Sometimes, things take a turn you don’t expect. When you’re a writer, that truism often involves going off on a writing tangent – I remember once having a cat totally take over one of my mystery scenes – or writing way beyond the intended length. The creative process can lead to some interesting results, to say the least.
Renee Schuls-Jacobson, blogger/writer extraordinaire and one of my cyber-pals, threw out a comment challenge when she posted about kummerspeck, a German word that describes the excess weight folks gain when they eat from emotional distress of some kind. Interestingly, the English translation of kummerspeck is “grief bacon.”
Her challenge:
Leave me a real or fictional comment about a time when you ate a lot of grief bacon.
Well, who can resist that?
I thought of something right away. That’s where the cheeseballs come in. The comment “paragraph” quickly turned into a two-pager, with photo. Renee loved it so much that she made it into a guest blog post yesterday. Isn’t that sweet?
So here’s the first part, with a link back to her blog for the rest. Enjoy!
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My Grief Bacon, by K.B. Owen
Grief Bacon. I’m glad Renee brought this up. Sigh. I have my own little sordid story to tell.
It involves the blizzard of 2010 – aka “Snowmageddon, ” “Snowpocalypse,” “Snowzilla,” and “snOMG”… and cheese balls.
Yep, cheeseballs. I know, I’m not proud of it. I’d much rather be carrying around this surplus fifteen pounds because of homemade butter spritz cookies, or macaroni and cheese, or even pie, but it’s really the cheeseballs that did it.
image via phot0matt on flickr
The Target store is partly to blame. No, really. But I’ll get back to that in a moment.
So, anyway, the Blizzard was coming. The weather forecasters in Northern Virginia – who don’t see much in the way of snow on a regular basis, I might add – were practically wetting themselves in excitement. Our local weather guy has a “Bread-O-Meter” that he pulls out when he makes snow predictions on the air. It’s named after how fast the bread goes flying off the shelves when folks around here start panicking, even when there’s only a dusting of snow on the ground. For the first time in the 20+ years that I’ve been living in the area, his Bread-O-Meter was a 10 – a designation he also refers to as “Run for the Hills.”
Hmm…looks like I need to get ready! I have to admit that I was excited, too. We don’t see much snow around here, and it sounded like we’d be digging tunnels out of the stuff (and we were). Time to inventory the gloves, hats, boots, flashlights, batteries, Parmalat, etc.
List in hand, I headed to Target. They have everything – food, DVDs, batteries, clothing – all in one place. We had to be prepared for a possible power outage, and since we didn’t have an SUV, we needed to be able to stick it out at home.
So I’m doing fine in Target, making my way through the list, being sensible in my food choices (non-perishable, nutritious, etc), when I see…this ENORMOUS clear plastic bin of cheeseballs. As high as my knee, and the size of a tall drum. O.M.G. This was the sort of thing I’d pass by when the boys were little. They’d be sitting in their shopping cart seats, and point to it and drool. Ooh! Can we get that?
Nooo.
But this time, it was different. At the time, I was thinking my survival instincts were kicking in. These would keep forever. Fat calories for keeping warm. And yummy.
In retrospect, I’m not quite sure what was going through my brain, but I put it in my cart.
The boys were super-impressed with mom plunking this huge canister of cheeseballs on top of the fridge. Hubster rolled his eyes.
The devil had entered our house.
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Read the rest on Renee’s blog.
If you’d like to get in on Renee’s “Grief Bacon” contest, click here.
Just for fun, here are some pics of our “Snowpocalypse”:
Have you ever eaten certain foods during a storm that you never would have eaten otherwise? What other emotional/social eating words do you think we should have in our English lexicon? With the holiday parties coming up, we could use a word for that sort of eating, don’t you think? I’d love to hear from you.
Hang on to your cheeseballs,
Kathy
Thank you for sharing the love, you cheeseball! Just about to lift off! 🙂 Have a great weekend.
Have a great time, Renee!
The first part was hilarious. I’m headed over to read the rest. My husband was still living in Virginia during this storm. We have some good pictures of the snow pile that is his car. Though I have to admit, now that he’s living in Canada, he doesn’t look back on it as a big storm 😉
Thanks, Marcy! It is all a matter of degree, isn’t it?
K.B. I read this on Renee’s blog–loved it. Made me wish I had a big ol’ tub of cheese balls.
When I was pregnant for the first time (this has nothing to do with a snowstorm) I ate half a round half gallon of Kemps mint chocolate chip ice cream, I then went to the store before my (ex) husband got home and bought a 1/4 round and shoved it into the half gallon so my husband wouldn’t know. Then I ate a little more. 🙂
LOL, Amy, you’re a crafty one! Aren’t those pregnancy cravings a weird thing? Glad it didn’t happen during a snowstorm – you wouldn’t have been able to hide the evidence. 😉
Oh yeah! Grief Bacon–what a delightful phrase! I’ve been there. I’ve even been there with the vat of cheeseballs!
Really? Somehow, that makes me feel better, Jill! Thanks for stopping by. 🙂
Being the well centered individual that I am I simply eat bacon without waiting for any grief. My wife stopped bringing it home years ago. It’s just as well.
Hard to eat it if it’s not there, right Jay! A very sensible woman. 😀
This totally cracked me up – and your snow photos are awesome! I LOVE the snow!
Although I’ve never binged on cheese balls (that I’ll admit to anyway…) I definitely have a tendency to consume large quantities of “grief bacon” when the occasion strikes. Pizza is my most common choice, but I’d have to say the weirdest would be those little french fried onions you put on green bean casseroles. One night, while depressed about something or other, I ended up eating half a can – half the BIG can, not that little one. My husband walked in and asked, “are you seriously sitting there eating those fried onions?”
I looked at the can and asked, “If I said no, would it make this better?”
“no.”
“Then yes, I’m eating the onions. Can we get a pizza?”
Oh, that’s a riot, Susan! Nice come-back, I might add. 😀