Irony in the Apiary

I'm now done with my Christmas shopping. My sister wants to go to El Salvador on a mission trip this Spring, so I thought I would get something from Ten Thousand Villages from there to prime her for the souvenir markets. Central America is terribly underrepresented at that store. South Asia however, over represented. Africa, just right. And to close this thought, there is a lot of really pointless merchandise at the store; it makes me think if there were a corresponding store in some other place in the world they would sell US dollar store items (nevermind, we have that store here, it is called Pier 1).

Of course a trip to the Haymarket requires a visit to everyone's favourite ice cream boutique, Ivanna Cone. They had Ambrosia Nectar on the flavour list again. This time the worker knew what it was made out of: raspberry, peach, and coconut. She said that it tasted better than she expected, but that it wasn't her favorite. I then said something about how her expectations weren't appropriate for something so named. I then said something about how the name might be redundant because ambrosia is the nectar of the gods (I'm really bad at flirting). I purchased a dish of pumpkin pie, egg nog, and peanut butter.

Then as I am wont to do when enjoying ice cream at Ivanna Cone, I looked at their dictionary circa 1954. The first thing I looked up was the actual definition of ambrosia. The third or fourth definition was "beebread." Naturally, I wanted to make sure what beebread was, because because because because, because of the wonderful things it does. That and you can never be too sure, beestings is the first milk, the colostrum if you will, so who knows what beebread is? While looking for beebread, I happened on Basic English. This was invented by Charles K. Ogden and has boiled down English to 850 words found here. I found this an interesting proposition, and even more interesting act. Finally, I got to nectar. Turns out, bees are connected to both ambrosia and nectar. I find it ironic that a creature which lives at most a year is constantly eating provender, victuals, comestibles, grub, pabulum, you know, food that yields immortality. Silly bees.

My evening ended with a stop at Walgreens to get some eggs. As soon as I got in, Dan, the guy who wants to be Napoleon Dynamite but ended up as Napoleon's dorky cousin, told me that they were actually closed. So I asked him if they had eggs, and he directed me to them. As I paid for my eggs, I noticed that his tie knot was easily 1/6th the width of his tie. Not a good look.

Willa Sibert Cather