Thursday, February 12, 2009

Conversation Hearts

My mother is a first-grade teacher. So sometime in the month of February, she goes on and buys a big ol' bag or two of Necco conversation hearts to split amongst her first graders. After scooping handfuls into twenty separate little snack-size Ziploc bags, (a tedious job, but still--yum.) there were plenty of hearts left over. I started to sift through them...
...to find that the cute little sayings had been updated! There were phrases like "love bird" and "melt my heart" and "stir my heart" and "sugar pie" and "angel" and "spice it up" and "yum yum" and "top dog" and "top chef" and "honey bun." When did that happen? And how does Top Chef have anything to do with Valentine's Day? I ate a "honey bun" one, and I swear it tasted ten times better than any others I ate. Could've been the fact that it was purple, though. That's the best color/flavor of them all.
(Just another thought before I go on: don't you hate those hearts where the ink has messed up, or it stamped off-center so you can just see the corners of a few letters? So you tip it every which way and squint and try to figure out what the stupid heart says, before throwing it down in frustration and agony, pawing through the bag to find a more legibly printed heart? Don't you hate those? I got one of those, kind of. Well, it was a reject, all right. Because it was blank. I stared at it for a moment before letting it slip between my fingers and land with a clatter on the table. My jaw fell open and my eyes glazed over. This was unacceptable. This was unethical. I will march down to the Necco factory and sue them. Never, ever, ever should a production line be so careless that they leave a conversation heart blank. It defeats the whole purpose! If I hadn't been born with a heart of steel, I think I might've cried. Clean up your act, Necco. Never make that terrible mistake ever again.)
Maybe I'll change my poll to "What's your favorite flavor conversation heart?" now. Or, "What's your favorite message on a conversation heart?" Or, "What gift would you want to recieve on Valentine's Day?" I went to the drugstore to buy my cheap Valentine's Day candy. I did not buy little Reese's cups, as I had planned, because they didn't have them in a pretty Valentine-sy pink package. Just the boringly normal bag, and no way was I buying THAT. I could not find Crunch hearts, either, but even if I had found them I don't know if I would have bought them, since that's what I used last year. Instead I bought these chocolate hearts that have foil wrappers printed with messages similar to the ones on conversation hearts. They're so cute.
I made my Valentines on the computer this year. They're pretty typical, an elephant holding a big red heart and "Happy Valentine's Day!" sprawling across the top. I printed out a few last week, and I tried to print some more this morning. Of course, now my printer won't work. "Opening printer connection..." it drawls as the printer moans and spurts out little start-up grunts. Poor thing. It's probably exhausted from all the printing my dad was doing yesterday.
I finished my whole little Dolley Madison thing. I'm glad to have it out of the way. I'm not sure if it's long enough, though, only a page and a half. Maybe I'll have to add some more stuff and reprint it, if the printer ever decides to get off its lazy butt and start working again.
Anyway, see ya.

(Song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdB7GDZY3Pk)

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