Bring me a TAB and a chocolate doughnut, please. Hold the strawberry ice cream.

Ah, we've arrived at Day 15 of our meme. Something or someone you couldn't live without, because you've tried living without it.

This one's easy.

It's diet soda. Dammit, I love diet soda. There's nothing better than opening the fridge first thing in the morning and cracking open a cold can of diet soda. I'm not horribly particular on the type of diet soda, either. Some people are all about Coke and others Pepsi, some people love a Dr Pepper or a 7-up. I'll take them all. Give me aspartame and fizzies and I'm happy. Add cherry flavoring and I'll be your new best friend.

I have tried to break the habit. I've read stuff that made me think the aspartame was going to cause me to grow a third eye or start barking at random intervals. And I'm cool with the Splenda versions of diet soda, too. In fact, TAB, made with saccharin, is probably my favorite of all. I think my mother put it in my baby bottles.

When I was growing up, we probably went through 10 2 liter bottles of TAB and then later Diet Coke in my house a week. That might even be a low estimate. My dad never touched the stuff, choosing to drink mostly water and occasionally an iced tea with no sweetener. He's always been the healthiest out of all of us. We didn't even typically use glasses. We'd just take a "chug" from the bottle straight out of the fridge. We were so classy.

There was always a 2 liter in the door of our fridge and whoever drank the last "chug" had to replace it with a 2 liter that would be found in the fridge located in the garage. My mom called it the "back porch fridge" because evidently in the years before I was born they had a refrigerator located on the back porch and she never could stop calling the 2nd fridge that. I think she might still call her garage refrigerator that.

I've heard warnings that if you drink straight out of a 2 liter bottle it will go flat faster. We never had one in our fridge long enough to know if that is true or not.

I don't buy myself diet soda on a regular basis. Though, the last time I went to Publix they had these two new flavors of Diet Mountain Dew (Supernova and Voltage) and I did grab a 12 pack of both of them. Delicious, by the way, and with lots of caffeine. Huzzah!

So I don't always have it in the house. It's the only way I can regulate myself. I grab one every time I visit my parents, who keep a stocked assortment of sodas in the "back porch" fridge, and it's fabulous.

The best, is really a fountain soda, though. And please don't tell me how disgusting fountain sodas are and the lines don't get cleaned and all of it. I know. I've heard it all. But there's just nothing like a big ginormous* cup of crushed ice and a cold diet soda with a straw. The deliciousness.

At one point I tried to switch to regular soda because I thought the artificial sweeteners were surely going to send me to an early grave. But I was panicked about the calories and I couldn't really enjoy it. Hand over the box of doughnuts, but don't you dare put a real Coke in front of me.

Why can't they come up with calorie free doughnuts that taste that good?

And on a similar note, I'm going to go ahead and knock out Day 16 of the meme, too. Someone or something you definitely could live without.

This one is strawberry ice cream. I never could stomach it. Strawberry ice cream, strawberry milkshakes, all of it. Blech. And what the hell is up with Neopolitan? Why would someone ruin that delicious chocolate and vanilla with that horrendous pink stripe? When I was a kid my dad would buy Neopolitan ice cream and my sisters and I would attack the chocolate and vanilla leaving only this perfectly formed island of strawberry in the middle of the carton. Like a pink land bridge across the carton with remnants of chocolate and vanilla on either side. Come to think of it, that strawberry ice cream was nothing but an unwelcome implementation of segregation.