Or Mega Ultra – whatever they are called. I worked all day today – well, most of it  – doing more of that dratted cleaning. The vitamins must have really kicked in because I did basement stairs, a good chunk of the basement, the vestibule, scraped melting ice here and there on driveway corners, stomped trash, sorted through a couple of toy boxes, vacuumed in the basement, started a fire in the basement and made food for others.

At the end of this – and it was after sundown – I decided it was not the work I do that makes me tired, but the work other people make but do not do that wears me out. So I first decided I was going to rub their noses in the “clean” but after awhile thought, “I don’t think that will have the same effect as rubbing someone’s nose is the proverbial ‘IT‘.” I am going to think about it some more.

And while I am thinking, I am going to wonder why I did all this on Celebrate Kookiness Day. Vitamins maybe would give me more energy, but it should be energy not earmarked for anything in particular. Perhaps since my general thought processes are in relation to – well, the sort of typical ones – kooky, I would have to do something unkooky for it to qualify as kooky for me. I believe there may be smoke and mirrors in my MacBook here.

And where there’s smoke, there’s firefox. Hahahahahahahahahaha. Oh, that was a lame little AmeliaJake funny.

I am waiting for my GNC Women’s Ultra Mega vitamin to kick in. That’s why I am sitting here. Because I have decided this morning to let the vitamin do the work, rather than my will. It is a green oblong vitamin, sort of large and, actually, you are supposed to take two a day – and I usually do, just not at the same time. I do think they are good for me and I think they have a positive effect. However, this morning I would like for the vitamin to step out of the background and get a little limelight time.

Boost me up, Big Greenie. Do you need a pep talk? Okay, how about I read you the list of your ingredients? That’s too long; I’ll just hold the back of the bottle up to the computer camera and let you have a “look-see”. I actually did that – and held it there while I stared at the purple and white of the front of the bottle. It was just a restful thing to do and I had to grin at myself.

Grinning is good – it tricks my brain into upbeat thoughts. Of course, now that I wrote that, I suppose my brain has wised-up. But now I am grinning ans silently chuckling and I think the forces of positive grinning may win out. Especially since I have a wide grin now and my cheeks are starting to hurt from the workout.

I believe kookiness gets a bad rap in general. However, it may be a good quirk that has to come naturally. I’m not at all sure pretended kookiness will work – there is probably an embarrassment factor that negates even a try in some people. BUT NOT ME.

I am so enthused now I am going to proclaim Kookiness Day. Say, celebratory methods should prove interesting – as long as they don’t get me in jail or the asylum. First thing, I’ve got to get my buddies here at the Peanut Butter Cafe & Roadhouse to start decorating and getting the music going.

It just occurred to me that maybe I got distracted and over-vitamined myself. Oh well, what’s done is done. Where’s my pointy party hat?

When  we went through our pantry, we reached way up high and way to the back and found a dusty bag of Paul Newman’s popcorn. So I made it the old-fashioned way, using a regular pan. Summer was fascinated; she wanted it to pop all over the floor. What was that supposedly smart girl thinking? I put oil in the bottom of a large Revere saucepan and threw in five kernels and we all waited for them to pop. Then, while Summer was responding with surprise that they actually had,, I tossed in a lot of popcorn and hoped that my memory would flick onto automatic.

The lid started to push up and so I let it overflow into a waiting pan, then again . . . and again. Nothing caught fire; nothing burned. Summer sampled it and said, “It needs butter.” I told her we had to melt it over low heat – that we used to have midget skillets we used for that purpose. I added that the making of popcorn used to be “an event” – part of the watching of a special TV show, From there, I  went on to tell her that one night a week, a network showed a full-length movie.

That little piece of information hit her forehead and bounced back at me; it was just too primitive to penetrate. Once she tried to process the fact that at one time there was no cable, no videos and no dvds. And, of course, no video games. It was not pretty, watching the thoughts about such a thing percolate behind her eyes. I think her brain almost ground to a halt as a robotic “impossible for life to exist in such a situation” refrain kept popping up.

I don’t remember if we had to hit her with a remote to jar her into a functioning mode or not. We are careful now. I try to ease into talking about such things as a group of us sitting around in the summer, sipping iced tea and reading our own copies of the same novel. I took it for granted that you read instructions or bathroom signs, but that reading was something done with books.

Oh, I started this with the intent of posting this picture of a popper we had when I was a kid. So here it is.