It seems I just finished singing "School's Out for Summer" and now we're within spitting distance of Labor Day. It's a bittersweet time because although I'll miss the great summertime activities, we're entering the crisp Fall settings and Halloween fun. My new town has a lot of campers coming through to stop at Cabela's, but it's more prominently known for the "King Frost Parade" which is a huge Halloween parade featuring King Frost, who represents the coming of Winter.



I'm getting ahead of myself. It's Back to School time, which means fancy new Jonas Brothers folders and Spongebob lunchboxes for the kids. The slap bracelets of my day have been replaced with a new fad called "Silly Bandz" or simple put, shaped rubber bands. They're used more as a fashion accessory and collectible than a means of keeping papers together. I can get behind any popular childrens fad that can be purchased for $1. Especially when it's a more fashionable way to do a timeless misdeed like flicking rubber bands at your schoolmates. Traditionally they come in cheap packs of themes like sports, beach, farm, dinosaurs, etc. The set above is one of the more expensive sets ($3-6) featuring the Disney Princesses and has equal male counterparts such as Marvel Superheros.

I'm not quite sure how  they're made, but I like to think they have machines jettisoning out tubes of rubber pumpkins and taking slices off to form bands. I like Silly Bandz, and am hoping they aren't the first thing to be banned this school year.

Over the past few months I've gotten all kinds of Kool-Aid, Pop-Tarts and cereal for review and yet here sits an empty blog. Yeah, I think it sucks, too. But here's a run down:

I can't tell the difference between Ice Cream Sandwich and Cookies and Creme Pop-Tarts
Marshmallow Pebbles are better than Cupcake Pebbles
Kool-Aid Fizzlers are the greatest new Kool-Aid invention since Kool-Aid Slushies
Shrek + 20 piece McNuggets = awesome

My life has taken a strange turn over the past few months in which I'm back to sitting at a desk all day but now I also teach evening classes on Mondays and Wednesdays at a vocational/career school. Yes. Teach. It's been an odd adjustment to have people address me as "Miss Whitby" because usually that salutation tends to follow along with, "Miss Whitby we haven't received your credit card payment this month."

I'm also purchasing a mobile home and moving soon. No more living in the crazy house for me! I'll have 3 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, and a garden tub to soak away all my problems. Also, maybe some moonshine.

Miss me? I've missed you guys, too.

Let's go back to the last blog post... right before the Thanksgiving Day Parade I wound up with vertigo and spent the majority of the time getting up to New York hopped up on motion sickness pills and unable to turn quickly or sleep on my left side. But I battled through it and lived out a big dream of screaming my undying love to Kermit the Frog. I also had Thanksgiving dinner at Rockafeller Center, which was cool, and we got to watch the ice skaters.

Christmas time was pretty busy. I was thrust head-first into a big project at work involving planning to switch systems etc etc etc. I spent the week before Christmas out at an office backloading appointments for Lap-Band refills and came back to my desk to find piles of OB/GYN surgical cards and Neurosurgery consults. Then I had 10,000 meetings. It was kind of like living in some weird The Office/Scrubs hybrid.

Things are calmed down for now aside from my becoming President-Elect of the local chapter of the American Academy of Professional Coders. Wedding plans have been tossed in lieu of wanting to run off and elope in The Keys. We'll see how that goes.

In the meantime, I've got something fun for review tomorrow (or maybe Wednesday?) so stay tuned.

As turkey day draws near, I would like to say a big "THANKS" to those of you that have supported me throughout the years. So this Thursday as you're sitting in the living room scarfing down Chex Mix, surrounded by obnoxious relatives and trying to drown them out by focusing on watching the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, make sure you look real hard at the audience BECAUSE I WILL FUCKING BE THERE IN PERSON!

Not only will I be there, but one of my biggest celebrity favorites will be there as well.



There is a God. Thank you and good night.

I can't believe the Halloween season came and went without a blog! Strike that. I can't believe it came and went without my finishing up and actually posting the 5 blogs I wrote. I've had this nasty habit lately of running around in business suits carrying disorganized stacks of paper. Sadly this habit of keeping busy has kept you from hearing of my great discovery. It happened a few weeks ago as I was at my mother's doing my laundry like a cheapfuck and clipping Sunday coupons. Between coupons saving $1 on 15 cans of cat food and an ad for ceramic plates, I found this gem.



Yes my friends, I have finally found a replacement for Magic Middles. These Nestle premade cookies have you just minutes away from fresh chocolate chip cookies filled with creamy chocolate filling. I've purchased and made them myself and while they're not the same as my favorite Keebler snack of yesteryear, they're a fantastic replacement.

I almost spent the remainder of my evening quietly painting my nails and then heading to bed. Almost. I realized that it takes 12 hours for nails to really dry in any sort of non-smudging fashion and as I don't care to have to wash my bedsheets with acetone tomorrow, I decided to blog instead. If you're confused about the lack of blogs lately, don't be. No one can possibly be more confused than my fiance, who actually watches me taking the photos for blogs I never write. If I had a kid on top of work, school, and various grocery shopping/laundry/cleaning type chores I'd of probably died of a stroke by now. I'll never understand how single moms do it.

Which brings me to yogurt.



