EMPS: A Mixed Drink

Carly's asking for a picture of a cold drink, and it's not as though I haven't had any this week; but I got distracted and didn't photograph one until now.



Normally I like to mix fruit juices with diet soda, but it doesn't work as well with diet cola as with Diet 7-Up and its rivals or else diet orange. Diet Pepsi is all I have right now, so cranrasblackapple juice it is!

Karen

RRPC: We Bottle Our Own

For this week's Round Robin Photo Challenge, "Bottled Up!", I rashly combined three similar topic suggestions. I wanted to see bottles, Kim of Nekked Lizard Adventures wanted to see labels on bottles, and Carly wanted to see the drinks themselves.

From Round Robin Photo Challenges

I'm afraid my own response to this Challenge is not my best work. Unusually for me, I took the photos a couple of weeks ago instead of a few hours before the Challenge date; but I didn't look at or edit them until Friday night. They're mostly pretty grainy, too yellow or orange because of the light source, and lightstruck on the ones that used flash or an adjacent lamp. But here are the best of them.

Checking out at Safeway - a nearly all-beverage purchase.
The fast hand belongs to Cliff, world's greatest grocery clerk (no, really!).

As I keep mentioning, it's been a hot, unusually dry summer in Tucson. This is the time of year when I sometimes go to Safeway and buy $30 worth of flavored water: diet soda, beer for John, sugar free Popsicles and maybe even bottled water. Any food purchase, such as the Italian sausage above, is almost incidental.

Recently, however, our summer drinking habits have changed. It used to be that I was hauling in four or five 12-can cartons of diet soda from the car, or getting John to do it. But recently we've switched to 2-liter bottles, sugar free Kool Aid if available, which it mostly isn't anymore, and Crystal Light.

Only one of these bottles has its original contents.

What's slightly unusual about our use of drink mixes is that it doesn't go into pitchers, or alternatively, into bottled water. The night I took these shots, I did purchase a gallon of refrigerated drinking water, but only because I was in a hurry to have nice cold water to add to the powder. We mix it up in bottles that originally contained an apple-pomegranate-blueberry juice blend. In the photo above, the bottle on the left has this blend still in it; the other bottles, not so much. The bottles are handy because we can just pour the mix in the bottom, add a bit of water, shake it, fill it up the rest of the way, cap it, shake it a little more, and stick it in the fridge. No stirring, no measuring, no open container to spill or attract bugs. A splash of the juice blend can be added to the Crystal Light for flavor and extra antioxidants.

Tonight's reshoot

The other advantage to these bottles is that we can have several of them in the fridge at once, in different flavors. In this weather, we get through two or three bottles a day, sometimes more. I try to have different colors in the three bottles so it doesn't all look the same; there's always a choice in what to drink.

Unfortunately, nearly all the flavors are some variation of red. I recently drank a couple of quarts before a Wednesday effort to give blood, and again before I successfully gave blood two days later. I would not be at all surprised if my blood was extra red by Friday from all that food coloring!

Now let's see what everyone else came up with for this Challenge:

Linking List

Karen - Posted!
Outpost Mâvarin
http://outmavarin.blogspot.com

Carly - Posted!
Ellipsis
http://ellipsissuddenlycarly.blogspot.com

ellen b. - Posted!
The Happy Wonderer
http://happywonderer.wordpress.com/

Martha - Posted!
Menagerie
http://meandering-martha.blogspot.com/

Vicki
Beach Bum
http://2babb.blogspot.com

Sandra - Posted!
A cappuccino a day
http://Acappuccinoaday.blogspot.com

betty - Posted!
a corgi in southern california
http://acorgiinsoutherncalifornia.blogspot.com/

Sherrie - Posted!
Sherrie's Stuff
http://sherrie-plummer.blogspot.com/

Suzanne R - Posted!
SuzyQ421's Photo Blog
http://suzyq421sphotoblog.blogspot.com

Linda - Posted!
Mommy's Treasures
http://mommystreasures.blogspot.com

Molly Mavis - Posted!
Visual Dialogues
http://visualdialogues.wordpress.com

Linda - Posted!
Linda's Window
http://www.lindaswindow.blogspot.com/

Jama - Posted!
Sweet Memories
http://mummyjam.blogspot.com

Gattina - Posted!
Keyhole Pictures
http://gattina-keyholepictures.blogspot.com/

Teena - Posted!
It's all about me!
http://www.purple4mee.com

Peggy - Posted!
Holmespun Fun
http://holmespunfunmemesandthemes.blogspot.com

And don't forget the Weekend Assignment writing prompt, in the entry below this one!

