WHIFFIES

Even though there are at least 8 partial boxes of different kinds of cereal on our shelf at any given time, requests are still made for one we don't have. Talon reminded me that the Fruity Pebbles were all gone, which I actually thought was a good thing, but what do I know?

It's interesting how you can walk up and down the cereal aisle three times and not spot the one particular brand you are looking for, or you can spend as much time trying to decide what kind of cereal to get this time. You'd think a family could decide on one...say Cheerios for instance. That's my choice almost every morning. I'm talking the regular kind, not the Honey Nut ones, which strangely enough, I find too sugary. There are also Multi-Grain, Apple Cinnamon, Banana Nut, Chocolate, Cinnamon Burst, Frosted, Fruity, Oat Cluster Crunch and Yogurt Burst Cheerios, though I won't run out and try these, either. I'm a stick in the mud when it comes to Cheerios. Kyle likes Honey Nut Cheerios, and one time I was trying to make room for more cereal so I dumped one partial box into another partial box, not noticing they weren't exactly the same. Big mistake...which I discovered the next morning as soon as the first spoonful hit my mouth. Ick.

When I was a kid, I used to like puffed rice cereal (not to be confused with the kind you use to make Rice Crispy Treats), the almost-without-flavor kind that look like grains of white rice right before they might explode. How they do that is a mystery. Anyway, my dad used to call them "Whiffies". He said that was because there was no food value in them whatsoever and any energy you might get from them was gone in a whiff; hence the name. I was probably 30 before I learned they were called puffed rice.

Today I perused the entire cereal aisle, box by box and sack by sack. No Whiffies. What is this world coming to???