Perhaps it’s due to my poor memory but it’s a little tough for me to remember…well, remembering stuff. Weird, I know. >.> So, here’s a shot at it anyways.

Fried onions always reminds me of perogies, which in turn remind me of my baba. My baba (the Ukrainian word for grandma) had been born in the Ukraine and moved to Canada with my dido (grandpa) to start a family. Needless to say, she was a pro at cooking all sort of Ukrainian foods, most notably perogies. She always made the best I had ever tasted, including these special “flat” perogies for me which were basically just the circles of dough unfolded and unfilled, cooked just like regular boiled perogies. It was always a huge treat to go back home with a bag of those flat perogies to eat later. To this day, no one has been able to match her ability to make delicious Ukrainian food…and I still love me a huge plate full of perogies.

The smell of fresh rain brings me back home to my parents’ place, situated in the “suburbs” of my tiny hometown (as much as you could really have some suburbs in a town of 300 people). I’ve always had this fancination with water and used to play around in the puddles when it rained, walking around the yard and making little rivulets and streams to drain the water into the ditch. Very rarely does the rain ever smell fresh in the city…usually it smells more like rotting garbage. Disgusting (another reason why I hate the city).

Oranges and vanilla make me think of this novel I want to write, one that’s perpetually in the progress of actually being written. The main character remembers her mother only by the perfume she wore, which smelled of oranges and vanilla. One day I hope to actually own that perfume (because musky perfumes suck).

Freshly cut grass also reminds me of home, when my dad would spend a whole afternoon cutting the 2 acres of yard in the summer.

Cattails and swampy water brings back memories of Blacky splashing through the ditches, ponds, and drainage ditch as I’m biking on the road during our very regular bike rides.

Pine sap reminds me of the church my parents used to take me to as a child. I never much liked church itself but it was surrounded by large spruce trees that gave off their distinctive scent.

Bonfire smoke makes me remember cool summer nights spent around a firepit, cooking hotdogs on willow or metal sticks and sharing about a third of my meal with Blacky. There was much poking around at the embers and watching Blacky lay in the direction of the smoke without apparent irritation (I guess it’s better than getting eaten by mosquitoes?).

Dang, I’m just one short. Ah well, that’s all I can think of so I hope that everyone enjoys that little trip down memory lane.

MysticThumbs is a thumbnail extension for Windows XP, Vista, and 7 (both 32- and 64-bit). It currently supports PSD, TGA, DDS (a game texture format), PAA, and JPEG2 file formats. All that you have to do is install the program and you might have to restart your computer. Best of all, it’s completely free.

This is a fantastic find for me, since I no longer have to hesitate taking tons of screenshots in WoW, because now I have a much simpler method to sort through them later. I just installed it and I love it already.

It’s a great read, check it out even if you’ve never played The Sims 3 like myself.