Breyer's YoCrunch has gotten all spook-ified for Halloween, donning Ghost, Witch, and Frankenstein labels in the classic orange and black fashion. They come in Butterfinger, M&Ms, and the more festively colored Reese's Pieces. The candy is a nice, touch, but the plain vanilla lowfat yogurt is still on the tart side even with the chunks of candy mixed in. I'd recommend eating the candy and using the yogurt portion for smoothies, but that's just because I've gotten quite the craving for smoothies lately. Although I'm sure any onlooker might believe my urges lie less with drinking frozen fruit and more with the glorious scent of an overexerted blender motor.

Now if I could just get Lean Cuisine to slap some vampires on the boxes, my bagged lunches would be in perfect step for All Hallow's.

Another summer season has passed which means it's now officially time to switch air fresheners from Ocean Breeze to Apple Spice. I'm eagerly awaiting the cooler weather not only because it means relief on my electric bill, but because it means Fall is coming. I spent my Labor Day picking apples at the orchard, which I think is a warm welcoming to the season. Summer has been killing me. Ever since moving out in July I've gotten vertigo, nausea, several weeks of allergy medicine induced fatigue, an ear infection, sinusitis, tonsillitis, a random blood pressure spike, and taken a trip to the ER for chest pain which was confirmed not to be my heart and probably had more to do with stress or maybe dragging an 80lb exercise bike into my apartment.

I have 100 photos of things for blogs, and yet no updates. Despite the busy times I'm trying to get back in the swing of things. I'm going to start slow with this.



Coconut M&Ms have me completely under their spell. The chocolate and coconut taste has me dreaming of laying out on the beach in Hawaii watching chicks in hula skirts and sipping fruity drinks with little umbrellas in them. They beat the hell out of coconut Easter eggs.


The stamps have an island flair, making the trademark "m" into beach umbrellas, flowers, and palm trees. I was even lucky enough to get a Siamese twin in my bag. The colors of green, brown, and white lend themselves well to the theme, but they could have made them baby puke green and diarrhea brown and I'd still toss them down with admirable enthusiasm.

It's been a few weeks but I'm settled into my new apartment complete with 16 spatulas and 200 utensils I can't even imagine the use for. Thankfully nothing was broken on lost in the process, but as much as I tried to find proper places for all my crap, I still have a few "random junk" boxes in my garage. It took me nearly three days to lure my scared-shitless cat out from under my bed but now she's back to her normal antics of crying for food every 2 hours and laying in the most inconvenient spots possible.



My apartment looks pretty much like you'd expect it to look. It's loaded with movies, games, toys, and there's this guy that sits on the couch playing video games, screaming at his opponents and occasionally chucks the PS3 controller across the living room. We've got all the major most recent gaming systems covered along with satellite tv and the joy of DVR. Friday night is officially Ghost Adventures night at my place, which is way better when you can rewind all the creepy EVPs as many times as desired. There's even a VCR under Cthulhu's butt for good show.

 Behind that sits the magical new station for Crown Combo.


There's a few key points to the desk such as the VCR, record player, corporate zombies, corkboard of anime pins, and such.

I'm learning all kinds of important life lessons about how much the laundrymat sucks and how if you leave potatoes sitting for too long they take huge smelly potato-pisses all over your pantry. Also, just because you take 5 blogs worth of photos doesn't mean that they're ever going to get written. Although I'm loving being able to make chocolate chip pancakes in the morning without hearing a barrage of family members inquiring into what I'm doing and telling me to not make a mess. I could easily become a hermit.

Oh lords of cereal and junk food, thank you for bestowing this most blessed feast upon me.

Within my top 10 favorite discontinued food products rests Golden Graham Treats. They came out, I believe, in the early 90s and I ate an estimated 2,500 of them in my bagged school lunches. The commercials used to run constantly during the 2 shows I taped incessantly in high school -- Darkwing Duck and Samurai Pizza Cats. I'm a big fan of Golden Grahams cereal, and when they tossed in marshmallow and chocolate I was rendered helpless to its powers.



These new treats have gone the way of the new pudding pops and taken a change in shape. Instead of being roughly the size of your average prewrapped Rice Krispies Treat, they're the size of a granola bar. Not only that, but the sweet graham flavor is almost drowned out by the intense chocolate that's coating the bottom of the bar. It's more candy bar than anything now. Still, I have my Golden Grahams Treats back and that's all that matters.

I'd post the old commercial for Golden Graham treats, as I have it 16x over on VHS, but my VCR is actually boxed up right now as I'm moving in to my first apartment on July 1. I'm moving to another tiny town in Berks County, PA. It's a huge ass 100+ year old house that's split into 4 apartments, and I get the one in front with the awesome basement bedroom. I've also been informed my neighbor is a homosexual Christian psychic, so mass hilarity is sure to ensue.

If you're one of the many that believe Dunkaroos are no longer produced, you're wrong -- I'm just hoarding all of them. As you can see, I have obtained a massive variety pack of Dunkaroos that's really 4 boxes in one. Not only that, but I only paid $4 for it, and that's less than 17¢ a pack.

These snacks first made the scene in the late 80's but they're only available now via black market vendors and speakeasies. The cookies are lackluster shapes like balloons and planes, but no one really cares when there's frosting involved. They could be shaped like cockroaches and goat asses as long as there's a tiny tub of frosting for them to swim it. Dunkaroos are the tastiest Aussie product  since Nad's hair removal cream.

I can't believe I've been at this for so many years and this is my first blog about Dunkaroos. I know I ate at least 15 boxes of Shrek Dunkaroos a few years back, but there's no sign of green slime frosting on the blog anywhere.