I have to tell a funny thing Christa did the other day.

There were some kids at our house coloring at our kitchen table with "Norwegian" markers.  I say Norwegian only because they came from our Norwegian friends who live next door.  We weren’t here when the coloring incident took place, but I guess the kids got "out of the lines" a little bit and onto our new kitchen table.

If these were Crayola’s they had been using we wouldn’t be posting about this, but since they were Norwegian markers they left colorful marks that felt a bit more permanent (if you catch my drift.)  Christa called our Norwegian friends and said (essentially):  Help!  What do we do?  How do we get these marks off our kitchen table?

Our calm Norwegian friends said, "Oh just use some Jif, that will take it right off."

Christa hung up the phone and went for the Jif.  We didn’t have any so she went for the next best thing.

That didn’t work either…

So she called our faithful friends back.  "We don’t have any Jif, can we use yours.  All we have is Skippy…"

Without missing a beat or questioning Christa at all about her statement, our friends said, "Sure, you can borrow our Jif. Come on over…"  (They live next door.  We lived with them for a few weeks when we first got here.)

I went and retrieved the Jif.  Oblivious husband that I am, I wasn’t really tracking with the situation.  I absently looked at the bottle of cleaning substance in my hand.  The only words in English were CIF and in smaller letters: JIF is now CIF.  Interesting I thought.

When Christa saw what I had brought and discovered what it was she busted out laughing.  "Oh", she said, "JIF is cleaner!"

Like George Washington Carver conducting a new experiment, Christa had tried to remove the marker stains using Skippy PEANUT BUTTER!!!  No wonder it hadn’t been too effective.  Maybe if she had added some jelly?

Our ex-pat friends got a kick out of this, especially our Norwegian neighbors.

It seems that the American brand names for peanut butter is not a universal.  (I kept saying to Christa, "But isn’t the peanut butter called Jiffy?"  Shows you what I know.)