Fish Stick Friday

Ok, so I know it's Tuesday, but that's how we roll around here sometimes. Bear with me and I'll explain the title in a minute.

Have you ever gotten into the habit of eating the same thing for the same occasion? We've gotten into an American Idol food jag. And we've kind of enjoyed it.

Last year it was grilled cheese sandwiches. Not just any old grilled cheese, I'll have you know, we ate the best darn grilled cheese sandwiches ever. You take good bread, add cheese (I like mozzarella, but the rest of the family is more into cheddar), tomatoes and onions and a sprinkle of Italian seasoning. Then you place it carefully on a George Foreman grill, maybe shred a little more cheese on top to add a nice effect, and there you have it. If any cheese oozes out, you need to make sure it gets nice and crispy and black. Or, wrap it around the bread until it gets dark and crispy. Yum! (The George Foreman does really good spinach quesadillas too.)

This year we ended up eating fish sticks during one of the first days of American Idol. And they tasted pretty darn good. They are Van de Kamp's Crunchy Fish Sticks in the blue box. So the kids asked for them the next week. And the next week. And the next. (You get the idea.) They were on a really good sale, so I stocked up on them and bought just enough boxes to get us through the American Idol finale next week. I'd buy more but they are kind of expensive and I think they make me break out.

Now, I'm not really a big fan of fish sticks but these are really good fish sticks. The are even good enough to eat with nothing else on them. And they really are crunchy. We actually fight over who gets the last fish stick. They are NOTHING like the fish sticks from my childhood.

At my elementary school in Nebraska, Alcott Elementary, we had fish sticks every (can you guess which day?) Friday. (You got it right, didn't you?) Apparently we had a large number of Catholic students in the area and it was a religious thing to eat fish on Friday, I guess. I should ask the Catholic family that lives next door if that is the case.

Now these were nasty, soggy, rotten, fishy tasting fish sticks. The only thing that saved fish stick Friday for me as a kid was the chocolate milk they served us as kind of a consolation prize. I still always drink chocolate milk when I eat fish sticks.

It just wouldn't seem right without it.

On an even more disgusting note, the cat threw up on my car today.

I saw a little of it on the hood and upon further inspection I found out that she had originally thrown up on the windshield and then it slid down almost under the top of the hood. That was not a fun thing to clean up, but I figured it would be better to take care of it before it got baked on once the engine warmed up.

I had to hurry because I was on my way to get Austin from preschool and I always time everything down to the minute. I leave at just the right time so I'm there in time to get a parking spot but not too early so I don't have to sit and wait too long.

I need to quit being like that because it gets stressful when something happens that slows me down for a minute. Even something like a neighbor stopping to talk to me or a kid needing to use the bathroom at the last minute will throw me over the edge because it will make me only four minutes early instead of my usual five or six minutes. One of my few OCD tendencies that I'm trying to overcome.

Why is it that these days they call it OCD and in earlier generations they called it "being responsible"?