How to be popular

Tonight as I was weaving drunkenly toward the Den after what seemed like an interminable open house with two hyperactive girls bouncing at my side, I was hailed from across the street by one of the neighborhood children.

“HI, MRS. BOO BUG’S MOM!”

“Hi, uh, um, er, ah, Matilda!”

“CAN I COME OVER AND PLAY?!”

“Uh, not right now, sweetie, it’s 8:00 on a school night.” (I left off the part where we hadn’t had dinner yet, or looked at homework, or anything else.)

“OH, OK.” {pause} “CAN I COME OVER TOMORROW NIGHT?”

“Not on school nights, OK? You can come over on Friday if you want, though.”

“OK, COOL. ARE YOU GOING TO BAKING, YOU KNOW, ANYTHING?”

Ah, yes. How to be the most popular kid(s) in town: Have a parent who bakes stuff. This weekend we had a veritable herd of children constantly flooding through the Den. Children can sense baked goods happening. The news spreads through the whole neighborhood, faster than Twitter.

A coworker today dubbed this mystic power “Fritter: The ability to telepathically send the news of cookies, pies, pastries and so forth faster than news of a good shoe sale spreads through the Twitter-vine.”

Or so I understand. I was the last human on earth to get an iPod, I’ll probably be the last to sign up for Twitter too. $DEITY only knows how many sales I’ve missed already.

The most disappointing part of the cooking weekend was the baked goods. Not because they didn’t turn out, but because most of them didn’t make it into the freezer – Fritter saw to that. The turnovers were consumed while they were still hot enough to burn people. The bread dough that was supposed to be frozen got baked instead because the bread that got baked got eaten.

The only thing that made it into the freezer were some crescent rolls; and I suspect they survived only because the cookies took one for the team. And because nobody was around when I was doing the fun part, which is when you roll them out…



…and cut them into wedges…



…and paint them with a little butter…



…and roll them up into little crescents you’re sure are too small…



…but then they puff all up and come out of the oven regular-sized rolls.



If you get them in the freezer quickly they can last up to a month.

Or fifteen seconds if you leave them out on the cooling rack and Fritter gets wind of them.

In other news, this has been a long week already. Today I went off to work only to get a memo from the husband that I had to catch the earliest train home because of the open house I’d forgotten about.

There were mother’s day presents involved. Sigh. So I dutifully packed it in an hour early so I could catch the earliest train, which naturally led to a fairly robust delay on the BART line so that I missed the bus shuttle to Train #2 by a good nine minutes. Argh.

So the husband drove out and got me so that I could get to the open house on time. Which we mostly did. And then the middle two Denizens ran me all over the school twice and I came home and we had spaghetti with sauce out of the freezer and now it’s going on ten o’clock and I haven’t gotten half of what I’d hoped to get done, you know, done but tomorrow is coming fast and I’d better wrap things up and get to bed or else! and I really wish I could work from home tomorrow because I could use a full day of working but no there are Meetings and Missives and I said I’d come in tomorrow so instead of getting a nice full eight (or better yet, ten or twelve) hours of actual work done, I’ll get six hours in the office, only two or three of them spent working and the rest spent trying not to yawn in meetings.

And then get back on the train so I can catch the shuttle that gets me to the second train on time.

My life? Never ending rollercoaster ride of excitement.

Now with crescent rolls.

And maple baked beans, which incidentally are awesome and possibly addictive, and I need to make more because I only made a couple quarts and they aren’t going to last long.

'kay! Goodnight, sweet Internets, I must go wash the allergens off my face and hit the sack, so that I can get up tomorrow and do it all again…

…hmm, somehow that doesn’t sound as appealing as it might…