For any of you arriving here from Jo's Lifewithheathens, I did the meme on my other blog, Homework. For those of you arriving here from any other path, you probably don't care about the meme. But please still do come and visit. I love company. I do most all my writing over there these days anyway. I kept trying to keep the personal stuff and the crafty & house stuff separate, and I kept getting confused about what should go where(Yes, I confuse myself regularly-- wanna make something of it??) The other blog had more pretty pictures, so I stuck with that one.

Update on the pot roast and my fingers

The pot roast was very good. I will recommend that particular recipe to anyone. And my fingers are healing nicely. The thumb is the only one still bothering me, and that's jsut because the skin on it now resembles old dried out leather, catching on anything I touch. It could have been much worse.

The pain is enough to make a shy, bald Buddhist reflect and plan a mass murder

My apologies to The Smiths for that. But I burned some fingers today, and the pain is really indescribable. I was busy making pot roast for dinner, and fuming about my recent phone call to Verizon's Customer "Service" department (I'll save you the details, because I know most of you have been through that). I had just completed the initial cooking of the roast at 450 degrees, poured the gravy mix in, and was scraping some of the fond off the bottom of the pan. All of a sudden, my left hand decided to grab the searing hot 450-degree pan, scorching my thumb and three fingers. I really don't know why my hand did that. Surely my brain would not have told it to grab the hot pan right? Anyway, I immediately ran to the sink and ran cold water over it, the applied a cold pack to it for a while.

I have now removed said cold pack, knowing that I don't want to add frostbite to today's list of mishaps. So now the pure unadulterated pain comes. I've burned myself cooking before, but this time I basically got a second degree burn on my thumb print. The other fingers hurt, but the pain on my poor widdle thumb is really something else. And I'm allergic to ibuprofen.

As I am not a shy bald Buddhist, I have found that cursing under my breath is doing an okay job of keeping the murderous thoughts away. Now I have to get back to working here at my computer, one handed. I think that is a true representation of the idiom "to add insult to injury."

Spring time and superheroes

Yesterday, I looked out the window and saw a robin hopping through the back yard. I called the kids to the window, and we had a fun time watching him root around for something good. After a few minutes he flew away.

Fast forward to this morning. We were eating breakfast and Nigel pointed out into the yard and exclaimed, "Robin bird!" I looked out, saw a starling, and told him that he saw a bird, but not a robin. He looked at me and said, "Batman bird?" It was the funniest thing he's done in at least two or three days.

That boy sure does love his superheroes.

Yep, I jinxed it

I bought a couple of seed packets the other day, and the sky retaliated. The clouds spat upon me with frozen rain. And it remains cold and windy and dreary. Even the cardinals have stopped their chirping. The next 5 days' forecasts look the same. In like a lion, alright.

My fingers are cold. But I refuse to turn up the heat. If I went and washed the dishes, they'd be plenty warm. But where's the fun in that?

The meme: (With thanks to Elise )

1. grab the nearest book.
2. open the book to page 23.
3. find the fifth sentence.
4. post the text of the next three sentences on your blog along with these instructions.
5. don't you dare dig for that "cool" or "intellectual" book in your closet! i know you were thinking about it! just pick up whatever is closest.

"At the intermediate level of homebrewing, there are a lot of different procedures for the progressing homebrewer to try, each with its own degree of difficulty."

from Homebrewing for Dummies. It's actually my husband's book, but the meme was very specific that I grab the closest book.

The next closest one is Better Homes and Gardens Stitchery and Crafts, from 1970, In which page 23 is about crocheting embellishments onto a pillow. Oh, how I do love avocado green and orange together...

I hear birds chirping!

There is still a lot of snow on the ground, although it is now surrounded by slush and puddles. It will be over 40 degrees again today. By this evening, I expect to see grass poking through the snow in my yard. The sun is shining. But the best part? I can hear birds singing in the tree outside my family room window. If I hadn't crawled out of bed early while the kids slept, I would have missed it. You miss a lot of things when there are awake children in a house. The tend to fill up the senses.

