otter pop mania

July in Utah can be brutal, and since my business grunge clothing style inspired management to institute their first ever dress code, I can’t beat the heat anymore with shorts and flip flops. Harsh.

So with temperatures outside hovering around 100 degrees every day, I’ve gone back to my roots to cool off. No, not a hat with a fan and spritzer attached.

Otter Pops.

Check this out, it’s not even 10:30 this morning, and here’s the wreckage so far:

Don’t worry I’ve got more:

Someone has to use the new freezer. Everybody else seems scared off.

Otter Pops are my new/old Cap’n Crunchberries–that is, I eat them so much that I’m suffering Otter Pop Repetitive Motion Injuries. I’ll list them here:

1. Roof of Mouth–when an Otter Pop is fresh from the freezer, it’s pretty, well, frozen. When you mush each bite around, the frozen crystals tear at the roof of your mouth. You may not notice this injury right away, since your mouth is frozen.

2. Torn Tongue–see number one.

3. Vampire Tears On Lips–this one is a bit more subtle, and only shows up in extreme cases (like me, right now). You tear off the top of the package, and clamp your teeth down on the plastic about an inch down, and push the calving iceberg up the sleeve and into your mouth. As you do this, and more particularly, as you pull the plastic sleeve OUT of your mouth, the sharp edges of the plastic sleeve rub against your lips, right where your fangs would bother your lips if you were, you know, a vampire. Eventually canker sores form there. Not that those stop you from enjoying more Otter Pops. Because nothing can do that.

I have developed a system for enjoying the Otter Pops. I grab about four from the freezer and set them down on my desk. Or, rather, I set THREE of them down on my desk  and immediately start into the first one. The first one is pretty frozen, and the way to eat a fully frozen Otter Pop is the same as enjoying a softer Otter Pop except, once you calve in the first couple of iceberg pieces, instead of just mushing it to the top of your mouth, you quickly crush the iceberg into tiny pieces with a rapid teeth motion (rapid so you don’t freeze the tops of your teeth–have you ever bitten ice cream with a normal bite on your bottom front teeth? ick.). Then you mush around and swallow.

With each subsequent bite, you put the open top of the sleeve in your mouth, clamp between your tongue and roof of mouth, and suck out any forming free juice. Then you push up the full glacier of Pop and bite off another iceberg. But now that the Pop is softer, you don’t crush it with your teeth, but instead you mush it between your tongue and the roof of your mouth. Swirl and swallow.

Once your current stash of softening Pops is depleted, you will spend the next 20 minutes wishing you had another pile sitting on your desk.

I’ve been chain smoking Otter Pops for a week now. I have sores in my mouth and I can’t taste other food properly. But I’m not stopping until this box of 200 is gone or the temps outside get back into the 80s.