K.B. Owen is a true cyber buddy. She listened to me whimper when my computer crashed and when I had some medical stuff going on. And she sent me this amazing “extended comment” in response to my Tingo Tuesday post. I had to share it here. Because it is that awesome, and because it should give you some idea of how talented and giving K.B. Owen is. Check out her blog and follow her on Twitter @kbowenwriter! Kathy is truly one of the most wonder tweeps out there.

If you’d like to win a chance to win some December sidebar linky-love, you are up against K.B. and a bunch of other folks. The comments are amazing, and you can enter to win until November 30. Interested? You don’t have to be a blogger to win. Click HERE for details.

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My Grief Bacon, by K.B. Owen

My “Grief Bacon” story involves the blizzard of 2010 – aka “Snowmageddon, ” “Snowpocalypse,” “Snowzilla,” and “snOMG”… and cheeseballs.

Yep, cheeseballs. I know, I’m not proud of it. I’d much rather be carrying around this surplus fifteen pounds because of homemade butter spritz cookies, or macaroni and cheese, or even pie, but it’s really the cheeseballs that did it.

Target is partly to blame.

(No, really. But I’ll get back to that in a moment.)

So, anyway, the Blizzard was coming. The weather forecasters in Northern Virginia – who don’t see much in the way of snow on a regular basis, I might add – were practically wetting themselves in excitement. Our local weather guy has a “Bread-O-Meter” that he pulls out when he makes snow predictions on the air. It’s named after how fast the bread goes flying off the shelves when folks around here start panicking, even when there’s only a dusting of snow on the ground. For the first time in the 20+ years that I’ve been living in the area, his Bread-O-Meter was a 10 – a designation he also refers to as “Run for the Hills.”

Hmm…looks like I need to get ready! I have to admit that I was excited. We don’t see much snow around here, and it sounded like we’d be digging tunnels out of the stuff (and we were). Time to inventory the gloves, hats, boots, flashlights, batteries, Parmalat, etc.

List in hand, I headed to Target because they have everything – food, DVDs, batteries, clothing – all in one place. We had to be prepared for a possible power outage, and since we didn’t have an SUV, we needed to be able to stick it out at home.

So I’m doing fine, making my way through the list, being sensible in my food choices (non-perishable, nutritious, etc), when I see…this ENORMOUS clear plastic bin of cheeseballs. As high as my knee, and the size of a tall drum. O.M.G. This was the sort of thing I’d pass by when the boys were little. They’d be sitting in their shopping cart seats, and point to it and drool.

Ooh! Can we get that?

Nooo.

Mmmmm….Cheeseballs (Photo credit: phot0matt)

But this time, it was different. My survival instincts were kicking in. I knew those cheeseballs  would keep forever. Fat calories for keeping warm. And yummy.

In retrospect, I’m not quite sure what was going through my brain, but I put it in my cart.

The boys were super-impressed with mom plunking this huge canister of cheeseballs on top of the fridge. Hubster rolled his eyes.

The devil had entered our house.

But I was blissfully ignorant. I had visions of the pretty snow, of kids sledding and building forts and missing school, of me making hot chocolate and drying mittens and boots beside the fire while reading, my hubby home from work to hang out with us.

And you know what? That was all true.

But then we got a little bored, and the kids couldn’t really play in snow that was so deep they kept sinking into it up to their hips; hubby and I had work to do, but shoveling was all we could accomplish (and where to put the stuff was our biggest mental challenge). The schools were closed, the roads were closed, the stores were closed. And it was okay; we were making do. We knew it was temporary.

But the cheeseballs had become an extra guest in our house. That canister was so easy to dip into. It’s okay, I thought, as I filled another bowl. I’ll be shoveling snow later. So we’d play a board game, and I’d munch on cheeseballs. The boys ate some, too, but I think I was the one who kept going back to it, again and again, until it was gone.

I feel stuffed just thinking about it.

Here’s one of the pics from the blizzard. Our cars are in there somewhere.

There are cars under there, people!

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My thoughts are with the folks who are experiencing yet another storm. I hope everybody got their batteries and their water. And their cheeseballs. Stay warm.