Filed under: random whining
This Saturday there is a craft & bake sale at Sport’s school to help raise money for new playground equipment. In a moment of complete and utter insanity, I volunteered to donate baked goods. It was a process of elimination, really – I couldn’t really volunteer my time, since that means finding someone to look after Sport, which is a chore at the best of times. I certainly wasn’t going to have a craft table, since my idea of crafts hasn’t really progressed past popsicle sticks and play dough. But baking? Ok, sure, I can make a few dozen cookies and toss ‘em in ziplocks, right?
Yes. Yes, I could have done that. Or I could have taken leave of my senses and forgotten that I SUCK AT BAKING, and gone for something slightly more ambitious. Here’s how it went down:
Tuesday night: discover the existence of something called “Cake Pops“, which my bloggy friend Danielle made for her kids for Halloween. Hers were little pumpkins, and they looked freaking adorable. I clicked around the site for a bit and found these ones, and thought, hey, those are great! And only 3 ingredients! Wait… I could totally make those for the bake sale! (Insert ominous music of your choice here.)
Wednesday night: stop on the way home from work to buy yellow candy wafers, lollipop sticks, and edible ink pen. Can’t find edible ink pen, so buy a tiny tube of black decorator icing. That’ll work, right? After supper, bake cake, cool, crumble and mix with icing as per directions, form into balls, insert sticks, and stick in the freezer. Man, this is a breeze.
Thursday night: arrive home from Scouts at 8 pm (why, why do they always run late?) and start melting wafers. Retrieve first pan of pops from the freezer. Melt wafers and begin!
Here is pan # 1 of frozen cake pops, ready and waiting to be dipped. Lookin’ good!
Here is the assortment of containers I tried to use – unsuccessfully - to prop up the dipped pops so the candy coating could harden without getting flattened on one side.
Here is the apparatus I finally came up with, which holds only 3 or 4 pops.
Here is the first completed pop. Looks great doesn’t it? Yeah! Go me! So what if it took 10 minutes to get one pop finished… the rest will be quicker, right?
Here’s what happens when the frozen cake pops thaw before you dip them. Which, as it turns out, takes about 10 minutes.
This…
or this….
So back the tray of pops went into the freezer. Right… I’ll do the faces on the ones I’ve dipped while the rest of the pops re-freeze. Here’s how that went:
Decorator icing in a tube doesn’t set. Who knew? Probably everyone in the world but me, that’s who. Let it dry for an hour, put it in the freezer, use less… no dice. It doesn’t set. Which means there is no way I am going to be able to bag these, they’ll just get wrecked. (Forget the ominous music, insert string of bad words of your choice here.)
Well… maybe I can still salvage this. Plain yellow? Bo-ring. Sprinkles??? Yeah, maybe sprinkles…
Okay, no, not sprinkles. Dammit. Well, maybe I”ll just eat this one while I try to think of some other way to make this work. Here’s what happens when you try to take a bite out of a cake pop:
And the kicker is, the bite I got… I didn’t enjoy. Bland, and kind of gross texture. Seriously… I am going to all this trouble to make something that doesn’t taste particularly good?
Here’s where the rest of the cake pops went:
(I just heard a shriek of anguish all the way from the South Canyon Ranch. Yep, I threw cake in the garbage again.)
Not pictured: my trip to the bakery on the way home from work tomorrow to buy some cookies to throw in ziploc bags. No one will know I didn’t bake them, right?
I am BEGGING you, please, please, teach Room 6 a new song on the recorder. If I have to listen to “Hot Cross Buns” one more time, I’m going to scream. I have heard it. The grandparents have heard it. Friends have heard it, neighbours have heard it, even the DOG is starting to slink away when the recorder comes out. Can we please, please, move on to Three Blind Mice? Or Mary Had a Little Lamb? Or ANYTHING???
Filed under: random whining
… that the universe wants me to stay fat. Seriously. The stars, they are aligned against me.
Back in July I started a 12 week workout/diet program. Then I got sick halfway through week 1. Then we went on holidays. And … yeah, Fail #1. I tried again at the end of August, and oh, what happened? Week 1 down and whammo, head cold followed by that whole ear/sinus infection and the resulting antibiotic rash from hell. I couldn’t even walk up the stairs at work, never mind do cardio or weights, and it’s not like I was cooking healthy food either – more like heating up chicken fingers and fries. Fail #2.
But since I am a glutton for punishment and all, I got motivated and found a different program that needs less daily time investment and should show results in 8 weeks. Right! 8 weeks! I can do this!
Monday was day 1. Check! Tuesday, day 2… by midday I was feeling nauseous and light headed and had the mother of all headaches. And a sore throat. No. NO NO NO NO NO.
Yes. By evening I was incapable of exercising, and by this morning I could barely swallow yogurt and had to drive Sport the 4 blocks to school since I didn’t think I could walk that far. Hmm, lasted only one day, that might be a new record for FAIL.
Filed under: random whining
In case you are wondering what would happen if you went out on a cold, rainy morning and ran 5K when you hadn’t been running at all for the last three months due to various colds and infections and a critical lack of time…
… the answer is, a pulled hip flexor and a recurrence of patellofemoral syndrome (aka knee pain that makes it impossible to go down stairs or slopes.) Two days later and I”m still staggering around groaning like an 80 year old.
That is it. No, really that is IT. I am getting back in shape if it kills me, and it might.
Filed under: random whining
Yesterday I tried a new route home from work and was picking Sport up from daycare less than twenty minutes after I walked out the door of my office. Seriously! Holy speedy commute, batman. That was a full 10 minutes faster than my previous best time.
This morning I took the same route (well, in reverse, obviously) on my way to work.
And I was 10 minutes late. This makes absolutely no sense, since the morning drive is usually much faster than the evening one.
