It’s way past my bedtime, but I just got back from Priest Lake (about 80 miles from here). I went to dinner at the Hill’s Resort. It was really good; just the huckleberry cheesecake is SO worth the drive.
The restaurant also had a dessert called Dirt & Worms, which I opted not to get. It’s basically a sundae with Oreo cookie crumbs (the dirt) and gummy worms on top. You have to know that kids just love this concept.
I, on the other hand, have a very strong visceral response to gummy anything. Gummy bears, gummy worms and so forth bring back so many revolting memories, I can hardly stand to even think about them.
The problem is that I worked part-time in a candy factory when I was in college. I worked at a very small distributing plant on a very short assembly line packing that sort of bad generic candy you often see hanging in grocery stores. The company bought candy in bulk and we, the candy wrappers, put it into bags and used a heat-sealing machine to attach the label and seal in the candy.
The trouble with this type of labor-intensive processing is that sometimes human error enters into the equation. The heat sealer and candy were never supposed to contact one another, but unfortunately sometimes they did. You’d misalign the label or the machine would jam, and some candy would end up in the wrong place. Then the most revolting smell would emit from the machine as whatever candy you were packing burnt onto the machine’s metal sealing plates.
So as you might imagine, my visceral response to gummy worms/bears/whatever is not just because they are sort of inherently disgusting, but also because I know what they smell like when they burn onto hot metal plates. Eww. Certain memories, you just can’t escape.
In more administrative (and less gross) news, because it’s so late, my favorite proofreader (James) is asleep, so I hope you’ll forgive any typos you find 😉