So once at holiday time, all of my siblings and I were coming home the same year. It rarely happens anymore, though this year everybody who has a spring break miraculously has them the same week, so we're doing the get-together at the folks' house in March.

So every day or two another kid came home from wherever, slept through the night, and turned up in the kitchen in the morning, wanting coffee. Or tea. Or something that involved microwaving a cup or two of water to near-boiling temperatures.

During the year, Mom had bought a new microwave to replace the one most of us remembered. It was a time, in the dark ages, before user interfaces were standardized, and when there were still glaciers abroad in the world.

So every day or two, the latest arrival would be in the kitchen, sleepily scattering commands off the microwave, until the secret revealed itself. "Ah," we all said. "Reverse Polish." Bippity beep beep whirrrrrrrr. Voila!

"What's that about?" Mom asked, on kid number 3 or 4. So we told her.

I'm not sure this was the same winterval, but it's a similarly amusing story involving serially arriving siblings all reacting in the same words to a kitchen stimulus. Some time the previous summer, Mom had made deviled eggs or an egg salad or something to take to a picnic, which involved hard boiling a bunch of eggs. Accordingly, she affixed a piece of tape to one of the egg holders in her refrigerator, and marked it "boiled". It being mid-winter, the boiled eggs had long since made the ultimate sacrifice, and just at that moment, the egg holder was occupied by batteries, which, we're told, hold their charge longer when they're unused if you refrigerate them. I, myself, keep standby batteries in the freezer in a bag.

"Mmmm," said one sibling after another, staring into the fridge. "Boiled batteries."

My freezer bag full of batteries is not marked "boiled."

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Is it me, or are the ads this year disturbing?