Learned something new...

Alright I'm 37 and never really ate Sunflower seeds before. Let me be clear, I've tasted these before and I'm talking about the buy'em in bulk, shelled, throw them back, chew and swallow kind of seeds.

So a co-worker brings in this bucket of David Sunflower Seeds and I'm talking a bucket the size of a large restaurant size pickle bucket and inside it has a bunch of tiny little bags (Net wt. 1 3/4 oz.) of Roasted & Salted Sunflower Seeds. I grab a bag to see what its all about.

Yes I've never done this and to the shock and almost humorous horror of the rest of my co-workers. Perhaps its all the work involved with braking into these things and knowing that someone has already shelled these somewhere and I wonder why I want to spend the time trying to pry into something so small and only find a little seed.

So they start to tell me how you cram a handful of these in your mouth and set them on one side to soak and then you move one over to the other side and crack it with your teeth. Next you pry open where they split and extract the seed and spit out the shell. It's all the fun of having a mouthful of what looks like tobacco chew and the spitting I suppose.

So I grab around 5 or 6 seeds for starters. Mind you I don't want to have a handful of seeds in my mouth and end up swallowing a bunch trying to learn. So I'm trying to move some to one side and then move one over. Lets crack it open and see how this goes. Ok, so I've got about a dozen shards of shell on one side and I'm told that I should have let them sit a bit and soak and they'll almost come apart on their own. Spitting the shards out and going to shell number two, its soaked a bit more and I feel the little gap and start to work into it with my teeth. It's at this point that a new feeling of stabbing my gums with the point of half a shell sets in. They say its alright and the gums will tuff up to that.

This was on Monday that I started this and I'm still on the first bag. I'm a little better, I said little better and will have this bag for most of October I'd say. I've decided that if left on an island and all I have is these seeds, that I'll starve or might make it rich opening my own business shelling these damn things for others like me. Then again, I'm probably the only one on the island that's new to such a thing like this and I should worry about something else. Like getting off the Damn island.