You'll never fear the checkout line again

So, when we first went to check out the new Thrifty's last April, we picked up a large chunk of Callibaut chocolate as well as some other fixings for a fondue, and up until last night, they sat in the back of the cupboard gathering dust.

I figured that the end of mom's audit was a good enough occasion to do something fun like a chocolate fondue. Unfortunately we had no strawberries, but we had bananas and a package of those vanilla wafer cookie things that we all hate, but are fondue necessities.

You know the kind - they come in rectangular sticks with a waffle pattern on the top, look kind of like plywood and taste kind of like drywall. They're crunchy and always leave crumbs on your lap when you eat them, no matter how hard you try to not make a mess. I hate them. I really do.

And yet, you can't have a fondue without them. They've got that sort of quintesscence that no other dippable food has, not even ladyfingers.

We had made it about halfway through the package when I noticed the warning on the back. Instead of just being a warning about peanuts and eggs, there was an additional note there, explaining that 'excessive consumption may have a laxative effect on sensitive persons'. I read that out kind of as a joke.

It wasn't a joke. I ate three, maybe four of them and within two hours I felt a lot of rumbling and movement in my abdomen. My parents had eaten more than I had so they were definitely affected too, but even my sister who only ate one said that she definitely felt something. Luckily, and this is rapidly approaching information you don't really need to know, luckily there were no stomach cramps or other forms of genuine unpleasantness associated with that affliction, other than spending half of one's evening on the toilet.

Which got me thinking, really. You know, certain products that deal with things of a... personal nature can kind of make one feel a tad self-conscious in the checkout line at the drugstore. I try not to, but I do tend to speculate in my mind about people who buy things like yeast infection cream, condoms or diarrhea medications in unusually large quantities before reminding myself that tampons are on sale and I have what could be considered an excessive amount of them in my shopping basket.

But there you go, there's hope for all you constipated people who don't want to broadcast it to the whole world. Eat vanilla wafers. Lots of them. People won't even look twice.