On being easily amused....

I am easily amused. I can happily spend an afternoon finding wooly bear caterpillars and chuckling at their divergent predictions about how harsh the winter will be. I can have fun rearranging the dinosaurs that look down from the top of my desk as I type. (They need to be fairly balanced, too-- no letting the carnivores sneak up on the herbivores without a fight!) And of course, I love spending an afternoon thumbing through some old cookbooks.

In short, I'm pretty boring by most adults' standards. But the beauty of being easily amused is that a few pages from McCall's Family-Style Cook Book (1974) can make my day.

If you can look at those pictures and honestly say that they don't make your day just a little weirder (in a good way!), then I should be the one feeling sorry for you!

I don't think I can express how much I love these. The crazy overstuffed absurdity of the poodle and the sheep! The comically over-sized elephant ears! The spiky lion looking like a child's picture of the sun! The ludicrously long giraffe's neck and dachshund's body! The hungry hippo! The minimalist birds! I can understand someone whose idea of a fun time is gluing marshmallows together, especially if the end result is a whimsical marshmallow zoo.

Should you want to make your own, here's how they did it:

I have a secret obsession with lime flavored marshmallows. The little turtle would work pretty well in lime, but I wish they would have made an alligator. Then the zoo would have been complete.