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Aug. 4th, 2009 02:10 pmOccasionally, I need to be reminded why I don't knit with either straight needles or metal needles. OW. *winces* Bamboo circs all the way, baby. *clings*
Aug. 4th, 2009
life in the fast lane
Aug. 4th, 2009 05:29 pmSo, at about 6:30 this morning I woke up, thought, "I think I'm going to be doing a lot of baking today," and went back to sleep for another three hours.
The upstairs shower has been leaking for the better part of, oh, six months now, so after repeated attempts by my parents to fix it on their own, we finally got a repairman to come and look at it today. Granted, about an hour before this was due to happen, I came downstairs to eat something, failed twice to make tea (damn you, fancy Japanese jasmine! You produced tea for me this morning) before giving up on the tea balls and going over to loose-leaf green tea instead (this is a funny story), and decided to bake something. Upon quizzing my father to see if he would prefer (MORE OH MY GOD) blueberry muffins or peanut butter cookies, I decided on the peanut butter cookies. Boiling water at the same time for wind-up number three on the tea front, anyway.
I forgot to half the recipe like I usually do and only noticed this when I was spooning up a cup of peanut butter, which meant that we were going to get approximately ten million cookies, but whatever, we can freeze five million of them, yes? Yes. Cookies are in progress, I finally have my cup of tea (SUCCESS! Do you know how annoying it is to want tea desperately and consistently fail at making it -- so far as I can tell, the boiling water was probably not hot enough or something; this time, I damn well boiled it -- and just. want. YOUR GODDAMN TEA), and for once I actually have all the ingredients; the last time I made peanut butter cookies I was running out of flour and I did run out of peanut butter. Also, half the cookies didn't have as much flour as they should have, so they came out really flat and kind of weird. After I shed my rings (at this point in time, I'm wearing six, and I very seldom take them off; I think the most I've ever worn was nine, a couple of years ago) and was happily rolling up balls of cookie dough, my mom comes home, goes, "Oh, cookies! I'll have to wash all that before T. (the repair guy) gets here." The first sheet of cookies goes in the oven, I start in on the second, and the repair guy gets here so the pump has to be turned off so he can fiddle with the shower. I finish up on sheet number two, and since we only have two cookie sheets, make up the balls for the third one while waiting for sheet number one to come out of the oven, anxiously eyeing the running water in the sink as I try and use up as much of the dough as I can.
And, of course, just as I finish rolling the last ball, the water runs dry. And I have DOUGH-ENCRUSTED HANDS, with flour and butter and dough and peanut butter all over my hands, and there is no water. I ended up just rubbing most of that off with a paper towel, since the alternative was going out and sitting with my hands in the irrigation ditch, trying not to fall in. Cookies from sheet number one come out of the oven, go on the rack, but oh no! Sheet number one is hot because it, well, just came out of the oven! Usually at this point we'd run cold water over it to cool it down so that we can put the remaining ten dough balls on it, but we have, uh, no water.
So my mother gets out four ice cubes and puts them on the sheet instead, and I amuse myself by making them chase each other around the cookie sheet while batch number two bakes. They finish, the ice cubes melt, sheet number one is dried off and the remaining ten dough balls go on, are pushed flat with the tines of a fork, and go in the oven, while batch number two cools off, then transfers to a rack. Meanwhile, there is a steadily growing pile of unwashed dishes growing by the sink.
Since T. is puttering around in the bathroom trying to figure out what's wrong with the shower and my room is down the hall past the bathroom, I elect to remain downstairs and read the newspaper, where the headline story is about some woman who collects babies. (Okay, that's very unfair and sounds bad; she has three adopted children who she got as babies and one biological child, plus a husband.) No outstanding editing errors spotted today. (Like, in the past, misspelling people's names multiple times -- including in a classmate's death notice -- and misspelling United States Air Force, if you can believe that.) I take batch number three out of the oven and transfer it to the rack, trying to make room amongst the ten million (okay, forty-five) cookies I ended up baking. My father stares out the window waiting for the mail to come; he's expecting a check and he wants to go to the bank.
The mail does not come. For a long time. When it eventually arrives, there is no check, but there is the latest issue of Glamour. I don't usually read magazines, but hey, I still don't feel like going upstairs (sorry,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
aella_irene), so I start flipping through Glamour, which sometimes manages to be fairly interesting. I also have Sunshine, which I'm rereading (thus the baking, probably), but hey, Glamour has my attention right now; I'm reading about how to improve your posture and what men's sexual fantasies are and also, thirty-six things every woman should know about money.
T. comes downstairs, announces that he cannot fix the shower because he doesn't know what brand it is. Shower is approximately fourteen years old and the store we probably bought it from is out of business (OH EAGLE'S). Thus, shower still leaks. He leaves, I finish the article I'm reading and finally start doing dishes, nursing my second cup of tea, and then I flee the kitchen and come back up here to tell you about my very exciting afternoon. (I also discovered I hate knitting with metal straights, but we went over that already.)
But the peanut butter cookies tasted good.
ETA: Shower brand name is on the knob, which my mother notice but neither my father nor the repair guy did. Clearly the women in this household are the ones with actual observational skills. (We are also the ones who pointed out that the battery in my dad's ATV was probably run down; he thought it was some kind of fancy problem. It was the battery.)