But they were still slumbering, and I got to hear birds. Spring really will get here eventually, won't it? Maybe I'll order some vegetable seeds today. I've been holding off, for fear that I'd jinx it and we'd be under a blanket of snow until June. (superstitious megalomania, anyone?) And I'll walk to work this afternoon. No, it might be too slushy for that. And the sidewalks remain buried.

Baby steps, Robin, baby steps.

Fun with site tracking...

Since the inception of this blog, I've been using Statcounter to check how many people come to visit. (In case you are wondering, the answer is not many.) But I've recently found the handy dandy little feature that allows me to look at what you typed in the search box that landed you here. And sometimes, it's kinda funny.

A few months ago, someone found this puny entry whining about a sore throat by Googling: Why does my throat hurt when I walk

charlize theron looking like a oompa loompa led some poor searcher to my one attempt at fashion critique.

A surprising number of you have searched for $5 shoes. Who could blame you? We all love a bargain. Here's where they ended up. Someone also landed there by searching for fake chucks shoes.

Sometimes I find things out about my blog from the searches. For example, I invented a new word in this post in my other blog about Christmas decorating. I found out because someone in India searched for christmas window decorationing. oops.

And sometimes I find other gems on the internet this way. Someone searched for knitting pattern hat om symbol (My post was a rather boring one about making an OM dishcloth) . Since I, too, would like to knit a hat with th OM symbol in it, I clicked on the same search. It led me to The Panopticon. What a great blog, if you like knitting and pet sheep and wit. And everyone loves those things, right?

Keep searching, people. You just never know what you'll find.

Whiny Monday

I'm feeling very whiny today. I hate Mondays. After a lovely weekend of having my husband home to keep the children from tearing down the house while I try to do anything, Monday leaves me here alone with them. And the unwashed dishes. And the rest of the laundry. I got a phone call that lasted all of two minutes, until I heard my daughter holler, "Mommm, Nige is coloring on the floor!" But the floor wasn't really the problem. By the time I got off the phone and walked the 4 steps to the kitchen, the artist had applied purple crayon onto three drawer fronts, and ALL over the dishwasher. Just what I wanted: another thing on the to-do list ot household drudgery.

Have I mentioned that Mr Crayon Artist has a cold? Damn he's cranky when he is sick. I cannot blame him, but it's hard to deal with all the same. Especially as I have the same cold.

Today's word of wisdom: Telling a 2-year-old to 'stop whining' doesn't work.

In case you are laugh-deprived

I must first apologize for the tardiness of this post. It's been rattling around in my head for weeks, but between the Holidays and my penchant for procrastination, I'm just now getting around to writing it out. And yet, it is still not well-written.

The history: A couple of years ago I stumbled upon a page that showed some Weight Watchers Recipe Cards from 1974. They are scary. Very scary. And funny. I have loved that site so much, I've even popped back there just to get a much-needed laugh every once in a while. It just might be one of my favorite corners of the World Wide Web.

Whilst shopping on Amazon for a couple of Christmas gifts, I broke down and bought The Amazing Mackerel Pudding Plan: Classic Diet Recipe Cards from the 1970s. It really was a necessary purchase, as it helped get me that much-sought-after Free Shipping. After all, why pay shipping when you can spend a few more dollars and get a book, right? So I waited for it to come in the mail. I started reading it and realized that it might be the best ten bucks I've spent in a long, long time. If ever you've wondered why people were so crazy in the seventies, it might be because they were eating things like the Frankfurter Spectacular or maybe Marcy's "Enchilada" and washing it down with lovely drinks like the Slender Quenchers, a lovely combo of bouillon and sherry extract (extract??). And the book has even more of the spectaular debacle that was. Ew.

Previously, I had believed that there were intense socio-political issues, causing the oddness of that decade. But now I know that it is all Weight Watchers' fault.