Thunked Out

Today I decided that it would be a good day to straighten out the sidewalk blocks leading up to our house. For the past few years I have sworn at them every time that the snow shovel caught in a crack or on a raised block. Not this winter!!! Well, probably not, it all depends on how good a job I do I suppose.

It was a beautiful, sunny, summer day, a few clouds spread across the sky and no wind to speak of. There was the promise of a late day thunder storm, but I planned to pack it in long before any rain hit my head. The job is actually in the shade, so it was theoretically the perfect weather to work. It was the perfect weather to be at a beach or for a bike ride, but not for lifting concrete blocks, shovelling dirt and gravel and having ants crawl all over you. I will pace myself and probably finish sometime next week/month/year.

There was a point when my mouth felt as if I had been swallowing the gravel, so I took a water break. I swear to God that cool eight ounces of water was the best glass of water I had ever had. It tasted wonderful! So cool, so wet, so damned refreshing! It was about halfway thru the glass when I started thinking about packing it in for the day. That’s what water will do to you. If it were beer I suspect that the work day would have been over.

I am normally not very particular about my water being cold, just so long as there is plenty of it and that it is wet. I think that is because when I was working I would carry water with me and after an hour or so it would be tepid and it was either the tepid water or the plastic tasting water from someone’s garden hose. Usually by the time I considered drinking from a hose I was beyond being discriminating about the taste. One guy I know to a big gulp from a hose that was running in a driveway only to realize (too late) that it was the water draining from a waterbed. Yummmm!

There is nothing better tasting than an ice cold Coke! There is nothing better tasting than an ice cold beer! There is nothing that tastes worse than a warm Coke! There is nothing that tastes worse than a warm beer! Pretty much any drink tastes better cold.

That’s the way I have felt for my entire life and most of the people I know feel the same way more or less, except for the whack-a-doodles. Well, I felt that way until today.

It occurred to me that the taste of a drink doesn’t change with temperature; hot Coke and cold Coke have the same ingredients and therefore the same taste. The same applies to beer and other drinks of all kinds and descriptions. I don’t think cold is a taste. I’m almost certain that hot or cold is just personal preference. The English have been drinking warm beer for centuries. I have always assumed that it was because they were technologically backwards when it came to refrigeration. Perhaps they knew something that I didn’t. The drunk is the important factor, not the drink.

I will think on this some more and when I have thunked out I will settle the taste of cold and hot once and for all.