1 "I went into the fridge and grabbed the carton of half&half and . . . " OMG for a second there I thought you were going to say you found something . . . evil . . . in the fridge. BTW. It's NEVER a waste of time to read well-paced stories about mashed potatoes. In fact, I'd go so far as to say the media ignores them at their peril.

2 You owe me about 4.5 seconds of my life back. Looks like we'll have to hook up for a P-Nats game this summer so you can pay me back. I'll bring Nic along, too, because I'm sure she'll want her time back, as well.

3 Ted, If you were Irish and did that, you would have hellacious penance to pay. But then again, if you were Irish, you probably wouldn't own instant potatoes to begin with or have killed the real ones with too much cream ;-)

4 Gir! How's it going?

5 OMG! I'm on a teleconference while reading your blog and haven't had time for lunch yet. I"M DROOLING OVER MY KEYBOARD!!!!! I want some... now!

6 Heh, I've done something like that, only much bigger. College. I'm in a fraternity, it's rush week, and our chef doesn't show up [turned out, he was a binge drinking alcoholic]. The menu called for homemade mashed potatos [and we're aiming to serve 150 people or so, over 2-3 shifts]. 30 minutes before dinner, it was clear that the potatos weren't going to be done in time. So we put on a pot of water for instant mashed potatos. It's time to serve dinner, and neither set of potatos are done. We're all sleep deprived [not drunk, there were some strict rules about not drinking where the freshmen could be involved]. So, obviously, the solution was to dump both sets of potatos into the industrial mixer, let it run, and then put the resulting mixture over all 4 of the burners on the stove simultaneously. The more observant people wondered how there could be large chunks of potato, yet have a starchy, grainy feel of not quite done instant potatos. We didn't kill anyone, so we called it a qualified success.