JUST WHAT YOU ALWAYS WANTED. . .

I was browsing through the LL Bean catalog that came in the mail yesterday, in the section titled "Out of the Ordinary Last Minute Gifts." Though I was hoping for inspiration for some of those hard-to-buy-for people on my list, I came up short here. I didn't find anything that screamed someone's name to me. One item I did find provided amusement though. For those of you who are wondering what to give to that incredibly lazy child on your list, I have found the perfect gift:For the low, low price of $14.95, you can buy the "SNOWBALL/SNOW BLOCK MAKER SET." The description states, "Lets kids build their own forts and fill them with perfect snowballs."

When I was growing up, we had snowball and snow block makers, and they were called our hands. Believe it or not, they were free and did the job just fine. In fact, my brother and I built some pretty impressive snow forts in our time, several that featured multiple rooms, most that boasted slides off the tops, and one that I recall even had a stained glass window. No kidding - - we figured out that if you froze water in a bar pan and added food coloring, it made something of a stained glass window (not a very attractive one, of course, but who else can brag that their snow forts featured such striking attention to detail?) You will have to keep in mind that we grew up on a farm, so we already had lots of drifts to work with, plus a dad that used a tractor and blade to push the snow into big piles. Still, we put a lot of work into the making of our "snow mansions" . . . . all without the assistance of the LL Bean Snowball/Snow Block Maker. Just think of the amazing projects we could have completed had we had this fantastic tool! We had no idea just how deprived we were.

HAVE YOU EVER SEEN SUCH OBVIOUS NEED FOR THE

LL BEAN SNOWBALL/SNOW FORT BLOCK MAKER?!?

IT'S THE THOUGHT THAT COUNTS. . . .

I worked on packing up the kitchen stuff last night. This morning, Maggie asked me to make her oatmeal, but regretfully, the oatmeal container was packed in one of the 20-some odd boxes of “kitchen stuff.” She settled for scrambled eggs. I find it amazing that so far, I have packed up about 20 or so boxes of stuff out of my tiny little kitchen - - and still have a few to go. Grandma Dot would definitely be proud of the amount of stuff I managed to shove into one space.

Speaking of that, when I cleaned out one of the cabinets, way in the back I found something that I haven’t seen since we moved into that house six years ago and had forgotten we had. It made me laugh out loud to see it, in fact. Ten years ago, when Chris and I got married, one of the gifts we were given was an expandable trivet. That was the only gift that was in the package - - a small, metal frame with hinges in the middle to allow it to expand so a hot dish could be set on it. It had to cost all of about $3.99 - - the wrapping itself probably cost more than the present. I can still remember being baffled when I opened it because I couldn’t figure out what it was, or why someone would just give us a trivet. Harder still was trying to write an acceptable thank you note for such an odd and let’s face it, really cheap gift. Rather than having someone say, “you guys are worth less than $5 to me,” I would just as soon have gotten a card with nothing from them. If it really is the thought that counts, then we were apparently not very highly thought of.

So last night, I rediscovered the expandable trivet and had a good laugh remembering our bewilderment when we unwrapped it in August 1997. As I have not used it in the last six years and haven’t even given it a second thought, I figured we could probably live without it from here on out. After ten years, the sad little expandable trivet that never got used finally ended up in the pile destined for garbage collection.