On the Trip

As the LA has already said, the drive up went pretty well. What she refrained from mentioning was that I had a migraine when we set out, thanks to the presence of phosphoric acid in a bottle of Gatorade. The inadvertent experiment thus performed was brutal in its conclusiveness: Silas gets migraines whenever he ingests phosphoric acid. This means no more cola for me, ever - a fact about which I find myself unable to feel sad. Root beer tastes better anyway, and if I go for Barq's it fills my addiction nicely. There are also gourmet root beers, which isn't the case for colas; about the fanciest they get is Pepsi Max (confusingly, this is not the same as the Pepsi Max in the UK; it's full-sugar, and includes ginseng and guarana, whereas in the UK Pepsi Max is the sugar-free stuff), so overall, the lack of colas is meh. Dr Pepper is included, though, but I'm not so keen on that either.

Anyway. I was pretty well packed in by bags (under my legs) and snacks, including a pack of golden Oreos. Some of my British readers may know the standard Oreo; for those that don't, it's a sandwich biscuit, with "chocolate" flavoured outers and white cream filling of surpassing blandness. It's disappointing, really; the main purpose of it is to come apart cleanly, leaving all the cream on one of the biscuits, allowing the creation of the "double stuff". This version, incidentally, is available readymade in the US, making the creation of quad-stuff and more multiples-of-two easier, although with sufficient patience these may be assembled from single instances (although past quad-stuff, it gets silly). Anyway. There are also variously coloured versions of the basic chocolate version, differing in the flavouring of the cream (such things as mint, peanut butter...), and also, we recently discovered, there is the golden Oreo, which is the basic biscuit without the chocolate. They're rather nice, lacking the carbonised edge of the chocolate ones, and I quite liked them. For some reason, they reminded me of giving blood, and somewhere around Coalinga I finally worked out why this was.

They're custard creams.

And now, as the cats socialise with the grandparents and the LA naps on the huge couch, I shall hope that things work out tomorrow such that she and I can go and catch Indiana Jones at some point. I may also nap a while, and dream of the very good pizza which was today's lunch; I would love a proper stone pizza oven.