Random Tuesday: All Wrong Edition

It is startlingly bright and sunny and cold today. It is, in fact, a beautiful day out today. But don’t let that fool you. It is still Tuesday, and therefore, it is still there, lying in wait, ready to pounce in a random fashion all over your unsuspecting ass.

• Bread hates me. This is nothing new. Everybody knows by now how the baking of bread only works if you have the full complement of hormones coursing through your veins; and I, as we all know, most definitely do NOT. And yet, I still try to bake bread. It is a compulsion, like lemmings running off a cliff. I have no explanation for Squamish. So, you can see where this is going: yesterday, I got it into my head to bake some bread. The reason was that we are on our last loaf of sliced bread due to an excess of grilled cheese sandwiches and peanut butter toast over the last little while, and I don’t want to have to face the grocery store more than once a week these days if I can at all avoid it. So I got it into my pea brain to bake bread. I still have the L (as in Lazy) so I followed my bread maker recipe and let it do the mixing for me. And it seemed to be okay, as I dumped the dough out and began to shape it into loaves to rise. Maybe a little small, but okay. So I popped the loaves into the oven, a warm spot, to rise. And I waited. And waited. And waited. Like, TWO HOURS I waited. And the damn things did not rise. AT. ALL. Well, maybe a smidge. But I thought, well, maybe they’ll puff up a little in the oven. And I am here to tell you, not surprisingly, that they did NOT. They came out of the oven two small, round, dense lumps. Which is a shame, because they smelled lovely and the bread therein, had it risen, was lovely and stretchy and all you’d want in bread. Except, you know, RISEN. So I cut those bad boys up and dumped them in the garbage. Le sigh. I blame dead yeast, which happens to me quite frequently, actually. And so today, do you know what I am doing? YEP THATS RIGHT BAKING MORE BREAD DONT YOU JUDGE ME. With a new, unopened jar of yeast. Fingers crossed, peeps.

• I have had a hate/hate relationship with our vacuum for years now. I hate it for being a useless and expensive lump of ineffective machinery, and it hates me because I curse at it so frequently and expect it to combat the disaster that is the carpeting in our (formerly four, now) three-cat, one preschooler, two adult-slob household. But we have been trying to be better housekeepers, and I have been trying to be nicer to our vacuum, and it has tried to respond in kind. And failed. Anyway. BDH has been saying for weeks that our vacuum has not been sounding the healthiest, but I haven’t honestly been able to notice a difference in the crap-ass piece of junk. So he was vacuuming on Saturday, upstairs, when I heard him hollering that “I think we might need a new vacuum”. So he came downstairs, and as it transpired, he was vacuuming when suddenly there was a not-normal noise, and the vacuum began to release the Mysterious Blue Smoke. And, as we all know from Mythbusters, once a machine releases the Mysterious Blue Smoke, it tends to stop working. So, we needed a new vacuum. And, I confess, inside, I was doing a little happy cheer. But then, DO YOU KNOW WHAT HAPPENED? Well, fellow babies, I am MORE than happy to tell you — WE BOUGHT A DYSON. Yes. You heard me. A DYSON. A DYSON ANIMAL. The best vacuum on the market is, right now, SITTING IN MY HOUSE LOOKING ALL SLEEK AND SEXY. Yes, we had to go into a little debt to do it, but we had to buy a new one, and I am a firm believer in “you get what you pay for” with technology. Plus, with cats and allergies and asthma, we needed something good. And oh my doG, peeps, I AM IN LOVE. It is the BEST. The thing damn near sucked up our entire carpet in one go. It is AMAZING. I may never stop vacuuming again.

• Today was the start of a new semester at Little Gym. Yeah, it was up and down for a while there last semester, but we bit the bullet and re-enrolled Stinkerbelle for another semester. Come the fall, we’ll start her in dancing, but she is still a little too young, so we kept her in the same class. So today, I went in, full of trepidation and the thought that some of the kids and moms we’ve gotten to know would not be there. All morning long, Stinkerbelle was shouting “SEE MIBBY!!!!” which was her way of saying she was excited to go to class to see her best pal Libby. But Libby’s mom did not re-enroll her, so we were alone. My first indication that this class was going to be a bust was the fact that there were no fewer than FIVE PREGNANT MOMS in the class. So right off, in introductions, they’re all talking about being pregnant and due dates and shit — not the best thing to endure when you are an infertile woman, I can tell you. But I figured I’d just ignore it, and class started, and I noticed that things were just… off. There was the dad, substituting for the pregnant mom, who was COMPLETELY UNABLE TO CLAP ON BEAT IN ANY SONG. Seriously. The class is full of singing and clapping along to little songs, and this guy could NOT clap on the beat. It was making me INSANE. I wanted to shake him and shout HOW HARD CAN IT BE WE ARE ALL DOING IT WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU??? But I did not. This same guy was letting his kid PULL STINKERBELLE’S HAIR AND TRY TO TAKE HER HAIR CLIPS/BOBBLES OUT. I may yet kill him. I have not decided. And then there was the fact that none of the parents seemed to be able to grasp the concept of directing their child so that nobody gets hurt. Kids were butting in line, and climbing over each other onto apparatuses, and getting underneath children who were on bars or climbing walls… and none of these dopes could grasp that if they didn’t start to intervene and teach and guide their kids to participate safely and take turns, somebody was going to get hurt. The biggest problem was that all the other children are CLEARLY younger than Stinkerbelle, so she was either well advanced in anything they asked her to do, or very bored. And that may be the significant issue right there. I am not going to pay that much for her to be bored for four months. So we’ll give it a few weeks, and see if it improves, and if not, we’ll try to switch classes.

• This week, my kid is scheduled to start speech therapy. I am not looking forward to it. I have heard good things about Wee Talk, but the woman who works the phones lacks telephone social skills and already I have a bad impression of the place. It may turn out fine, as these things often do. But I am no longer convinced, after waiting since July of last year, that my kid even NEEDS  speech therapy. Yeah, she WAS behind, but thanks to the ineffective organization doling out therapy appointments, A FULL 20% OF HER LIFE HAS GONE BY and quite honestly, she’s catching up in leaps and bounds. Kid never shuts up, and that is down to our hard work here at home. So I am tempted to say “screw you” to the whole deal. But not before I tell them how I feel they have dropped the ball. And, oh yeah, what a bitch their admin person is. Because I am helpful like that.