Life as an impoverished newly wed couple is really fun. Granted, I've never been a wealthy newly wed, so maybe life would be just as fun if we were rolling in money as it is now. However it may be, Peter and I have exciting adventures together in this life of limitations.
One of the fun adventures we encounter on a monthly basis is a local food bank we visit to receive free food. Volunteers gather together behind the Kahuku hospital every 4th Monday of the month to hand out free food to people in the community. To partake, you need only to show up with an ID and some sort of carrier to cart your spoils home. This food bank has been such a bounteous blessing in our lives; each time we attend, we come home loaded with enough food to sustain us for at least the next couple of weeks, sometimes longer. The fun part is that this food is coming by donation and is distributed to you via a conveyer belt of volunteers as you walk along with your boxes. It actually kind of feels like you're trick-or-treating in one long unbroken stream of houses that are really close together. Because you are not selecting your food, there is never any telling what you will receive.
It is this element of mystery which has made our experience with the food bank so very fun. On one occasion we received a "Humanitarian Daily Ration (Menu #4)" tightly sealed in inch thick plastic and stamped with the American flag, claiming to contain "one day's complete food requirement for one person." Where else in the world would we find such a gem?! It's still sealed and sits atop our refrigerator, but one of these days we are going to open it! Maybe we'll make a fort in our living room, turn off all the lights and eat it, flash lights in hands, while watching a Zombie movie. Maybe we will take it with us to church one day and use it as our snack, or take it to work for lunch. Whatever we do, and whenever we do eat it, it is going to be super exciting, and we will feel like Astronauts.
This last trip to the food bank provided us with four quarts of 100% Grapefruit Juice. It was a pretty yellow colour, which is always exciting because yellow is the fairest of all the colours, but as any of you who have tried to drink 100% grapefruit juice will know, it's a pretty little drink that likes to punish you sorely for attempting to quench it.
Not ones to succumb to the will of a juice, much less one we received for free, Peter and I opened a bottle once we got home, and poured ourselves glasses. As we drank, I was forcibly reminded of my high school days spent at bars with my friends, watching them do shots of pure tequila or vodka. I could never quite understand where the pleasure was, as all of them needed quite a bit of time spent psyching up to their task, then afterwards would pull faces that looked like they had just been sucker punched whilst trying to take a particularly vile and potent form of liquid medicine. Years later here I sat with my husband, both of us egging each other on to prove our genders' potency by taking shots of this juice.
In an attempt to make the drinking easier, I suggested we go to Foodland to purchase four more quarts of another juice and then mix the cumulative eight quarts together to dilute (and thwart) the grapefruit's power. Peter hypothesised that apple would be too light of a juice to do anything, so we instead chose a mighty opponent in the form of Pomegranate Berry Acai, and Pomegranate Cranberry.
As it turns out, when you mix together four quarts of 100% Grapefruit Juice with four quarts of Pomegranate Berry Acai and Cranberry, what you get is eight quarts of really potent juice that tastes mildly like stomach acid, but somehow grows on you the more you take tumbler sized shots of it. We've taken to calling it "The Alcohol Juice," and are actually finishing it up faster than I expected. We play our card games, and make the loser drink a glass of it, although usually we're so tired from our rapid fire attempt to annihilate the other, that the winner drinks as well. I find that I enjoy the juice a lot, so long as I continue to gulp at it from the bottle or glass, as soon as I stop is when the bitterness takes a vindictive dump on my tongue and laughs in my face.
Well, let it be said: I will probably never be an alcoholic.
Next food bank adventure... working out what to do with the six pounds of dried cranberries we have inherited.
One of the fun adventures we encounter on a monthly basis is a local food bank we visit to receive free food. Volunteers gather together behind the Kahuku hospital every 4th Monday of the month to hand out free food to people in the community. To partake, you need only to show up with an ID and some sort of carrier to cart your spoils home. This food bank has been such a bounteous blessing in our lives; each time we attend, we come home loaded with enough food to sustain us for at least the next couple of weeks, sometimes longer. The fun part is that this food is coming by donation and is distributed to you via a conveyer belt of volunteers as you walk along with your boxes. It actually kind of feels like you're trick-or-treating in one long unbroken stream of houses that are really close together. Because you are not selecting your food, there is never any telling what you will receive.
It is this element of mystery which has made our experience with the food bank so very fun. On one occasion we received a "Humanitarian Daily Ration (Menu #4)" tightly sealed in inch thick plastic and stamped with the American flag, claiming to contain "one day's complete food requirement for one person." Where else in the world would we find such a gem?! It's still sealed and sits atop our refrigerator, but one of these days we are going to open it! Maybe we'll make a fort in our living room, turn off all the lights and eat it, flash lights in hands, while watching a Zombie movie. Maybe we will take it with us to church one day and use it as our snack, or take it to work for lunch. Whatever we do, and whenever we do eat it, it is going to be super exciting, and we will feel like Astronauts.
This last trip to the food bank provided us with four quarts of 100% Grapefruit Juice. It was a pretty yellow colour, which is always exciting because yellow is the fairest of all the colours, but as any of you who have tried to drink 100% grapefruit juice will know, it's a pretty little drink that likes to punish you sorely for attempting to quench it.
Not ones to succumb to the will of a juice, much less one we received for free, Peter and I opened a bottle once we got home, and poured ourselves glasses. As we drank, I was forcibly reminded of my high school days spent at bars with my friends, watching them do shots of pure tequila or vodka. I could never quite understand where the pleasure was, as all of them needed quite a bit of time spent psyching up to their task, then afterwards would pull faces that looked like they had just been sucker punched whilst trying to take a particularly vile and potent form of liquid medicine. Years later here I sat with my husband, both of us egging each other on to prove our genders' potency by taking shots of this juice.
In an attempt to make the drinking easier, I suggested we go to Foodland to purchase four more quarts of another juice and then mix the cumulative eight quarts together to dilute (and thwart) the grapefruit's power. Peter hypothesised that apple would be too light of a juice to do anything, so we instead chose a mighty opponent in the form of Pomegranate Berry Acai, and Pomegranate Cranberry.
As it turns out, when you mix together four quarts of 100% Grapefruit Juice with four quarts of Pomegranate Berry Acai and Cranberry, what you get is eight quarts of really potent juice that tastes mildly like stomach acid, but somehow grows on you the more you take tumbler sized shots of it. We've taken to calling it "The Alcohol Juice," and are actually finishing it up faster than I expected. We play our card games, and make the loser drink a glass of it, although usually we're so tired from our rapid fire attempt to annihilate the other, that the winner drinks as well. I find that I enjoy the juice a lot, so long as I continue to gulp at it from the bottle or glass, as soon as I stop is when the bitterness takes a vindictive dump on my tongue and laughs in my face.
Well, let it be said: I will probably never be an alcoholic.
Next food bank adventure... working out what to do with the six pounds of dried cranberries we have inherited.
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