Fear and Popcorn

The other evening I was home alone with the boys, because the Hubster had to pull an overnight shift doing whatever it is he does in his highly technical job. (Some IT infrastructure mumbledy-jumble thingamabob.) Honestly, he tries to explain the specifics to me, but it's so hyper-jargoned, not to mention warp speed light years beyond my ability to comprehend, that the only defense mechanism I have is to smile and nod until he leaves the room.

But I digress. He was gone for the evening, and so The Adolescents and I popped some popcorn and sat down to watch an enriching evening of television: The MacNeill-Lehrer News Hour, Washington Week - it was all so informative and enlightening. It's important stay abreast of current affairs and remain politically astute.

What? WHAT??

Okay, FINE. We spent the evening watching truTV. Cops, Most Shocking, Forensic Files. Hey. It's kinda like current affairs.

Shut. Up.

Here's a hint for those members of the audience who are perhaps more paranoiacally inclined, and suffer from Chronic Worrywart Syndrome. (Not that I understand these things personally.)

If, in the course of events, your husband is going to be gone for the night and you will be alone in a dark and creaky house, it is not generally wise to watch, right before bed, several episodes of Forensic Files which all involve women being brutally beaten to death in their homes. It tends to make the imagination, shall we say, wander.

He finally returned home at around 2:30 am. At which point, I slept like a baby. It's so wrong of me to think, "oh good, now all the axe murderers are HIS problem." But, I kinda can't help myself.

Perhaps this is a signal from the universe that it's time to take martial arts classes.

more about me

I know, I know. It seems like I've totally neglected The Blog, doesn't it?

Well, I have and I haven't. See, I haven't written anything on the blog for almost two weeks. So in that sense, yes. Neglect. Guilty.

But I've been thinking about the blog. A lot. About whether I want to keep food blogging. (Answer: yes, but not exclusively.) About how I'm not a talented enough writer to be able to just turn on humor like a faucet, and yet humor, when I've got it, is my favorite thing to write. But? Sometimes I just want to be able to write without the pressure of trying to be funny. Really, there's only so much humor you can squeeze out of a polenta recipe.

I've also been thinking about my priorities, and how blogging fits into that. My first and foremost priority, which I take seriously, is as a homeschool facilitator for my boys. Their success depends at least in part on my availability. There are certain times (*Tuesday mornings, cough*) that I can't be tied up at the computer, either writing blog posts or spending time creating a network of readers - hello, all three of you!

I'd also like to include posts about what we're doing with school, because sometimes what we're doing is pretty cool. Sometimes it's downright mundane, and heck, there may even be a place for that in my writing.

I've also, at long last, decided to take seriously my attempt at Intuitive Eating. I've been messing around with it for over a year, and have never been brave enough to stick with it. But this is finally the time. And one of the things I've realized, already, is that while with IE I can eat baked goods for breakfast, lunch, dinner and midnight snack if I want to... well, I don't want to. Baking even once a week seems like overkill to me right now. I also realized that I want to bake what I choose, when I choose, even if some months that IS once a week - or more. So, if the TWD recipe looks good to me, and I'm in the mood, I'll happily bake along. If it doesn't, I won't. If I get kicked out of the club for some egregious rules violation...well, life will go on.

So there you have it, my current Momifesto. (It may change tomorrow.) Thanks for allowing me to get this off my chest; and now back to your regularly scheduled programming.

Ratatouille

Why, hello blog! It's been awhile. Apparently I do have a life. Go figure.

If you're here looking for a TWD post, you will probably be sorely disappointed. After reading the comments describing this week's Lemon Cup Custard as "eggy", "eggy", and as a variant, "eggy", I decided to bag it. It would have gone to waste.

If I sound a little cranky, it's just that I'm having a bit of a day, you see. A day that started at 12:40 am or so, when, having been in bed for a full 40 minutes, The Hubster and I were awoken to a sound of scritch-scritching in the wall right next to my side of the bed. Mere inches from where I had been innocently sleeping.

Now, I live in a suburban development. We have squirrels, chipmunks, moles (damn them!), skunks, rabbits, uncollared cats and even the occasional possum. Every member of this suburban menagerie has the decency to STAY OUTSIDE, where God designed animals to live. Up until this winter, I had never seen nor been aware of a mouse on our property. For which I have been very grateful. I am equal to a lot of tribulation, but mice are not on that list.

After spending over an hour huddled in the fetal position in my desk chair with my feet safely off the floor, The Hubster finally coaxed me back to bed, and promised that at first daylight he'd do a perimeter and attic check of the house. So at 2 am I laid, huddled in the fetal position in my bed with my feet safely off the floor, jumping out of my skin at every little noise that the house made, until my alarm went blaringly off at 7 am. Ugh.

This was the point at which I woke to find that my 15 year old was sick. Fever, malaise, serious hocking-up of louies. It wasn't pretty. He hadn't slept much the night before, either, and still couldn't sleep. I put him on the couch in front of Ken Burns' Civil War and let him doze. He tossed and turned, finally got up and decided to retake the algebra test that he had crashed and burned on earlier in the week. Didn't seem like a great idea to me under the circumstances, but what do I know?

He got 69%. Uff.

And that's when the diarrhea started. So now my house smells like poo, a fact that didn't really hit my nostrils until I was putting a spoon into a jar of Nutella.

It's not a good idea to be contemplating Nutella at the exact point that your brain registers that your house smells like poo. Because Nutella does bear a passing resemblance to, uh, yeah. You know what I'm sayin'. Needless to say, I'm kinda off Nutella for the rest of the day.

I need to go down to the basement to clean up after this debacle, but there may or may not be a mouse in my basement at the moment, and as a dear friend put it so delicately to me this morning, I am being totally pansy ass about this. I am stridently unapologetic about it, too. So there.

So, at shortly before noon, I am kinda ready to be done with my day. I am going to go now and find a comfortable chair where I can take a nap in the fetal position, feet safely off the floor.