I’ve got aces in my eyes

It’s December again! Despite living in Winterpeg and working in retail, there are some things I absolutely love about the month of December. X-Entertainment’s Advent Calendar would be the obvious one. Oh, and that Christmas thing is pretty cool too, as long as you don’t mind overblown holidays. I also like the opportunity to dress up my website with little snowmen. A little snowman. Whatever. The point is snowman.

But with this change in header image comes an absolutely massive commitment: The 24 Days of Materialism. Yes. That’s right. It’s back. You may or not remember that last year I attempted to review 24 things, one a day from December 1st until December 24th. It burned out with only three days to go, but I feel good about it this year! And for someone who hasn’t made more than three blog posts a month for almost the entire year, it’s a pretty grand claim. But I can do it! And I will do it! You shouldn’t start sentences with ‘and’ or ‘but’! Given that it’s a pretty big project and it’s my first day, I think I’ll start small.

Jones Soda carbonated candy has been around for ages, but I only just discovered it whence I was visiting the top of a mountain in Banff earlier this year. I then found more in the shopping district and was amazed. I ate it, and it was magical. I was swooned. When I returned home, I proudly showed off my find to my mom and youngest brother, but was quickly shot down when he said he’d been getting the stuff down at the 7-Eleven for ages. I slumped to the ground in defeat.

The Jones candy isn’t terribly special on its own. I’ve been eating little candy bottlecaps and other stuff that has the sweet fizzing effect that the Jones candy so proudly touts since I was but a wee nipper, and as far as I can remember, they all taste just as good. Or even better in some cases. I’d take a root beer bottlecap over a sour green apple “fufu berry” Jones candy any day. The cream soda is rockin’ though! The thing that really sets them apart is the sweet tin that they come in. Okay, fine, it’s not super great, but I’ve been obsessed with candy tins since like forever. I have a collection of Altoids tins in my closet that is just a small testament to my love of candy tins. In recent years, I’ve been purging my room of useless things like that bit by bit, so it’s not as apparent as it would have been back when this site was still coated in black. It physically hurt me to toss out the Jones candy tins, but I’m told that fewer people respect packrats.

If that last sentence weren’t there, I’d have a wicked awesome segue into this paragraph, but so it goes. I just wanted to mention today that it’s been a whole year since I gave Torrential Equilibrium a facelift, and I still like it. Though to its credit, I think the last layout lasted about three years, so we’ll see how I feel about this one come 2010.