Pumpkin Season

 

Belated October post

 

Fall is here so it’s officially pumpkin season. Everywhere you turn there’s something in pumpkin flavor or scent. The New Yorker even ran a cartoon at the end of September that featured gasoline pumps with Regular, Super, Diesel and Pumpkin. I was already planning on having October’s column be on unexpected products that are pumpkin flavored or scented, so it made sense to start it off with gasoline. You can blame The New Yorker for this.

 

A household item that’s available in some unusual varieties that could add pumpkin is mattresses. They already come in charcoal-infused bamboo and there’s an Avocado brand. I’m not sure if that’s scented or just green. Ditto for the Purple brand that features eggplant mattress covers.  I don’t know what color or fragrance the Nectar, Mango and Apricot brands are (and yes, they all exist.) One thing is certain: a Pumpkin brand mattress would be orange.

 

In a household with two senior indoor cats, I’d welcome cat litter in pumpkin scent. I’m not sure my girls would agree, but I’d be willing to give it a try. Even with pee soaked in, I expect it would smell better than the name brands we’ve used. A lot of the time, my cats’ aim shoots over the edge of the litter pan and much of their pee lands on the newspaper spread outside the pan. I’m not sure if newsprint comes in a pumpkin-scented option, but I’ve been known to write letters to editors for causes I believe in. This could be one of them.

 

We generally use lemon-scented cleaning products in the litter room and the kitchen. It would be a welcome change to have pumpkin dish liquid, scouring pads and cleanser. I haven’t seen any of those in the grocery stores, but it wouldn’t surprise me to see pumpkin Fabuloso dish liquid at some point this month. Fabuloso comes in about eight fragrances already. How difficult would it be to add pumpkin?

 

Before any of my readers panic, I’m not recommending pumpkin scented or flavored personal care products. No pumpkin deodorant; no pumpkin toothpaste; no pumpkin shampoo. I’d probably regret this, but I’d welcome the addition of pumpkin flavor to the Zero Water electrolyte juice that we drink every morning. Right now there are three flavors that we like. Having a fourth could provide a welcome change of pace.

 

I’d take a chance on pumpkin flavored vitamins, starting with a multi whose RDAs of each vitamin in it would be competitive with the market leading multi vitamins. Plus I’d suggest adding separate vitamin A and betacarotene pills. I’d wait to see how much interest there is in those first letters before I’d invest in separate supplements of the rest of the alphabet.

 

A brand that has ads all over TV these days gave me another idea. Let’s see some pumpkin scented Skechers Slip-ins! If it’s too much trouble to do the entire shoe in pumpkin, then just give us pumpkin-scented Dr. Scholl's shoe inserts. Howie Mandel could be the spokesperson to announce the launch.

 

One of my final suggestions for pumpkin based products could be a risky one and that’s   vaccination shots. This certainly seems like a logical pairing. After all, flu shots are the most common vaccination and they’re usually given during pumpkin season. Also, pumpkin fragrance could make COVID shots more appealing, helping to prevent a seasonal pandemic. I wouldn’t recommend these for babies and toddlers, but they would be worth the R&D expense if they significantly increased the percentage of adults who get vaccinated during flu season.

 

Lastly—this is really an after thought—is a plea directed at a specific company. Those of you who are fans of Marshmallow Peeps should appreciate this. I’d like to see pumpkin flavored Peeps at this time of year. You’ll find lots of options for pumpkins on the packaging, but the Peeps inside are all classic vanilla marshmallow. Join me in lobbying Just Born Quality Confections, the manufacturer, in “birthing” them in pumpkin!

 

Copyright 2024 Business Theatre Unlimited

 

Hairballs and Dingleberries

September Post (belated) 

A Canadian friend on Facebook blogs about her rescue cat. Recently a neighbor in her condominium complained about the cat’s hairballs and dingleberries. I’m not sure how the neighbor would even know about these, as the cat stays inside or on the balcony. The neighbor must be a nosy balcony peeper with a dangling microphone. Anyone who has ever had cat knows that a hairball gives plenty of notice as the cat hacks one up. But on a balcony, I would think the sound would be muffled by the wind.

 

I’ve often wondered why some people call them hairballs and others call them fur balls. This is what my brief research determined. Technically the term fur is used with mammals with thick body hair (and therefore cats) while it’s still attached.

 

Hairballs describe the fur that cats swallow and then hack up. If the fur is sparse, as with humans, we generally call it hair even while it’s still attached. If you’d like more detail on this distinction, visit: https://www.thesprucepets.com/cat-fur-vs-hair-554813. We call it hair once it’s fallen out onto our clothes or our furniture and we’re trying to brush it off.

 

Dingleberries were new to me. It turns out they collect around the exit hatch at the cat’s rear, especially on those with long hair. They require constant, fastidious grooming to prevent blockage. The balcony peeper might have observed that, especially if she uses binoculars. I imagine a persistent peeper would. They’d undoubtedly have a kit with all their peeping tools in it. And a notepad to keep track of their findings by date and time to report to the condo board.

 

The dingleberry name reminded me of one of those silly jokes from decades ago. “What do you call red crepe paper that hangs from the ceiling? A dingle dangle. What do you call green crepe paper that hangs from the ceiling? Crepe paper. Dingle dangles only come in red.” I warned you that it was silly.

 

Getting back to the dingleberries at a cat’s exit hatch—this could get gross. I’ve had nine cats in about forty years. None were long hair and all of the females were spayed. I never noticed any dingleberries. What I did notice was that when some of my girls got older, their lower bellies began to droop and they flopped when they walked. The hair at their back belly also got longer. I referred to it all as their fuzzy baggies.

 

I came up with that name from a commercial on the radio for Fazi Battaglia Verdicchio wine. A man was in a liquor store wanting to order it but couldn’t pronounce it. One of his attempts was Fuzzy Baggies. He finally settled on Fizzy What’s It, as I recall.

 

Stella Periwinkle, one of my current girls, now has fuzzy baggies. Kallie Jasmine is more petite and is still svelte. Once I had dingleberries on my radar, I decided to inspect Stella’s exit hatch. What I found shocked me. Dingleberries galore, some larger ones almost blocking that out ramp. I pulled one or two off for her, taking some fur along with it. She was not pleased so I stopped.

 

There must have been at least four to six of those buggers still there. I decided to make this a multi-day project with regular inspections once I had her completely de-dingleberried. Don’t even ask where that project stands.

 

Just to be safe, I also checked Kallie’s rear end. No dingleberries there; no surprise because her fur is not very long. However, she seems to be more prone to hacking up hairballs than Stella is. Her pre-hack meow is so pitiful that I usually have plenty of time to find her and catch the blob in a tissue as it comes up. I say usually because there are occasions that I don’t get there on time. Cleaning throw up on carpeting is not pleasant.

 

Neither is stepping on a dried up hairball days after it was deposited. I imagine that happens when I’m out on errands. Once those dry, they blend in with the Oriental rugs and it can be weeks before I happen upon them.

 

It took a friend’s Facebook post on hairballs and dingleberries to get me thinking about all of this. I hope my column has you searching your rugs and examining your pet’s exit ramps, too.

 

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