Dear Kid,

Friday night Dad and I went to the hippest event in Blue Ash: the Food Truck Fest.

The past two years, the Food Truck Fest has been down in Washington Park (not convenient). This year it moved to Summit Park in Blue Ash (extremely convenient).

I’m pretty sure they moved it just for us. And because Summit Park is awesome and can accommodate many more trucks.

If you weren’t at Summit Park in Blue Ash for the Food Truck Fest, you missed a great event and a lot of YUM!

There were enough people so it felt incredibly well attended, yet not so many that it was hard to walk around. Most of the trucks had short lines for food, but the waits weren’t bad at all. We decided to walk the whole circle to check out all the different offerings—and there were a lot of different kinds of foods. Trucks specialized in everything from coffee to cupcakes, from pizza to pops, from beer to BBQ, from Cuban to Korean to waffles to wings to…well, you get the idea.

It was very difficult deciding where to eat because everything sniffed so good. We finally decided to eat at Urban Grill and let me just say YUM! Dad had a chicken something or other sandwich and I had a fantastic couscous bowl and we were pretty quiet while we ate because YUM! In some ways, this is awful, because it means that the next time we go to a gathering of food trucks we’ll want to eat at Urban Grill again; AND we’ll want to try other tasty things too. Decisions, decisions.

The weather was absolutely cooperative for our visit—it cooled down just enough to be nice while we walked around and the rain didn’t start until after we left. I really hope the In Charge Of Food Truck people bring this event back to Blue Ash next year. Or soon than next year.

Love, Mom

Dear Kid,

Today’s Word of the Day is OGANOLEPTIC.

Organoleptic properties are the aspects of food, water, or other substances that an individual experiences via the senses.

Organ (like eyes, nose, tongue) and leptic (as in “to fall off”—no that’s leper).

The reason that organoleptic is today’s word is that I just learned it. And it’s really fun to say. (Go ahead. Try it. I’ll wait…. See? Fun to say.)

Department of Agriculture employees frequently perform organoleptic inspections (“eeeewwww—shut this place down!”).

But don’t be all that impressed. You perform organoleptic tests all the time. Visual inspection (“interesting, colorful”), sniff (“hmmm, that smells yummy”), taste test (“Oh, yes. That is an excellent pizza. And I really, really hope that green stuff is spinach.”).

I love learning new words.

Tomorrow’s word of the day will (of course) be PIANOLEPTIC.

Love, Mom

Dear Kid,

Happy Monday and hope you had a good weekend.

For us, the weekend included the First Spinach Harvest.

Yeah, it was a lot of spinach.

The spinach we grow is Malabar Spinach which is stupid easy to grow. Plant seed, ignore, harvest, ignore more, harvest more.

We (and by “we” I mean Dad took the stems out to the compost bin and I did the rest) made two kinds of spinach. Yum.

We also had homegrown beets.

We did not eat the weeds (which were the balance of the weekend’s “harvest”).

Love, Mom

Dear Kid,

Once upon a time, there were no messengers. Then the worlds was invented and blam! there were messengers and general contractors. It just worked that way.

In the beginning, messengers had a fairly easy job: the most complicated message they delivered was “Ughhhggguhi” and since no one knew what that meant no one cared much whether the message got delivered verbatim (ver-grunt-im?) or not.

Not too long after that, people started using actual words to communicate. At that point, messages began to matter.

And the role of messenger became much riskier.

The first time the phrase “Don’t kill the messenger” was used was when Joe Neanderthal decided to stay out with the boys after the hunter and sent his son Thnng to tell Mrs. Joe Neanderthal not to wait up for him. Mrs. Joe did not react well to the message, leading her to stop, drop, roll far away, and mumble (but very quietly) “Not my fault—don’t kill the messenger.”

Shortly thereafter (if you’re a fan of condensed evolution), Plutarch wrote about not shooting the messenger, but since no one really understood him, everyone waited until Sophocles got around to writing “no one loves the messenger who brings bad news” in Antigone. [There will not be a quiz. You’re welcome.]

Shakespeare used a variation on the phrase in both Henry IV and Antony and Cleopatra.

On the more authentic military side, there was an unwritten code of conduct in which messengers (known in war as emissaries so they could get better uniforms) were received and sent back (unharmed) with messages generally designed to confuse everyone involved.

All of which means, just because someone gives you bad news does not mean you should yell, scream, shout, demote, punch, bellow, snub, mistreat, or withhold coffee from them.

Love, Mom

Dear Kid,

Yippee!! It’s Chocolate Day!

As if we needed an excuse, but IT’S CHOCOLATE DAY!

And we don’t really need to be creative, but it’s Chocolate Day so why not?

Chocolate milk and chocolate cereal with a chocolate éclair for breakfast.

Triple chocolate brownies for a mid-morning snack.

Chocolate fondue and chocolate chip cookies for lunch.

Chocolate covered strawberries, chocolate soda, and chocolate covered pretzels for snack.

Chocolate peanut butter pie, chocolate covered bacon, and a chocolate milkshake for dinner.

Chocolate mousse cake and hot chocolate for bedtime snack.

And s’mores if you wake up in the middle of the night, because why not?

See how easy this is?

And, YUM!

Happy Chocolate Day, my sweetie. (I have to go snarf some chocolate.)

Love, Mom

Dear Kid,

Dad is at it again.

Or perhaps I should say the squirrels are at it again.

Either way, someone is at it, and “it” involves birdseed and removing tree limbs.

Dad was convinced that the squirrels couldn’t reach the birdfeeder, or that the one clever squirrel had reached the end of his time here on planet earth and was stalking birdfeeders in squirrel heaven.

And so he (Dad) happily went about his business.

Until I refilled the birdfeeders and Dad happened to look outside.

(Insert stabbing music from Psycho.)

What followed next was something out of a scene from Caddy Shack. A scene that hit the cutting room floor, but a scene nonetheless.

Dad raced out of the house, shouting at the squirrel to mind his (the squirrel’s) own species, and inviting plagues of curses upon the house of said rodent. The threat of his lineage being cursed didn’t seem to upset the squirrel in the least. The threat of a crazy man descending upon him waving a cell phone made him reconsider hanging out on the birdfeeder.

Once the birdfeeder was squirrel-free (temporarily), Dad went about assessing the situation to make it squirrel-free (permanently).

Saws, loppers, dynamite, drones, schematics, ladders, a laser pointer, and eye of newt were all involved.

In short, one of the nearby trees had its bangs trimmed. And the squirrels seem unable (or unwilling) to leap from the branches to the birdfeeders.

But the hand shears are still on the porch so that Dad can race out and prune away if the need should arise.

Perhaps this should be an Olympic sport.

Love, Mom