Daily Diatribes

Our sweet friends sent us a box of products from Omaha steaks. It’s the nicest thing anyone has done for us in a long time; we are usually the senders, not the recipients!! The steaks came in a nifty little cooler packed with dry ice. I removed the steaks and put them in the freezer. Then I picked up the bag of dry ice and squinted at the instructions, which read “DO NOT PICK UP DRY ICE”! Oops. I tossed it back in the cooler and set it on the back porch.

Also enclosed in the box was an envelope full of coupons. The outside of the envelope advised “It’s COOLER to recycle” and informed me that the styrofoam cooler could be reused. WHAT?? ReUSED??? You mean….gasp….when the dry ice melts I can….put things IN the cooler??? I mean, I had no idea that styrofoam coolers could be reused!! It’s like an environmental breakthrough!! Someone call Al Gore…no, wait, he’s on the line with his divorce lawyer!! But I can practically hear that hole in the ozone layer closing up!!

And there are TESTIMONIALS on the envelope from satisfied customers who have reused the cooler in new and exciting ways! This is extremely helpful because I’m not very creative and I would never be able to think of fun new ways to use a cooler. In the past, I thought they were just for beverages, but apparently I was very wrong. Styrofoam coolers: they’re not just for beer anymore! Awestruck, I read the comments.

“Perfect tackle box: It’s a great box for fishing trips; I stick my hooks in the lid!” Wow! You mean I could take the cooler and fill it with my FISHING GEAR??? And maybe even stick the dead fish in it after I’ve caught them?? Why am I only just now hearing about this STYROFOAM COOLER??? Another satisfied customer says “Great sewing kit: I use mine as a sewing box!” And she can stick her pins and needles in the lid! Brilliant. Simply brilliant! It’s as if a new world has opened up before me, a panorama of empty styrofoam coolers begging to be filled with my stuff!!

“No moths here,” a customer reports gleefully. “I store off season clothing in mine!” Oh my, what a cunning idea, one that appeals to my sense of irony: keep your SWEATERS in the COOLER! I GET IT!!! One extremely creative customer shares A REALLY GREEN IDEA: “We turned ours into a planter!” What a FANTASTIC idea!! I would totally turn mine into a planter except I think we have restrictive covenants in our neighborhood regarding the usage of styrofoam coolers as planters, even if you do decorate them with Barbie stickers and magic markers. Well, and I kill plants, but that’s another story. Another customer calls her cooler “A gentle toybox: it’s an ideal toy box for my grandson [because] the lightweight lid won’t pinch his little fingers!” Oh. My. God. That is soooooo precious!!! Let’s hope little Jimmy doesn’t discover he can wedge the cat into the box and hold down the lightweight lid, thereby suffocating Fluffy to death. I think that’s how Charles Manson got started.

Actually, now that I look at the envelope, one customer uses the cooler as storage for feral cats. “Keeps the Kitties warm,” he says, and then goes on to share the following charming anecdote: “My wife and I care for the neighborhood feral community of cats and have been using your shipping cartons as shelters in the rain and in the wintertime. The cats and we thank you!” Ok, so lemmee get this straight. They catch the wild cats and shove them into the coolers when it’s raining and the cats are good with this?? I’ve never met a cat that would willingly submit to being placed into a styrofoam cooler. Let’s call this what it really is: kitty genocide. Omaha Steaks is actually subsidizing the murder of millions of innocent cats with it’s free, reusable styrofoam coolers. Monsters!!!! That might just make that last bite of steak just a little bit harder to swallow!!

So, Chad and Amy, we thank you for the steaks. It was a thoughtful gesture and greatly appreciated. But the styrofoam cooler!!! That was just way too much! You shouldn’t have! We’ll have that cooler for years to come and think of you fondly every time we murder a stray cat!!