years ago when diggin up ivy for our yard. I now have some of that ivy in my yard and it grows up the face of my house and my dad hates it
every year he comes over and pulls it down and tries to dig it out.
i gave up worrying... if it makes him feel like he is helping out, i just let him do it. it always grows back. i've lived here over 16 years and every time he comes over and takes down the ivy, i just laugh at how bare it looks and know in a year or two it will be back and so will my dad.

[Former_Member]

Oh, your ivy story reminds me of the wisteria i dug from the yard of my 98-year-old nana.

In 1935ish, nana and grampa bought a house in Seattle on Puget Sound. Right on the water. And she lived there until she died a few years back. It was a great old house. Nana tended a huge garden in the back. She made jam from the berries she grew. The house had a porch running across the front of it with wisteria planted at one corner that grew up and along the roof of the porch. I dug some of it before the house sold. And so far, it's in a pot because we're in this rental and I don't want to give it "permanence" in soil that doesn't belong to me.

In a perfect world, I would have had the boatloads of money it would've taken to update the house enough to make it a tad more livable--you know, like reliable electricity, decent plumbing, a non-leaky roof--i would've left everything else just as it was. But sadly, it's not a perfect world and my dad, aunt & uncle sold it. To a local mega-uber-rock star. Really. I can't say who it is kuzz the family could be sued. Really. I hear he put a big wall around it, thereby destroying some of the neighbors' views, which were spectacular. I haven't had the guts to go see it kuzz I know it will make me sad...and I want to remember it the way it was.