"More special last cocoa please"

While my mother was staying here after her brain surgery, she would often sit quietly at the table and drink coffee. This was very boring for the kids to watch, so they of course decided that it must be amazingly fun to do, since nothing could ever actually be that boring.  So Tommy would ask to drink "copy" with Doan (it's what we call her. long story) and I would make him some hot cocoa and he would sit there quietly with her and hold his head up with his hand like she did, and pretend that he had a big owie under his hair too, and then he'd get bored and go play. But they bonded so it was okay.
Now that she is gone, and the sweet "bonding with Grandma" thing is done for the moment, he still wants to drink hot cocoa all the time. (How did I not see that coming?) So at least a couple times a day I give in to his incessant begging and give him a cup of Swiss Miss.  Today Tom left to play golf and 3 hours later I caved and went to make the damn cocoa and guess what! Tom had made the last of the cocoa, not told me, and now I was the one who said yes but wasn't going to be able to follow through. I think Tom set me up.
I briefly contemplated making actual cocoa on the stove, but then I remembered that I had bought a pouch of overpriced peppermint flavored cocoa mix 5 years ago and it was smashed into a ball in the back of a cupboard.  SO I told Tommy I could make him only one cup of cocoa, that this was special cocoa, the only one of its kind in the entire world, and he would have to savor it and drink it slowly because after that there was no more cocoa in the house anywhere at all. Got it? He agreed.
Ninety seconds later he handed me an empty and oddly clean cup and asked for more special cocoa. 

It's like having far too much coffee, but without the coffee

I wish there were some sort of definitive test for fucked up minds.  I'd happily go into an MRI machine or give blood or even spinal fluid. But all they can do is ask me questions and tell me that if I get 5 out of 6 answers right, I have this disorder.  Except that the 5 I got right are also on the list for this other thing, and t4 of them match this problem over here.  So do I have bipolar disorder, or anxiety, or just some sort of panic problem?  I don't know. All I know is that right now I have restless everything syndrome, I'm wringing my hands (yes, while typing! Because I'm that awesome!), and my mind is racing a mile a minute about everything and noting. So, hypomania or what?  Because I'm on my second beer in an hour and it's not fixing it and I don't wanna become a xanax junkie.;  I think maybe I need time and space to jog.

Tort reform, my ass

What do you think is in seasoned beef? When faced with that food, seasoned beef, what do you imagine it contains? Beef, seasonings, maybe a tad of the ubiquitous preservatives? One person found out, and is suing Taco Bell for false advertising because their seasoned beef is only 35% beef. I am opposed to frivolous lawsuits, but this I agree with.

I believe in truth in advertising laws. I want my juice to say 100% real juice, or artificially flavored, and I want to know what it means when it says one of those. And when I order a beef burrito, I want the brown lumpy fatty stuff to come from a cow, not a chemical plant. And if this lady wins her lawsuit, restaurants might be more truthful in their descriptions and that's a-okay with me. If not, at least other places will know that there are folks out there willing to pay a lab to test fast food.

And, although I've already mentioned it here before, I want to reiterate that the McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit lady had to have her vagina skin grafted because McDonald's company policy was to only serve coffee hot enough to give 3rd degree burns if sipped. Plumbers cannot legally set your water heater temp as high as the coffee that McDonald's handed to people every day. [source]

I find it odd that the Republican rallying cries are simultaneously tort reform and free market. To me, lawsuits are the epitome of free market. The bad guys are bad, they get sued, and a jury of their peers determine the damage. Be bad for as long as you think you can get away with it and then pay up when it catches you. The free market determines the penalty for bad behavior rather than the government. Isn't that exactly what free market is supposed to be about? Republicans should shun tort reform for what it is: government trying to regulate and stifle the peoples' wills in the free market.