The Turkey Loaf

Monday Evening - Sometime during Monday Night Football

I walked into the living room and stood in front of LJS, the only way to get his attention away from whoever was playing football on television. "Hon, Can you get the turkey out of the freezer to thaw? We are having a turkey, right?"

"Yeah. No problem. I'll do it next commercial."

I had no reason to doubt him, so I walked back into the office.

Tuesday Evening

"Hon! Turkey. Turkey. Turkey."

"Oh crap! Okay, I'll do it in a second."

Wednesday Afternoon - Sometime around 1pm

I was sitting on the couch eating Frosted Flakes when it suddenly occurred to me that there wasn't a turkey thawing in the refrigerator or sink. "Dang it!" I thought, and then picked up the phone and dialed LJS at work.

"Hello, Sweet Baby, what's up?"

"You forgot to get the turkey out."

"Oh shoot!" I heard him sigh in frustration, "Great, now what?"

"Well, if we get the turkey out tonight we should be able to thaw it in a water bath."

"Okay... Why can't you get the turkey out?"

"Well, for one, I don't know where it is."

"It's in the main freezer."

"Main freezer? Which one is the main freezer?!"

"The one in the garage."

"We have two in the garage."

"It's the main one."

I'm on the verge of laughing out loud in disbelief. "Okay, so the one when you walk through the door?"

"No, the other one."

"Okay, I'll get it out."

We hung up and I walked into the garage, something that is generally a pain in the ass considering that the dogs always know you are coming and are prepared to weasel themselves out of lock-up. That probably wouldn't be so bad if they didn't also know how to hide themselves under the bed until you had no choice but to leave them out.

I shut the garage door behind me and looked to my left where the, apparently "main", freezer was located and the first thing I noticed was about 10 lengths of molding leaning against it. Great. As I got closer, I also noticed the anchor. Not completely insurmountable. But then, I noticed the bungee cord wrapped around the handle. Upon checking, I noticed that it was too tight for me to unclasp.

The turkey would have to come out that evening, but as luck would have it... he forgot again.

Thursday Morning - Three hours before we planned to have dinner

"So, am I going to the store?"

"For what?"

"Well... I guess if we want turkey it's going to be a turkey loaf."

"Oh... yeah."

Standing in line at Fred Meyer I have never been so embarrassed. My little turkey loaf sat on the conveyor belt for all the world to see.

A Thanksgiving low.

LOL... it got funnier during the preparation of dinner, however. Everything in the oven cooking and I'm pulling out china and crystal and serving dishes counting what we would need against what we were preparing to eat.

"Hey, I thought you got rolls."

"I did."

"Well, where are they?"

"In the freezer."

I went into the kitchen and opened the freezer door. "Hon, are you talking about these rolls? The Rhodes ones?"

"Yeah."

"You uh... realize that it takes hours to thaw and cook these?"

"What?!"

"They have to rise."

"How long does that take?"

"3-5 hours"

The silence coming from the other room was ominous, so I sought to lighten the tension. "Oh, don't worry. We'll just eat them when we have the turkey."

Did I forget to mention that the only reason that we have this turkey is because we kept forgetting to get it out to thaw a year ago? Check back in the year 2020, we'll probably still have it!

2007

I want this year to end.

As far as years go, this one has been... not bad, anything with Short Person in it could not be bad... it just hasn't been the best it could be, or that good. I forget what the Chinese Horoscope is (the dog, maybe?), but I do remember that it specifically said I would not catch a break. As much as I don't really subscribe to horoscopes, it seems that this one was true.

Even though there is still a month and a few days to go, I can feel relief on the horizon. How much I want to lay down on the 31st of December and wake up on the 1st of 2008 and remember nothing of the bad things.

Just cut myself off from it and let it go.

Let the emotional stress of losing a friend go...

Let the work load that has ruled my last 9 months go...

Let the house repairs fade into the background...

and just bounce.

An Anti-Climactic, Climactic Week

I've been working a month now on redesigning the City's website. It went live on Tuesday and is a total transformation from what it used to be. I'm so incredibly proud of myself.

However, after working and working on it, after teaching myself all kinds of HTML code to get things looking the way I wanted them, after getting more an more excited every day about how good it would look and looking forward to the "Wow's!"... I only got one.

It's weird, I think. I didn't expect whistles and bells and horns, but all in all the final completion and publication of the website has been rather anti-climactic. It actually reminds me of Christmas as an adult. You work and work and wrap and wrap and look forward with anticipation to the people's faces when they open gifts (especially if you have kids) and then after an hour of unwrapping... it's over for a year.

