Couch-Less Thursday Rundown

Have you treated yourself to anything pumpkin-flavored yet? If not, bravo! I think it is best to wait until the beginning of October to indulge. But something that shouldn’t be confined to a certain season or month (at least in my humble opinion) is the Thursday Rundown. So let’s get rolling with tonight’s five topics…

STA Experience – I mentioned earlier in the week that last Saturday’s EWU gameday experience included a bus ride for my kids. They got to journey on the new STA double decker bus and gave it high marks. Although Sloan battled some brief anxiety once the bus started to move and we hit the highway, her butterflies quickly dissipated. It was cool to let Sloan and Beau experience the same commute that I take often.

Sloan and Beau right the STA double decker bus on our way to the EWU football game in Cheney.

Bye Bye Couch – About four years ago, I made a big deal about us selling a couch. It followed us to four different houses and was the first joint purchase that Sid and I ever made. So, yeah, it held sentimental value and deserved its own blog post. Well, this past weekend we sold the couch that replaced our first one. This second couch provided a comfortable place to sit in three different houses over the course of five years (our first couch sat in storage for a year after we bought our second couch). However, it was time to move on. Facebook Marketplace once again helped us sell this second couch and now we are couch-less until our new piece of furniture is delivered on Saturday. Thanks to big blue for a memorable half decade!

Beau “helps” by assisting the buyer of our couch with loading his new furniture. It served us well!

Green Caterpillar – While on a neighborhood walk the other day, we came across a brightly colored green insect that stood out quite brilliantly on the curb. We spent plenty of time looking at it and admiring the red “horn” coming out at one end of its body. Sloan was especially interested to learn about the creature so we did a Google search and found out it was a tomato hornworm.

Beau looks at a tomato hornworm that we found while on a walk.

9/11 – Tomorrow is the 25th anniversary of September 11th, 2001. This week I have been watching a show that reunites people who were at the World Trade Center during the attacks. In most instances, one individual saved the other and the show brings them together for the first time since that awful day. Since I have authored this blog, I have written about 9/11 no less than seven times. To view those entries you can tap here.

I am currently watching the “9/11 Reunited” documentary series.

National TV Dinner Day – I look back at what I put in my stomach when I was a kid and I can’t believe I ate the Kid Cuisine TV dinners. And it wasn’t like I was plugging my nose and swallowing either—I loved those frozen meals so much that I would opt for them over pizza delivery or fast food! To celebrate last year’s National TV Dinner Day, I wrote a blog post that goes into great depth about the “gourmet food” I thought I was eating and how I now realize how badly mistaken (or taste bud-challenged) I was. Happy 2026 National TV Dinner Day!

This box is a fond memory from my childhood. I loved Kid Cuisine TV dinners. Can’t say the same now.

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Thanks for reading. Make sure to take some time tomorrow to reflect on 9/11 and the lives that were lost. It is crazy to think that it was 25 years ago. Don’t Blink.

The Best (or worst?) TV Dinners

When I was a kid, there was a certain meal choice that would make my night. I craved it so much that I would tell my mom to hang up the phone with Domino’s, drive past McDonald’s, and take me right to the grocery store. From there I would go straight to the frozen aisle and plead with my parents to buy me a Kid Cuisine TV dinner.

This box is a fond memory from my childhood. I loved Kid Cuisine TV dinners.

Now, to be fair, I might have embellished my opening paragraph a bit. I don’t know if I actually ever did choose a TV dinner over pizza delivery or fast food, but I did seriously really like Kid Cuisine products.

And to this day, I don’t know why. 😂

I can still see, smell, and taste them. It would come in a tray with different compartments for an entrée, fruit/vegetable, potato item, and dessert. Portions were rather microscopic and the food was…well…edible?

I would get the pizza or corn dog box—which was by far the best part of the meal—and from there things would get sketchy. It was impossible to evenly heat the entire dinner and quite often items from one compartment of the tray would inextricably find themselves in the compartment of another. If you like corn in your chocolate cake I guess you would be in luck but it definitely wasn’t my cup of tea.

Oh man, memories are flowing right now. If your entrée came with French fries, you could look forward to three mini crinkled cut fries in the corner compartment. If you had the baked apple slices, the sour sauce would burn your tongue off. If you had pudding for your dessert, you might reach something that resembled the consistency of pudding after you dug through the crust at the top.

The exterior packaging was slick but the actual food was a different story.

But you know what? I seriously loved these dinners. And let me tell you, Kid Cuisine did much more to market to children besides adopting a name with “kid” in it. The packaging was colorful, a penguin mascot adorned the box, and I am pretty sure some of the dinners came with stickers or other cheap “prizes.”

Safe to say, there are just things that you eventually grow out of. Happy TV Dinner Day! I hope you can celebrate with something a bit more age-appropriate like Stouffer’s or Hungry-Man. Don’t Blink.