"Saved" from a seed

So, Treecup has got herself a new passion. It's great for her.  She looks good, feels good, has normal blood sugar.  Sly describes himself as "raw adjacent" and I feel adjacent to the adjacent.  On Saturday they were kind enough to invite us to their club, which I heart.  After working out we went to a large chain restaurant, and Treecup had cooked vegan food to be social.  It's perfectly normal to go work out and then go eat chain restaurant food, right?

Once we reconvened at their house, I wandered into the kitchen to explore the raw zone she's created.  I was being my usual forward self and smelling tubs of stuff and being perhaps more disparaging than I ought.  Treecup offered up "cheese" on a "cracker."  Sly says that her food has entirely too many quotes.  The "cheese" was made of cashews and was a rough approximation of cheese.  Like, if we were in the cheese ballpark and cheddar was playing first base, this was in an obstructed view seat in the upper upper deck.  Take me out to the ball game, take me out with the crowd, buy me some (raw) peanuts and cracker flax...

Anyway, if the cheese was in the cheese bleachers, the "cracker" was maybe standing on the street waiting outside cracker stadium to catch a long ball hit by a saltine.  When Teresa asked how the seeds could be made to form a "cracker" Treecup informed us that, when soaked, flax seeds exude a semi gelatinous substance and then can be made into cracker shapes. Handy.  (See, there I go again being more disparaging than I ought.  Still, I have anti-flax seed feelings just at the moment).

We departed soon after our raw experience.  (I should note that I demurred for us when Treecup offered up a viewing of her new raw dvd).  She claims it very inspirational and I think we may need to watch it next time.

Anyway, I kept pulling flax seeds out from my teeth with my tongue.  One of them got lodged in my windpipe just as I was steering the FJ onto the 10.  (Non-SoCal note:  Socalies use the definate article when referring to freeways.  I've lived here long enough that I do it too.  "The 10" = "Interstate 10" which stretches from Santa Monica to Jacksonville, Florida.  It's 2460 miles long, which makes it longer by 270 miles or so than my high school distance.  I can code-switch well enough that when I go to Atlanta I switch back to "I-75").   So, there I was getting on the freeway and needing to merge onto "the 57" (aka California 57, which runs from Glendora to the Orange Crush for a distance of almost 24 miles) and I'm choking on this flax seed.  Coughing with watering eyes choking.  It persists all the way up the 57 until I merged onto "the 210" (aka California 210/I-210 which runs from San Fernando to Redlands for a distance of 86 miles, it swiches from I-210 to CA-210 at the 57).  Choking and coughing so hard, I'm hoping not to vomit choking.

Honey was very supportive during my coughing episode.  She offered my some tepid lemonade and offered to drive.  She also refrained from saying disparaging things about my Garmin nüvi, which was telling me to do things vis à vis the freeways.  Teresa vacillates between thinking the Nüvi is rude and thinking it might lose the will to live.  She doesn't like that it interrupts her (which it does) or that I defy it (which I thoroughly enjoy doing ).  I agree wholeheartedly with my co-worker who says that all Nüvis (she has one, too) are "judgemental" when they say "recalculating" after you've defied their direction.

As I merged onto the 210, I finally stopped coughing.  I noticed at that very moment a Dodge station wagon (of the modern magnum/charger variety) that had a brown body and bright orange expensive looking rims.  It also had sepia tinted pictures painted across its sides.  Of Jesus.  Both sides.  Sepia Jesus on a Chrysler product.

WHY I stopped coughing is up to debate.  Some possibilities:

Chance?

The 210?

The biological dislodging of the flax seed from my windpipe?

The shock of the sight of the car?

Divine intervention?

Very hard to say.  Maybe if I had watched the raw dvd I'd know better.

Cracker flax, know thine enemy.

Mallomars

Essentially lifted from Facebook...

I was doing one of those 25 things things.  I never do memes on the blog, why I did one on Facebook, well, I dunno.  I have NOT done any of the follow-up memes.  48 things, etc.

Anyway, here was things #23: I once got "stranded" on a rock in the former Yugoslavia (when it was still Yugoslavia). My friends and I made our way into town and I bought and ate some mallomars. They tasted better than any cookie ever had before or since.

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A friend asked for more info on what had happened.  Here's my response.  I should note that I have now corrected my spelling of the cookie in question.  It's Mallomar.  I'm going to maintain that it should have a w, but acknowledge that it doesn't.

My response:

In the late 1980s, I traveled with friends from Italy, up through Austria, and down into Yugoslavia. The train to Zagreb was fine, the train from Zagreb to Split was not.

Once we arrived in Split, we explored the city and decided to take a ferry one day to Hvar, an island off the coast. We were the only Americans, probably the only English speakers, and certainly the youngest people of the ferry. The ferry arrived at a rock. It opened itself up and we got off. Everyone else drove off in cars or was picked up. The ferry closed and started back to Split. There we were standing on the rock.

There was NOTHING there. Alone.

Off in what looked like an impossible distance to travel was a town. We climbed up the road and down into the town (it wasn't actually very far). It turned out to be a pleasant resort town, largely closed for the winter (it was March). We wandered around, found a small grocery store. I bought the best Mallomars ever. When we saw the ferry headed back toward us, we walked back to the rock.

In our exploration of the town, we found a path along the harbor that got us back to the rock without having the climb the road/hill. We arrived as the ferry did and boarded it back to Split.

That night we had goulash, and the following night we took the overnight ferry to Bari.

It was that moment on the rock. I wanted to jump in the Adriatic and swim down the ferry.

That and the Mallomars.