********************

The climactic part of this week came today when I got to move into my own office. Before you get all excited though, it wasn't for a promotion. No, I was just helping out a friend that had trouble dealing with the cold in the summer (for whatever reason the air-conditioner runs full blast in this office) and overwhelms her with heat in the winter (same system).

Me, I'm just happy for it because now I can (hopefully) tune a lot of the chatter out. We'll see. Right now, I'm just trying to get used to the weirdness of having all this space. Which, in retrospect is actually funny. I have so much "stuff" that when I moved out of the front office it opened up an incredible amount of space! We went from "we need a bigger office" to "Gee, we just needed to move her out!"

********************

Short Person sliced her thumb open last night. Poor thing. She was holding on to her hand as Daddy washed and bandaged it, all the while crying in spurts, in a tone just spilling with dismay, "But Daddy! It really, really hurts!"

I think that she thought we didn't believed her. "No, but Daddy! It really, really hurts!"

On a different note:

This morning, she had a melt-down because she was calling for her Princess Dora doll. We looked through all her buddies and couldn't find her and I only got her out of the house to go to work by promising that we'd look for her after I picked her up.

However, in the car, she asked me, "Mom, I just don't understand. I was calling and calling for her! Why doesn't she answer me? Why is she hiding from me?"

She sounded so heart-broken that I couldn't bring myself to have this conversation about how Dora was a toy and couldn't talk, so instead I turned it into one of those motherly things and responded, "Well Honey, maybe she just didn't hear you. You know how mommy calls you sometimes and you don't answer?"

"No."

"You know, when you get busy with something? Maybe she's just busy."

"Oh. Okay!"

LOL...

The House Is Duuu... *Sound of screaching tires echoes*

I spoke too soon.

The ironic part is that I knew I was speaking too soon.

I was cleaning the house, vacuuming and celebrating as LJS put in the last door. Our house was done, save two door knobs and about 10-feet of molding. A year and a half of working on our house and it was finally done.

I was dreaming about a "Thank God our F-ing House is Done" house-warming party and going through the guest list in my head. Fantasizing about pictures, both before and after, posted here and at DropShots. I was looking forward to when I could clean my house and not have it still look as though it were in disarray.

Like now.

And then in one gut-wrenching moment it all came to a halt.

I had asked LJS to put the medicine cabinet back up in the bathroom. Should have only taken a few minutes, but as we found out soon enough, the anchors holding the screws into the drywall had been stripped and needed to be fixed. LJS sat on the bathroom counter to do this minor repair and that's when it happened.

The granite countertop, the same one that the guy so horrifically screwed up on... the same one that we had thought we'd fixed, shifted on the cabinet. It cracked in half, dropping down from the backsplash and dislodging the sink.

It was one of those rare moments when I actually thought I could vomit my stomach was so upset... all the while trying so hard to make sure that LJS stayed on this side of sanity.

I'm hoping insurance will cover at least some of it, since it will take nearly twice as much as what we paid to have it replaced, but my hopes are slim.

This whole bathroom thing has been the best/worst thing for this house. It seems like if we fix one thing, another is just waiting in the wings to break.

Sidewalks and Doggie Poopie Bags - The Mine Fields My Mind Wanders Into

I was sitting with a friend and talking to her about her husband's Beeotch of a parole officer. I won't go into too many details about how this situation came about (how we got ourselves a parole officer) because it isn't my story to tell, but will say that the parole officer has mentally given herself much more power than she should be allowed and gets off on screwing with people's lives. Yeah, he got into trouble, but she really seems to make things as difficult as possible-- almost as though she's daring the person to get angry and do something that would violate the terms of the court.

My friend had called her and yelled at her about getting off of her butt and doing something that she was supposed to do... oh, about three weeks before (sign papers allowing her husband to come home). The parole officer gave her a song and dance about how this and that had to happen and how they changed the process, blah, blah, blah. The necessary papers had been signed by the Judge three weeks ago, but she hadn't gotten around to doing her necessary paperwork and was trying to tell my friend that it would take another two weeks or something. Plus, they had to mail over the paperwork.

My friend, who I love to death, says point blank, "Why don't you just walk your lazy ass over and get the fucking thing? AND, YOUR paperwork should have been done weeks ago. YOU dropped the ball. He was supposed to be home three weeks ago, NOW GET OFF OF YOUR FAT ASS!" (I may have messed that last part up, but I know it was close.)

