Tonight, I was munching on a box of deliciously hot and salty McDonald’s French fries (what? you think I don’t eat French fries? Oh…I eat French fries…) (you know what else I had? A Big Mac. Because I had to have one. RIGHT NOW! NOW-NOW-NOW, pull this van over and get me a Big Mac if you value your pathetic excuse of a LIFE!...if it weren’t scientifically improbable, I’d wonder if I were pregnant…) while stuck in some of The Most Hideous Traffic Ever when it suddenly hit me: It’s Thursday.
Have you ever had something like that happen to you? You’re all sitting there, kind of bummed out, tired, can’t-wait-for-the-weekend, task-list-from-hell-looming-over-you, and somehow in your brain it’s, like, maybe Tuesday, and then suddenly you realize OHMYGAH, it’s actually Thursday?
…and it feels kind of like the mental equivalent of thinking there was one more stair, but there wasn’t, and your brain is all, Qwaaaaaaang!!!!…?
The really funny thing was, I went from “can’t wait for the weekend” to “holy crap, I can’t possibly finish everything I wanted to finish at work this week by tomorrow! I need two more days!!” in an instant.
Funny how that works.
In case it isn’t obvious – it’s been a helluva week. The guy I was hired to help is on vacation for three weeks, and it is turning out that our many training and hand-off sessions focused entirely on the wrong things. (Or not enough of the right things. Although it does seem to me, now that I’m ankle-deep in Things and very tired of having to say, “Duuuuuuuh…wat u mean?!” all the time, that there sure seems to be a lot more I do not know than I do know, which frustrates me because I hate feeling stupid and guess what? Feeling stupid, an awful lot.)
ANYWAY. Yeah. I blinked, and it’s Thursday, and tomorrow is Friday. Holy smokes.
This morning, I spent my train ride starting to flesh out a Big Cook. It’s a sort of variation on the once-a-month cooking thing, where “variation” should be pronounced “oh my sweet loving $DEITY-of-choice, pleeeeeeeeeeeez tell me that fruitcake-woman isn’t jumping back into some hare-brained scheme or other!”
Which I totally am, of course.
SEE, here’s the problem: I don’t have a weekend in which to cook. I can’t spend Friday arranging my shopping list and mapping out my cooking-day moves; I can’t spend most of Saturday shopping and prepping, followed by a mad dash of cooking on Sunday.
I have nothing on Friday. Not a single second of free time. I have a few hours on Saturday, a few hours on Sunday (with all the chores normally done on Saturday crammed into Sunday, on top of Sunday’s usual and customary chores, which is another way of saying we are SO not going to have clean underwear around here next week)
Soooooooooo…I’m going to be sort of…splitting things up here and there. Baking in both ovens, using the crock pot morning, noon and night, setting up each night that week to make four meals worth of the dinner so I can freeze three of them…
Historically speaking, this hasn’t worked out particularly well.
But, undaunted by piddly little things like lengthy history of disaster…I’m going for it.
AND! Not only am I looking to make dinners…I’m also planning to make a bunch of dinner rolls, pasties, pre-packaged lunches for us (think ‘homemade Hungry Man’), desserts and so forth and so on.
Oh. And also, I have to find time to read through Artisan Bread in Five Minutes A Day. I’m a little worried about the texture – ‘artisan’ bread is awesome for eating and all, but how will it do making a PB&J for a picky five year old used to his mother’s thrice-raised “white” bread (I throw a handful of wheat germ into the mix – don’t tell him it’s not white-white, ‘kay?)? Time will tell…
Furthermore…I’ve abandoned the afghan already. I did four squares, and then I went, Oooh look, something shiny!
Or actually, chenille-y. I pulled out a skein of chenille I’ve had since Stitches West a couple years ago and went, This would make an awesome warm sweater for Boo Bug!
And then I measured her, and I used my knitting software to block out a basic design (plenty of interest in the yarn, doesn’t need much in the pattern), and then I started to unt-ugh…untan-gah…un-ok, WHAT is going on here…?
I swear to Dog, it’s like whoever wound off this skein was…drunk. Or had balance problems. Or secretly hated knitters and wanted to inflict pain on whoever bought it. It was so hopelessly tangled I almost threw it away. But then I remembered that it cost money, so instead I sat down and began patiently working at it.
A few hours later, I dumped it into my husband’s lap and he spent a few more hours working on it.
We both agree: It was possibly the worst yarn barf we’ve ever had in this house. Ugh.
But! It’s making a very pretty, very warm little sweater. Which I’d totally show you, if it weren’t downstairs and me upstairs in my sorry excuse for PJs and a guest still wandering around down there.
I’ll try to remember to take pictures tomorrow. Or Sunday. I think it’s going to be really cute; I also think there should be enough yarn left over for a matching hat. And maybe one for me, too.
Which would be good, because I think my ears are about to drop off my head. It’s cooooold out there, in the wee hours of the morning…
Anyhoo – that’s the what-passes-for-quick update around here. Craziness, commuting, eating strange things that may or may not actually be food, plotting a cooking marathon I can’t possibly actually accomplish, knitting, working oh! And trying to plan the spring garden – which, by the way, is coming faster than we think. It’s almost time to start the indoor seeds for those things we hope to be planting the instant the weather won’t kill them off…geesh, yet another thing to think about…
It is moments like these that make me wish I could just be, you know, normal and maybe get hooked on Heroes or Dances with Tuna or Survivorman v. Beastboy, The Anime Version or something.
But then again, I’d probably just get equally bad ideas from watching the shows.
That’s just sort of how I roll. Hey, you know what would be fun? We totally ought to build a tree house just like that one, and then use it to house chickens! C’mon, it’d be AWESOME!!
Recipe Tuesday: Hoisin Chicken Tray Bake
3 days ago
5 comments:
I adore 'Artisan Bread in 5 minutes a Day' but the texture is definitely chewy. But--if instead of leaving out on a board, you bag it after cooling, the crust will soften up quite a bit. Not entirely to white bread texture though.
I absolutely feel your pain over the "what happened to my week?" passage of time. Been there far too often. For me, this week's been more like a marathon of reruns - laundry yesterday, laundry today, and oh goodie! Laundry tomorrow! Gee, I wonder what next week will bring? Grrrr.
I do find it amusing that my verification word is "cordybra". Sounds like something Madonna would wear.
For a couple of months last fall, the only sandwich bread we had in the house was the white breadiest recipe in Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day. It was fantastic and wonderful. Then the peanut gallery staged a complete revolt after a visit to my father's house because the bread wasn't squooshy enough. I gave in and buy sandwich bread from the store now, but all the other bread in the house we bake and they eat.
please tell me that your older kids do SOME chores. It just sounds like you do everything. I know it seems easier to do it yourself instead of their not so perfect efforts but believe me you'll end up with a slacker like my 19 year old if you don't start 'em young (or sort of young)
A lurker with saaaad experience.
I'm not usually an advocate for spending money to "save" money, but how about you waste some of your hard earned $$$ on a bread machine? With your commute, it would be justified and, since they last for years, the amortized cost would is probably add 1 cent extra to the cost of each loaf.
- Pam
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