at the age of four my father & i took a trip from my parents' chelsea, ma apartment up route 93 to windham, nh, where my parents (then aged 25 & 27) were in the process of building their first & only house. as i remember it, he & i walked around on dirt through the shell of the house as men hammered around us. you could still see through the stairs to the second floor, where the bedrooms would eventually be. a house had become more of a priority for my parents, as my now-28-year-old brother was on the way, upping the kid total to three. we would move in soon after & that's where i lived from then until i moved 45 minutes back down route 93 to boston for college. new hampshire sweeping upbringing assessment...good education, boring surroundings. a few nh facts fo yo mind:
- new hampshire has no sales tax, so people from massachusetts come over the border to shop, particularly at our state liquor stores, located both close to the border & directly off the highway, they're like rest areas with no place to pee but a wealth of "the cure for what ails ya"...very convenient for mass area fraternities looking to purchase grain alcohol for tubs of punch...i'm jus' saying is all.
- we host the first state primary, which i think makes us a skew corollary to the color red. bonus political fact...if it wasn't for arizona, we would have been the last state to declare mlk day a holiday.
- we've begat one president...franklin pierce...yes, his actions did result in the creation of the republican party & he is the only elected president to seek the nomination for a 2nd term but not get it & is often referred to as one of the worst presidents ever. thanks for noticing.
#27 - my spicy home state.
snack: lindt excellence chili dark chocolate bar
drink: v-8
turns out that lindt & sprungli (lindt usa) is based out of my home state. stratham, to be exact. just southwest of portsmouth. i'm snacking on one of their lindt excellence chili dark chocolate bars. i've been all about the fancy gourmet chocolates these days. in my book, i figure if i'm gonna need to consume chocolate to remain sane, a fancy imported chocolate bar beats a lame-o possibly-been-melted-in-the-bodega hershey bar any day of the week. gourmet chocolate (& specifically dark chocolate) is the future, people. if you've invested in clean technologies, i'm sorry to have to break that news to you.
omg. so i had been feeling guilty about drinking so much soda & thinking of what i could replace it with & thought about drinkable chili chocolate complements & went for the "tomato/vegetable goodness" of v-8. tomato...chili...sounded right to me...big mistake. i couldn't even get past the half way point of a 12oz glass. v-8 is nasty. i mean, on one level, it is only one letter & 32 numbers away from being a toxic lubricant. at first, i told myself the reason why i couldn't drink it was because i was in the middle of watching true blood (specifically something that happens in the 2nd episode) but it goes deeper than that. i will say it once...tomato juice is good for nothing but creating bloody marys. you can try to tell me that it's good for me. you can try to tell me it'll make me straighter (as if that's possible!). you can call it "splash" and pair it with berries. you can lock me in a room with nothing but v-8 & yoo hoo and i will choose yoo hoo every time.
that is how awful v-8 is. it almost ruined this blog entry...i originally wrote 95% of this on sunday night, but my life was thrown into such a whirlwind by the awfulness of the v-8, that i just couldn't finish it until now, three days later...new slogan = v-8...tastes like puke, but without the vodka & tabasco.