I am equally delighted that she had enough guts to say exactly what she meant to say, and horrified that she's done this because with Murphy's Law at work in the world, she'll get caught doing something and get a parole officer. Specifically, that parole officer. So I start in on the "Okay, just... no killing anyone, no stealing, don't get caught pooping on the sidewalk..."

Oh jeez. It pays sometimes to think about what you are saying before it comes out of your mouth. Poop on the sidewalk?! We cracked up laughing. We laughed until our sides hurt, until tears were streaming down my face, until I felt like I would die laughing because I couldn't catch breath.

You might think that just that sentence alone really isn't enough to garner such laughter... and you'd be right. It wasn't the poop on the sidewalk thing, it was the speculation about whether you'd have to bring a poop scoop and if you didn't whether you'd get fined... whether a leash around your neck would keep you from being arrested... whether they'd be putting up signs showing a human stick figure with a leash around it's neck and a pooper scooper in its hand... and how exactly I would broach the conversation about whether pooping on the sidewalk was in the City Code or not.

It was an hour of disgusting hilarity I will never take back.

Conversations with Short Person

I sat down to talk to Short Person about owning a Bunny. We were at the park, sitting on the step to the structure. I was drinking coffee and she was sipping strawberry milk from her "coffee" cup.

I was attempting to make her understand how much care a Bunny would need and get her to talk about what her plans were in owning one. Attempting to figure out what she was going to do when she got him home, I'd ask such questions as "What are you going to feed it?" and "Are you going to cuddle with it?"

She seemed to have it in her head that she'd take it home, put it in its cage and when she got older she could play with it. I didn't quite get that and tried to explain that she'd need to play with it before she got older, to which she'd respond, "But see Mom, I'm older now." It was a confusing conversation.

We talked about the dogs and how daddy would miss them, and about how they might try to eat the bunny.

Finally (I thought) I'd made her understand that owning a bunny right now might not be a good idea. She sighed and seemed kind of sad for a minute and then looked at me and asked,

"Well, can I have a crocodile then?"

*****************

Last night, LJS and Short Person sat down to re-watch Transformers with me. Neither of them had seen it. If you know how much LJS hates movies, you will note that this ranks up there with *shocking* on the charts.

I was worried about Short Person because there is a lot of shoot 'em up violence in it. I was worried about how this would affect her well-being.

In the movie, one of the Transformer's is named Bumblebee. He's a yellow camaro that transforms into a robot. Short Person latched onto him like a koala in a tree. For two hours it was "Where is Bumblebee?" "Is Bumblebee okay?" "Did Bumblebee get his feelings hurt?" "Are Bumblebee's friends coming to save him?"

LOL... She loved Bumblebee and the violence only worried her to the extent of whether Bumblebee was going to be okay.

*****************

The other night I was limping. As occurs way too often for my taste, my knee slipped out of joint and then back in leaving this residual soreness mixed with a bit of "take it easy or it will do it again".

LJS looked at me and asked why I was limping and I told him. He chuckled and responded, "I think you're just getting old."

As is typical of the little rug-rat, Short Person looked at us and in a dead-flat voice said, "You're both getting old, Dad."

This, after a day at Grandma's. Grandma told her that she (Grandma) was special. Short Person responded, "Grandma, you're not special... you're old!"

Sheesh!

*****************

I know somewhere in my memory bank there are more. She's been on a roll lately. Unfortunately, I can't think of any more.

Rest assured if I do, you'll be the first to hear about it!

I Ate Crow This Weekend and It was YUMMY!

Friday night I got together with a couple friends of mine to hang out and watch movies. I hadn't gone to the video store to pick one up, figuring that I might have a moderately non-girly movie that they hadn't seen that we could watch. (Apparently, I don't. They are all girly.)

Paul had a couple that he had recently purchased-- Fantastic 4 RTSS, and Transformers.

Sometime around the point where I was singing the Transformer's theme song and telling him that only 14-year old boys watch transformer movies, I was told that I was going to (basically) be tied to the couch and forced to watch the movie.

WHICH SO TOTALLY KICKS ASS!

I told him this, and all I can say is that I admire his restraint because had it been me, "I told you so" would have been written on my face, flying from my mouth, and written all over the walls.

Even the soundtrack rocks. I've so totally become a Transformer's fan, it's not funny.