Iced Tea Forever

My Dad loves ice cream. He likes to have it every day. He always wants it for dessert after supper. I remember countless times from my child(and adult)hood Mom asking after supper, “We don’t need any dessert, do we?”

Dad would say, “Oh, how about a little ice cream!”

Or Mom would be serving cake or pie or something and say, “Should we have milk or ice cream?”

Dad would always reply, “Oh, we’d better have some ice cream!”

No matter what, he was always in the mood for ice cream. Years ago he used to make it a lot. In fact, way back in the Nebrasky days he was well-known among his neighbors for regularly making homemade ice cream.

AHQ was on tour one time in Nebrasky, singing at a church in the area Dad was from. This elderly lady cornered me afterwards and said, “Does your Dad still make ice cream?! We used to be next door neighbors and he would make ice cream every Saturday night!”

I hope I wasn’t a disappointment to my Dad, I never was that enthused over ice cream. I liked it ok and would eat it occasionally, but more often than not I would pass it up. It was just too cold and milky.

But lately I started to notice that I’m eating it more often. For some reason I’m usually helping myself when it makes the rounds, my interest is growing. This all led up to a momentous happenstance.

My wife and I were on the way to the in-laws one evening for pie and ice cream. And we were supposed to bring some ice cream. Of course we didn’t have any, so we stopped at the Most Expensive Grocery Store Known to Man (the gas station) to get some. My wife made me get out and get it, so I thought, I’m going to get whatever kind I want. If she doesn’t like what I pick that’s just tough, she could’ve came in too!

I scanned the freezer and picked 2 cartons. The one I’ve long since forgotten, but the other has changed my life. Destiny reached out and tapped me on the shoulder when I saw that box of Raspberry Cow Tracks ice cream.

My wife looked at my choices in the car and burst out laughing. “It’s supposed to be for pie!” she said. I didn’t care, I got what I thought looked good.

The whole family tried my ice cream. Everybody hated it. I was thrilled! I got it all to myself!

This is the most amazing ice cream in the world. It’s a Kemp’s Special Edition flavor, and in their words it consists of:

Raspberry filled chocolate cows, swirls of thick chocolate fudge in raspberry ice cream.

Yes! Very accurate! And as good as that sounds, it’s even far better! Wonderful raspberry ice cream liberally swirled with fudge! Generously populated with little chocolate cows which are surprisingly filled with raspberry filling! Amazing!

If you come over I’ll let you try some. If I still have any on hand! I think I’m going to create my own little twist on the family ice cream legacy.

I’ve been real predisposed this week. I’m back now. But anyway, my wife and I stopped at Goodwill this afternoon. She likes to stop there and so do I, so we did. I like to look at music. And by music I mean records. It’s a great place to find old gospel quartet albums.

The Goodwills out here are much more fruitful ground for such endeavors than the ones back in Utopia. There’s always gospel records of some sort out here, I guess maybe the heathen/righteous ratio is more unfavorable in Utopia. Anyway, here’s the loot from today!

Click the image for a larger version.

The top three are all London Parris and the Apostles. London Parris was a phenomenal bass singer, I usually try to snap up anything he did. Here’s an track off of the “His Eye is on the Sparrow” recording, Farther Along. (2:47, 2.5MB)

The next two are a group I hadn’t heard of, Couriers Unlimited. I know of the Couriers, I don’t know if this is just a later iteration or not. Anyway, can you tell the reason I picked them up?! See if you recognize the guy on the left.

Michael English. Not that I’m a big Michael fan by any stretch of the imagination, but I never knew he was with them and it fascinated me. In researching it, I’ve found he was only a member for about six months (this was in ’83 or ’84). He went from the Singing Americans to the Happy Goodmans to the Couriers Unlimited, and from there he went back to the SA for a brief stint before he ended up with the Gaither Vocal Band in ’84. Where of course he shot to stardom.

Anyway, pretty interesting. The album is fairly unremarkable, they sound like an early ’80s SG group going CCM. They do Brent Lamb’s “Army of the Lord,” I thought that was notable.

Then of course there’s an orange Rebel’s album. And did you notice the cassette at the bottom?! The Oak Ridge Boys! “I Guess it Never Hurts to Hurt Sometimes,” there’s some fodder for my pathetic car’s tape player. All right! Looks like a ’92 reissue of an ’83 recording.

Anyway, that’s my haul for today.

I was walking to my car in the parking lot after church this morning, and saw six minivans in a row. Of the 9 cars in that row, 7 were minivans. I started surveying the rest of the parking lot. Good gravy! Am I the only one not showing up in a minivan !!

I started counting. And counting. And counting. There were 20 minivans in the parking lot! Church attendance last Sunday was 144, there weren’t near that many today I wouldn’t think. So I doubt there were over 20 other cars in the parking lot!

What does this say about us? Nothing profound, I’m sure. Just that there are a lot of kids at church I guess.

But I am glad it’s not me driving the shoebox on wheels, I don’t care for them very much.

This has been about the worst day ever. I had lots of things to do and progress to make today. Fat chance of that.

Instead, my email client (which I’m too embarrassed to name) choked first thing this morning. I quickly backed it up, but realized that was probably a gesture in futility. I had made a backup on 2-22, though, so at least all was not quite lost.

Sure enough, the new backup was worthless. I’ve spent this entire day trying to retrieve the lost information, but I’m about done for now. Ridiculous.

Fortunately, in the last few days I’ve made quite an effort at digging myself out of the mess that my inbox was. I sent out a bunch of long-overdue replies and whatnot, so I think I’m fairly well covered. However, if you sent me an email after Feb. 22 and I haven’t replied, you might want to check back with me! Chances are that a reply could be quite some time in coming.

I’ve got to get a new email client. It would be a ton of work that I don’t want to do, though. Plus, I can’t find another client that I like. Thunderbird is the obvious choice, and I use it for some things, but it just doesn’t feel right. I need to do some research on themes, I guess, and see if I can get it to make me feel happier.

I recently told you about Mom sending us flowers. Here’s a day-by-day progress report.

Day 2

Day 3

Day 4

At the Den of Iniquity:

“MOOCHO FREEO!!! MOOEY FREEO!!!”

On the way to an appointment:

“We’re not late, we’re not early.”

In the grocery store:

“We need a gallon of Hominy.”

Dumping something that had been in the fridge for a long time:

“This is very disturbing. It looks like motor oil.”

Dumping something else that had been in the fridge for a long time:

“That SOUNDED like motor oil!”

So with the big move to WordPress, you’ll notice that I actually now have a respectable list of links to other highly recommended blogs. It’s about time. To the many distinguished bloggers mentioned in the sidebar, I apologize for taking so long.

And I have a request. Could you update your link to ITF? I don’t know how long I’ll keep the old site up, but it will eventually be taken down. Link to http://www.icedteaforever.com.

Or if you’d like, copy and use this html code:

<a href="http://www.icedteaforever.com" title="This is My Favorite Blog of All Time!">Iced Tea Forever</a>

Speaking of the sidebar, I need to get around to hacking up this theme so the main sidebar shows up on all the pages. There are a few others things I need to tweak and hack, but I forget what they are right now.