Greasy Strings and Casseroles

MORNING OF JUNE 5, 2010

I was with Richard and Jessica and their daughter Cailey. We were playing with some toys Cailey had supposedly received for her birthday. Someone handed me a boxed toy that looked to be some sort of miniature train set. I took all the individual pieces of tracks out and they proved very difficult to piece together in the proper intended fashion.

Suddenly, instead of the pieces of this set, I was holding pieces of waxy string. I don't know the proper name of this waxy string, but in real life it comes in packs with the kids' menu at the Mellow Mushroom pizza chain. The waxy strings are in different colors and can be bent and twisted to make different shapes. Cailey gets them whenever we all go to Mellow Mushroom together. Anyway, that's the sort of thing I was now holding in my hand.

I had one piece of it balled up into a fairly small knot. Suddenly it was very greasy to the touch and seemed to be coated in a slick, oily film. It was actually kind of gross. I was curious as to what had happened to make it this way, but I didn't want to pick it up again.

Finally, I remember going to a downstairs area where it look like people were serving a pot luck dinner of some kind. Two middle-aged ladies simultaneously asked me to try some of the casseroles they had each prepared and brought to the event. One of the casseroles seemed to be mostly vegetables and the other seemed to have a lot of sausage and pepperoni and pizza-friendly meats. Besides being a bit too greasy in the first place, the meaty casserole also had FRUIT in it! Naturally that was kind of gross, being mixed together like that.

The ladies demanded I tell them which casserole I liked best, so I politely told them that fruit and meat in the same recipe weren't my thing, so I liked the vegetable casserole best. This caused no little amount of dissension between the two of them.