Sticky Fingers No More

So I guess something good has come of individually wrapped prunes.

Learning of their existence yesterday is what spurred me to revive this blog, something I've been talking about since returning from New Orleans in November but hadn't managed to get around to doing, what with planning and recovering from fabulous cocktail party I threw in December and preparing for and recovering from the holidays and basset-sitting my brother's hounds and flooding my kitchen and almost setting it on fire simultaneously one morning and spraining my ankle on a fall down my sister's cellar stairs and helplessly witnessing my bank account balance reel under the blow of one unexpected expense after another and meeting with lots of people to learn about exciting professional opportunities that await a talented and captivating young woman such as myself and drinking way too much coffee (decaf, though).

In one of the more enjoyable of those meetings the topic of consumer fruit products had come up, so my interest in the individually wrapped prune news, which came in the form of a daytime TV commercial, is not without context. (It's important to go on record that my viewing of daytime TV was incidental to my being stationed on an elliptical trainer at Meadow Mill directly in front of one, and I had finished flipping through the October issue of Vogue and didn't feel like starting the New Yorker article on Mike McConnell.) What initially struck me, however, was the sheer absurdity not merely of individually wrapped prunes--which btw have been rebranded as pitted plums, surely to broaden the target demographic to include those ageists who would never go near a prune--but of the value proposition touted in the commercial: take them anywhere and...no sticky fingers! I'm sleeping better at night knowing the individually wrapped option is now available to me.

In other news this morning, the Fed cut the key rate by 3/4 of a point, the stock market is down 400 points in the first 10 minutes of trading, there's a winter weather advisory here in Baltimore for less than 1/10th of an inch of wintery mix, and my mom's in town for still another appointment at Hopkins. The days are getting noticeably longer but it's been cold for the last several days, cold like it hasn't been for a long time, cold like it should be in winter.