my father's daughter.

My sister Carla tells the story of going to some soda store (The Pop Shop? The Pop Stop?) with my dad when she was a little girl. She wanted to try something different, so she went for a Diet Pepsi. Daddy took it away, telling her it was gross and she didn't want it. So she got something else. Daddy paid for the drinks, including one for himself, and they went out to the truck to enjoy their cool frosty beverages. Daddy took a great big sip of his and then spit it out all over the place. He had forgotten to put back the Diet Pepsi he took from her and ended up getting it for himself.

This is classic Daddy. He's the kind of fella who sees the big words on a product and then ignores all the little qualifiers. Let me tell you, those qualifiers are important. The only time we ever had any sort of fat-free or diet or low sugar version of a regular product was if Daddy bought it and just didn't pay attention to what he was getting. If for some reason you hated things that taste good and wanted the low-fat crap, he could not be relied upon to bring that home either. Basically, it was whatever he saw first.

Daddy is a very intelligent man; he's just not one of those attention-to-detail kind of guys. And that's no big deal. We can all just suck it up and eat the low-fat yoghurt. Or, we can avoid eating it until it goes bad and then next time not let Daddy do the grocery shopping. To be fair, usually the thing he gets is something only he eats anyway, and in true Daddy style, he doesn't seem to notice the difference.

Then, last week, I bought a quart of fat-free half and half. Man, it sucked.

I realized my mistake as I was putting the offensive stuff away, but I wasn't about to drive ten minutes back into town to exchange it. As important as fat levels in dairy products are to me, making an extra trip for the sake of full-fat cream was silly.

So I used the stupid fat-free stuff. I drink a lot of coffee and hot tea, so I use a lot of half and half. And apparently, the fat is the good stuff. I had to use much more cream per cup of beverage to get it to taste/look right. Which turned out to be not such a bad thing, since it meant I got rid of the fat-free cream quicker. This morning, I used the last of it, and I'm now enjoying a nice cup of Earl Grey with all the fat. And it's good.

So now I'll pay more attention to the words on the containers I buy before I put myself on a diet without realizing it. Of course, now I live a mile from the grocery store, and I'll go back and exchange that sucker before I suffer through another week of defattened cream.