So, did I just hit some bizarre gap in the time-space-traffic continuum yesterday? Or are the traffic gods trying to make me go insane? Or what?
… and his stupid law. Because wouldn’t you know it, three weeks after starting Sport at the home-based daycare, I get a call from the in-school centre saying oh, we have a spot for him now!
Sigh. Cause that’s what we need right now, another change in routine. I briefly considered asking if they could go on to the next person and let us sit on the list for a few more months, but with my luck, “a few more months” would be next December or something. I asked for a day to think about it, but it really makes no sense to turn the spot down. (We’re talking a permanent spot in the centre attached to his school, which is open during school holidays, summer, etc. And it opens early enough in the morning for me to easily catch the bus to work.)
Sport is not going to take this well at all, though. He has become very tight with one of the other boys in the home daycare, and already complains if I pick him up even five minutes early. I’m thinking of compromising by continuing to send him there after school – that way he can still have his playtime with his buddy, and I still have an option open in case the daycare is a disaster for some reason. Logistically this wouldn’t be any more difficult, it would only cost $1 more per day, and it might soften the blow of yet another change. Or maybe it’s a stupid idea. I have no clue anymore, really.
Filed under: random whining
Today is day 9 of the 10 day course of antibiotics I was prescribed to beat my sinus infection (which actually turned out to be both a sinus and an ear infection.) I started feeling better around day 5, and things went uphill from there.
Until this morning, when they dropped off the edge of a cliff. Why? Because I woke up looking like this:
Arms, legs, chest, feet, neck…. it’s brutal. At least it’s not on my face, but that may only be a matter of time. Stupid amoxicillin. If you’re thinking I should take Benadryl, well, that’s what it looks like AFTER a lot of Benadryl. And if you’re wondering if it’s itchy… HELL YES.
(No, I’ve never had a reaction to antibiotics before. But then again, in the last twenty years I think this is only the second time I’ve taken any. Normally I’m pretty healthy, I swear.)
Yeah, so remember how this week was going to be ugly? Sadly my prediction has come true. First of all, I wasn’t actually feeling better by Tuesday, since it turns out I had an ear infection as well as a sinus infection. The antibiotics seem to be finally kicking in, since I have only had to take painkillers once today. So basically I have been sick for two weeks, which means that the house is a disaster area, the lawn needs a swather, and Sport has eaten a LOT of chicken fingers for supper.
Other than that, things seemed to be going smoothly. The new daycare went well. First swimming lesson went well. Dentist appointment this morning went startlingly well, considering that Sport has some really mutant baby teeth (yes, that’s the technical term for it) and therefore needs a lot more scraping, chipping, and gouging than the average cleaning would require. Roll on, nice smooth properly-enameled permanent teeth. Anyway, he was an absolute champ at the dentist.
Which brought us to this afternoon’s “Triad Conference”, aka meet the teacher. It’s an informal little chat about the upcoming year, how the class routine goes, here’s your desk and coat-hook, etc. We had already been to the classroom last spring, so some of it was already familiar. Frankly, I thought this was going to be the easiest part of my week. Yeah, that oughta learn me. It was the meeting from hell, because Sport suddenly became possessed by Dennis the Menace, or the Bad Seed, or possibly Satan. (You think I’m exaggerating, but at one point he told the teacher he wasn’t going to do homework, because homework is EEEEVIL.) Yes. My cooperative, school-loving, teacher’s-pet of a child was sullen, uncooperative, borderline rude, and tried to drag me out of the room more than once. He pretended he didn’t know how to read. He wouldn’t find his name on things. He was a NIGHTMARE.I don’t know what on earth was going on, and after we left he couldn’t explain it either.
So part of me thinks I should take a few hours off work tomorrow morning and take him to his first day of school myself. The other part of me thinks I should leave him at daycare and run like hell. Option B is probably going to prevail.
Filed under: random whining
…. barely. Last weekend’s head cold morphed into this weekend’s sinus infection. And naturally, this is the first gorgeous weekend we have had all summer and I had all manner of activities planned. Instead, I have been sleeping and Sport has been watching an insane amount of movies. We did get out briefly yesterday to the park for a round of mini golf and a pedal boat ride, and this afternoon tried out a Parks Canada geocaching activity (they rent you the GPS and a booklet giving you clues to find the waypoints and solve the “mystery”.) But now I need to lie down for another 12 hours or so, which is problematic since I will have to actually feed the child supper soon. I figure I’ll probably be feeling better just in time to go back to work on Tuesday. Boo.
It’s that time of year again…. fall. (Not that we had any summer, but that’s another rant.) Which means back-to-school, which means money. It’s not so much the school supply lists (although really, 4 different kinds of notebooks? For grade 1?), it’s the shoes. Yep, shoes. Sport currently has a grand total of one pair of shoes that fit, if you don’t count flip flops. They’re a bit beat up but still in once piece, and although he has grown out of all the other ones that size, for some reason this brand still fits. I thought, ok, no biggie, I’ll buy him another pair for indoor shoes at school and we’ll be good to go. After all it will be snow boot time pretty soon anyway, right?
Yeah. Then I sat down and did the math, and realized he actually needs four pairs of shoes. Yes, four. One pair to actually wear to school. One pair of “indoor shoes” to change into when he gets to school. One pair of “gym shoes”, as demanded by his school supply list. And a pair for indoor soccer. (In theory his gym shoes could also be his indoor soccer shoes, but that would mean he would have to remember to bring them home every Wednesday and take them back again Thursday morning. Chances of that happening: slim to none.) So in the last two days I spent $70 on three pairs of runners.
I, on the other hand, am still wearing shoes from 2005. Which have been glued back together 3 times. Ah well.
