of dogs and ice cream

I don't think it's fair to say I have a sweet tooth. I do think it's fair to say that all my teeth are sweet tooths. God help me, I love sugar. If a diet of candy, cake and ice cream were enough to keep a person alive and breathing, I'd be interested in that. Maybe I would take occasional breaks, for a turkey sandwich or nachos, but ultimately, I would be happy to survive on sugar.

But if any young kids or my parents are out there reading this, then you should know that I absolutely DO NOT survive on just sugar. For one thing, I would like to keep my original teeth, and for another, diabetes is not appealing to me. But honestly, if I ever get some other awful painful disease and I'm given months to live, I'm just going to eat sugar. Maybe that way the sugar will kill me before the disease does. Please, again note, I am not advocating just eating sugar.

Even though I know sugar is bad, bad, bad, I still sometimes, occasionally make sugar-rific impulse buys when I've had a crappy day. I think that's how I came to buy a little ice cream called Birthday Bash, which won me over with this winning description: "cake flavored ice cream with confetti and blue icing." HOW COULD YOU PASS SOMETHING LIKE THAT BY? I certainly couldn't, especially because the confetti made it look pretty similar to my beloved Funfetti cakes. It's Kroger brand ice cream, and I don't know it's meant to be a generic rip-off of something else, and I'm not going to investigate that too much, because than I'd want to try the original as well.

So anyways, I bought this ice cream, but it's been sitting in my freezer for awhile, almost like a fine wine. I figured I'd break it out when things got really bad, or conversely, when I had a real reason to celebrate. And that point came this weekend.

As I mentioned in the last entry, I worked from home this past week. Working from home allows you to realize that sometimes it's a good thing that you're not around in the daytime, because there's lots of leaf-blowers going, and garbage trucks coming by, and dogs just barking their heads off. The dogs were the worst part for me. There was this one dog that would not shut up. It just barked and barked and barked. I'd never noticed it before, which I thought was due to being shut up in an air-conditioned pod for the past few months (I just turned the AC off and went back to natural air last week), but Katie reminded me that it was probably just that the owners were at work and the dog was lonely.

But then the weekend came, and that dog still wouldn't shut up. It barked so much that it stopped sounding like a dog and started sounding like a donkey. It was just braying away. I felt I was going insane. While I don't condone animal cruelty, I would like to take that dog and drop-kick it to kingdom come. At one low point, I was holding two pillows over my head and also my comforter, and I could still hear that fucking dog. Though maybe it was just the sound of the dog ringing in my ears.

That's when I had an epiphany. No, the epiphany was not talking to the apartment staff or talking to the dog's owner directly, or anything mature like that. The epiphany was that I would break out the box of Birthday Bash ice cream, and that I would probably feel much better because of it. So after a few bowls of Birthday Bash, I thought I'd share my review.

First of all, it does kind of taste like cake. Not a Funfetti cake, sadly, but nothing could touch the perfection of that. But it doesn't cross the line into ice-cream cake territory, which is good for me because I don't really love ice cream cake. Is that surprising? It kind of is to me too! You'd think ice cream cake would be right up my alley! But I just don't like it! It's weird! I prefer ice cream on the side of the cake, not in it!

Unfortunately, Birthday Bash can't quite replace cake on its own. For one, the icing is not evenly distributed throughout the ice cream box, which makes it a little too hit-and-miss for me. Each time I take a bite of Birthday Bash, I can't help noticing how good it would be WITH cake, ON THE SIDE of it. That would be a double cake bonanza, but again I'm stressing that I don't want an ice cream cake. I want two things that both taste like cake, but of different textures and kept separately.

While these very specific cake requests make perfect sense to me, I'm well aware that they may not make sense to anyone else. For that, I blame that barking dog, which, drove me to the crazy house. The dog has been quieter today, so maybe it's okay. But if that dog were still barking, this ice cream would be pointless. I would need real cake. Administered via IV.

On another dog-related note, when walking to the library this weekend I saw a sign that advertised that a dog was missing. The sign listed the dog's name but said the dog answered to "here girl!" Now, call me crazy, but don't about half of the dogs out there probably answer to "here girl!"??? I just don't think these people will find their dog.

On another Birthday Bash-related note, my eyes have been able to carefully avoid seeing the caloric and fat content of what I'm consuming. But I did briefly glimpse the fact that this box is supposed to contain 14 servings. Uh-oh. I think I'll be lucky if I break double digits. Particularly with the presidential debate about to start.