Sampling Crackers = Today’s Life Lesson
Every Tuesday my Boomer Connections partners and I meet to discuss the fun and meaningful things we will ferret out of our daily lives to write about for the blog. Meetings can be ho-hum, even when you love what you do. Here’s how we mixed it up last week, and why it was a life lesson about how you can find the fun and the interesting even in small, everyday experiences.
Never, ever accept boring. Life is short, Boomers, and getting shorter. That’s the fact. So figure out how to ramp it up. Last Tuesday we accomplished this with crackers!
We meet at 1PM because this fits everyone’s schedule…and we usually rally at Camille’s house. Often, but not always, we each bring an offering of food and have a potluck lunch. This Tuesday was sort of haphazardly planned, and Camille, known for her amusingly terse and direct missives, texted us that we were “on our own” for lunch.
Knowing there would be little to snack on, I decided to make a detour on the way to her house. I stopped at the Asian grocery in town, called Tan A. Going into a store that sells all sorts of things you don’t know and can’t even recognize is so FUN! In fact, when my husband and I travel, we consider visiting the grocery store in a foreign country as one of the best parts of the grand tour.
Sometimes we are pleasantly surprised and find amazing new things to eat. Other times….not so much. Like in Italy when I got tripe when I thought I was getting squid, Bleh! But it is always a great adventure.
At Tan A, I decided to buy up a number of different types of crackers so that during our working session, we could sample them with our tea and coffee. And it was fun, and it did make an ordinary business meeting a bit extraordinary.
In the photos you can see our three favorites, each unique, and two of which were different than anything we had ever tasted. The first was pretty familiar; it was a butter cookie much like Scottish shortbread but not quite as rich (rectangular package). Definitely good with tea and coffee. The second (red and white package) was especially intriguing, a saltine type cracker but with sugar rather than salt on top! These would be fabulous with wine, fruit and manchego cheese on a happy hour plate. The last, in the brown package, was like a chocolate sponge cake. It had a light chocolate flavor and texture, kind of like a madeleine. Later I ate some before bedtime with milk, what my Mom used to call a Midnight Snack, and I am pretty sure I had a better night’s sleep!
Because Camille did not have snacks available, she felt a little guilty, so she brought out her collection of jams. We found these did quite nicely on the sugar saltines!!
We expanded our horizons a bit on Cracker Day. I think I spent maybe $7 on these three packages of crackers. So for very little in resources, we had a fun, sharing, communal experience…via cracker tasting, who knew?!
Here’s the lesson: It’s really pretty easy to make the ordinary special. Stick with us friends, Boomer Connections will show you how!
Give us some ideas. Tell us about how you make your life special for very little $.
By Cherie R. Blazer
Cherie is a late bloomer Boomer, born at the tail end of the Boomer generation. She was playing with Barbies while her older sisters marched on Washington and fought for equal rights, but watched and learned. Now she is an empty nester with a whole new future to explore and share at www.BoomerConnections.com! As “Philosopher in Chief” Cherie merely wants to change the world with this blog: to encourage those of us in the midst of our “second act” to look at life with new eyes, open to a life filled with new beginnings rather than endings, and to apply all we have learned to a way of living that is more meaningful and profound. There is SO much to live for, up until the very end.