Karen

Weekend Assignment Results: What We're Drinking

Last week for Weekend Assignment #221, I took note of the coming of summer thirst and asked what people like to drink. The answers came in a variety of flavors, but tea is strongly represented. Click on the names below to see the full entries:

Bea said...

I prefer making my own iced tea. I control the sweetness of it, the freshness, and quality of it. But I don't often make iced tea at home because if I did, I'd be drinking it all the time.

Jama said...

Like Karen I don't drink alchohol and coffee,but on a daily basis, I must have hot milo (chocolate malt drink), while reading the morning newspaper. I like wake up earlier than the rest of the family so that I can have an uninterrupted reading , while sipping the hot beverage and whatever simple meals I prepared for myself. Most of the time, it's just milo to kickstart the day.

Julie said in comments...

Too much coffee, apparently, since I'm up at this hour. Yet, I haven't had any of the stuff since about 10:00 yesterday morning. Perhaps the mere thought of coffee is keeping me awake. ;-)

Duane said...

My drink of choice is usually that old Southern specialty, ice-cold sweet tea. I drink it all the time -- day or night, winter or summer. I much prefer the homemade variety, but will occasionally drink a bottle of Lipton or Nestea, a poor substitute.

Florinda said...

I am a huge water drinker, one of the annoying people rarely seen without a bottle of water in hand. That doesn't mean I drink "bottled water," though; I'll buy a six-pack of bottles periodically, but I have a tap-water filter attachment on my kitchen faucet and I refill and re-use the bottles from there. I probably re-use the bottles too often, if you worry about leaching plastic, but I've decided not to think too much about that.

Kiva said...

Tea! I normally drink about four cups of it in the morning without lemon. Since I am congested, I'm adding a spritz of lemon this week. Sometimes I twirl in a splash of honey. If I'm totally miserable, I stir in a jigger of Grand Marnier. I guess I'm just slightly sick since all I crave is a bit of lemon.

Mike said...

For me, it depends on where I am and what I am doing, as I guess it would be with most people. At work I drink water for the most part. I usually buy one bottle and refill it over the course of a week or two, rinse and repeat. Most people at work wouldn't dream of drinking the water out of the drinking fountain, but I don't find it to be bad. If I get some kind of heavy metal poisoning, I'll just sue. That's what we do, am I right? I'm just kidding of course. (Anyone know a good injury lawyer?)

Sarah said...

As far as alcoholic ones, I like fruity adult beverages with vodka in them, like cosmopolitans and fruit martinis (I just learned from Wikipedia that martini purists insist that martinis must have gin in them, not vodka, but whatever. I like vodka). I also like an occasional glass of wine, not that I know all sorts of things about it like, say, Frasier and Niles. I started out preferring red but at some point, for some reason, I started to favor chardonnay. I also like the "hard" versions of cider and lemonade.

Nice job, folks! You inspired me to have a cup of tea last night, and again today! Now I'm back to diet root beer.

The new Weekend Assignment topic will be posted shortly.

Karen

Weekend Assignment #221: What Are You Drinking?

Some of our recent "empties"

Summer is starting in Tucson, and in the Northern Hemisphere generally. As temperatures top 100 degrees here, John and I start going through beverages at an amazing rate. Which brings me to this week's Weekend Assignment question:

Weekend Assignment #221: What do you like to drink? Do you prefer Coke, or Pepsi, or neither? Do you start your days at Starbucks, or end your days with a nice cup of herbal tea? Are you a connoisseur of beer, or do you like to keep a pitcher of lemonade on hand? Do you carry a bottle of water around, and refill it as you go? Tell us about your favorites!

Extra Credit: Have you ever invented your own drink sensation?

I don't drink alcohol, I hate coffee, and I'm not a big fan of cola, although I'll sometimes drink the latter for the caffeine. Basically I go for diet sodas, as big a variety of them as possible. Who wants to be bored, drinking the same thing day after day, week after week?

Of course it doesn't hurt that the Kalil products were on sale the other day at Safeway: buy two cartons, get three free. "The Good Guys at Kalil" are the local bottlers of non-Pepsi, non-Coke soda options. So I bought two cartons of diet ginger ale, and one each of Diet Sunkist, Diet A&W and Diet 7Up. Yes, I should probably be drinking water instead, but these are much more interesting!

As for the extra credit, I've made a variety of soda and juice combinations over the years, routinely mix root beer into cola, and once tried adding black pepper to Diet Pepsi. The latter wasn't terribly good, but it wasn't awful, either.

So how about you? Tell us what you're drinking these days and why. Post it to your blog or journal, and don't forget to link from here to there and from there to here. I'll splash back through in a week with a cooler full of your delicious responses. Meanwhile, drink up, and have a great week!

Karen