ETA2: Oh, and not only didn't I get the Pell grant I expected, but my tuiton went up by almost a grand. Thanks a lot, Tulane. That is a bad combo, just for the record.
The upstairs shower has been leaking for the better part of, oh, six months now, so after repeated attempts by my parents to fix it on their own, we finally got a repairman to come and look at it today. Granted, about an hour before this was due to happen, I came downstairs to eat something, failed twice to make tea (damn you, fancy Japanese jasmine! You produced tea for me this morning) before giving up on the tea balls and going over to loose-leaf green tea instead (this is a funny story), and decided to bake something. Upon quizzing my father to see if he would prefer (MORE OH MY GOD) blueberry muffins or peanut butter cookies, I decided on the peanut butter cookies. Boiling water at the same time for wind-up number three on the tea front, anyway.
I forgot to half the recipe like I usually do and only noticed this when I was spooning up a cup of peanut butter, which meant that we were going to get approximately ten million cookies, but whatever, we can freeze five million of them, yes? Yes. Cookies are in progress, I finally have my cup of tea (SUCCESS! Do you know how annoying it is to want tea desperately and consistently fail at making it -- so far as I can tell, the boiling water was probably not hot enough or something; this time, I damn well boiled it -- and just. want. YOUR GODDAMN TEA), and for once I actually have all the ingredients; the last time I made peanut butter cookies I was running out of flour and I did run out of peanut butter. Also, half the cookies didn't have as much flour as they should have, so they came out really flat and kind of weird. After I shed my rings (at this point in time, I'm wearing six, and I very seldom take them off; I think the most I've ever worn was nine, a couple of years ago) and was happily rolling up balls of cookie dough, my mom comes home, goes, "Oh, cookies! I'll have to wash all that before T. (the repair guy) gets here." The first sheet of cookies goes in the oven, I start in on the second, and the repair guy gets here so the pump has to be turned off so he can fiddle with the shower. I finish up on sheet number two, and since we only have two cookie sheets, make up the balls for the third one while waiting for sheet number one to come out of the oven, anxiously eyeing the running water in the sink as I try and use up as much of the dough as I can.
And, of course, just as I finish rolling the last ball, the water runs dry. And I have DOUGH-ENCRUSTED HANDS, with flour and butter and dough and peanut butter all over my hands, and there is no water. I ended up just rubbing most of that off with a paper towel, since the alternative was going out and sitting with my hands in the irrigation ditch, trying not to fall in. Cookies from sheet number one come out of the oven, go on the rack, but oh no! Sheet number one is hot because it, well, just came out of the oven! Usually at this point we'd run cold water over it to cool it down so that we can put the remaining ten dough balls on it, but we have, uh, no water.
So my mother gets out four ice cubes and puts them on the sheet instead, and I amuse myself by making them chase each other around the cookie sheet while batch number two bakes. They finish, the ice cubes melt, sheet number one is dried off and the remaining ten dough balls go on, are pushed flat with the tines of a fork, and go in the oven, while batch number two cools off, then transfers to a rack. Meanwhile, there is a steadily growing pile of unwashed dishes growing by the sink.
Since T. is puttering around in the bathroom trying to figure out what's wrong with the shower and my room is down the hall past the bathroom, I elect to remain downstairs and read the newspaper, where the headline story is about some woman who collects babies. (Okay, that's very unfair and sounds bad; she has three adopted children who she got as babies and one biological child, plus a husband.) No outstanding editing errors spotted today. (Like, in the past, misspelling people's names multiple times -- including in a classmate's death notice -- and misspelling United States Air Force, if you can believe that.) I take batch number three out of the oven and transfer it to the rack, trying to make room amongst the ten million (okay, forty-five) cookies I ended up baking. My father stares out the window waiting for the mail to come; he's expecting a check and he wants to go to the bank.
The mail does not come. For a long time. When it eventually arrives, there is no check, but there is the latest issue of Glamour. I don't usually read magazines, but hey, I still don't feel like going upstairs (sorry,
aella_irene), so I start flipping through Glamour, which sometimes manages to be fairly interesting. I also have Sunshine, which I'm rereading (thus the baking, probably), but hey, Glamour has my attention right now; I'm reading about how to improve your posture and what men's sexual fantasies are and also, thirty-six things every woman should know about money.T. comes downstairs, announces that he cannot fix the shower because he doesn't know what brand it is. Shower is approximately fourteen years old and the store we probably bought it from is out of business (OH EAGLE'S). Thus, shower still leaks. He leaves, I finish the article I'm reading and finally start doing dishes, nursing my second cup of tea, and then I flee the kitchen and come back up here to tell you about my very exciting afternoon. (I also discovered I hate knitting with metal straights, but we went over that already.)
But the peanut butter cookies tasted good.
ETA: Shower brand name is on the knob, which my mother notice but neither my father nor the repair guy did. Clearly the women in this household are the ones with actual observational skills. (We are also the ones who pointed out that the battery in my dad's ATV was probably run down; he thought it was some kind of fancy problem. It was the battery.)
ETA2: Oh, and not only didn't I get the Pell grant I expected, but my tuiton went up by almost a grand. Thanks a lot, Tulane. That is a bad combo, just for the record.