Jelly Bothers Me...

That was the title of a BLOG written before there was any such thing as a BLOG.

Today, I was sorting a boxful of old letters and cards, to mail them to my son David. I found that they went back to his first days in college... February 1977. Coincidentally, today he wrote a BLOG about his "envelope art, " and here I was, mailing him several of his original ones.

But in the box, mistakenly, was this "blog" about Jelly, written by his brother John... in May 1986.

Jelly bothers me...

Last night was another bad experience with jelly. I tried to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. No, that's wrong. I tried to put jelly on some buttered bread. Yeah, that's right. Anyway, the bread was fresh out of the bag and I spread an even layer of butter on it. Cold butter is a great water repellant, but more than that it is highly resistant to jelly. But jelly is stupid anyway. When I try to get jelly out of the jar with a knife, I have to slice it into pieces and shake the jar upside down. I did that and got these large chunks of shiny jelly on my bread. ThenI tried to spread it. That was stupid. You can't spread jelly when it is big like that. So, I chopped at the jelly until I had a bunch of little jelly lumps, each equally as stupid as the original mass they came from. If I tried spreading the jelly flat, it would all glide over the butter to one side of the piece of bread. So, I had to move it around very carefully and sort of leave it in one spot and hope that it wouldn't stray to some other zone of the bread. But there is always one stupid section of the jelly that decides it is going to go off the edge of the bread onto something it is hard to get off like highly trafficked areas in the kitchen, or the web between the ring finger and the pinky fingers of the left hand. I don't know how it gets there, but it is stupid. And another thing: It never helps to try to lick it clean because that just gets your whole finger sticky. Then, when I finally ate the thing, I found out I put too much butter on and I couldn't taste the jelly.

Another challenge is the peanut butter and jelly sandwich, which is gray if you make it the way I do. Obviously, I'm not going to make a sandwich with peanut butter on one half and jelly on the other. I have vivid memories of pulling such sandwiches out of my lunch sack and finding the jelly all over the inside of the sandwich bag. The sandwich bags are called Glad Bags. My solution to this is to premix the jelly and peanut butter, although this is pretty stupid too, because for the first 5 to 10 minutes, the jelly and the peanut butter stay on opposite sides of the knife and the jelly always creeps up the handle of the knife and gets my right hand and my steering wheel sticky. But the result is that the jelly is trapped in that great stuff peanut butter, a substance that is probably used by the military in midflight fuselage repair, and the mixture won't budge once applied to bread. But a night in the Fridge will turn the stuff gray, so it probably isn't marketable.

But is is a good way to get revenge on jelly.