17 March 2000

Technically, given my ancestry, I should be wearing orange (I'm part Scot and no part Irish) but I look much better in green, so there you are. Besides, I'm pretty well situated to enjoy St. Patrick's Day. My maiden name is Luck. Hey, it didn't occur to me when I was going through that tedious name-change process after I got married, but I can now say, "Luck is my middle name!" How cool is that?

And as long as I'm mentioning Lucky things, the day Matt and I got married, one of our guests found a four-leaf clover in the church yard. He picked it and held on to it all the way through the ceremony, and gave it to us in the reception line. We've still got it - we pressed it in our guest register.

At any rate, for the majority of us, St. Patrick's Day is a pretty bloodless holiday. Wear a little green, tease people who forget, do a little drinking. I understand Chicago goes to some trouble for the holiday, dying the river green and having a rather elaborate parade. It sounds like fun, but I'm not sure I'd want to fight the crowds for it. So for a holiday that's fun and doesn't really carry much significance, I'm willing to play along. Happy St. Patrick's Day!

K.T.'s having a belated St. Patrick's Day party tomorrow (late so that her husband and his friends from work - all of whom have to work tonight - can attend.) Which means, I suddenly remember, that I really need to go to the store tonight and pick up some eggs and something to drink. Heh. Excuse me while I just jot a note in my PDA...

K.T. dropped by our house last night while Matt and I were eating dinner. She was on her way home after her salary and benefits negotiations, and was feeling too excited to go home and sit by herself until Kevin got home at 11. For the first time in over a year, she's got a real job. (By "real" I mean a full-time job that isn't a temp position.) She's pretty happy about it, despite the rather long drive she'll be making.

I'm happy for her, myself. She and Kevin have been having a lot of financial trouble lately, and Kevin is getting fed up with being jerked around at his job. Steady work for her means that they can start to pay off the accumulating bills and Kevin can start looking for something better.

The local cable company is going to be laying a new main cable - we got a notice in the mail asking us to let them know if we'd laid any underground sprinkler systems or lights. Yesterday, the NoCuts people had come by and sprayed our whole side of the street with orange and pink paint, marking other buried lines, like power and phone lines. Our yard is studded with little flags and paint. Annoying, but temporary.

And that was it, until K.T. wondered aloud last night, "Look how high up into your yard the paint goes. They're not going to dig up your yard, are they?" Then I started wondering just where the new cable would be laid. Would they dig up our new mulch bed? Disturb my plants and tree? Surely not! But then again, perhaps...

So I'm fretting. I don't really care if they dig up our grass; there's not much of it anyway. But I'm going to be quite upset if they dig up my plants.

16 March 2000

The collection of floppy disks I've filled with pictures taken on my digital camera has finally overflowed the section of the floppy box I'd set aside for it. It works out to a little over 20 megs of pictures, and I decided to go ahead and put them on a Zip disk. (When I get to the point where I've filled several Zip disks - which won't be for years, if I keep going at this rate - then I'll put them on CD.)

Last night I finished copying the last of the pictures over. Of course, it wasn't as simple as just copying all the files over; they're all named similarly on each disk, so as I copied one disk's files over, I had to rename them. And it seemed logical to rename the files based on the date the pictures were taken so aid in organizing them.

So now I'm contemplating a database for the disk to keep track of each picture, when and where it was taken, what it's of, what the event was (if there was one), who's in it... Everything I might ever want to know about or search for particular pictures of. But that'll take a good long while; there are well over six hundred pictures so far.

But I was going through them last night, briefly, in order to rotate the pictures that were taken sideways, and it was interesting to watch things change - or not change, as the case may be. It was especially interesting to watch the last couple of months of the house being built. I tend to look at our yard and think it still looks only half-finished, but when I look at the pictures from June and July, I realize how far it's come. (We still need to work on grass, though.) To be honest, remembering that stress, I'm amazed we ever made it through. I'm even more amazed that we managed to move in on time.

Looking even briefly at pictures from our various parties made me smile. We throw good parties, if I do say so myself. (I teased Matt at the beginning of February - we'd thrown a party at the end of August, the end of October, and the end of December, so obviously to continue the pattern we'd have to throw one at the end of February. He wasn't amused. But K.T. ended up throwing her moving party, so at least someone had one.)

I hope the collection will continue to be interesting as the years go by. I love going back through my old photo albums. Every now and then it occurs to me that I should write down people's names and the circumstances of each picture soon, before my memories grow even more fuzzy. I love pictures. They're windows into the past.

In the fuzzy haze of my mostly-asleep brain this morning, I decided that it was Matt's turn to put the cat out when he got to be annoying. And when the cat came in and started playing with my alarm clock, Matt grumbled and groaned about it, and that decided it. I gave it a minute or so in the hopes he would volunteer, and then gently shook his arm. "Sweetie? Would you put the cat out, please?"

He sighed, grunted his assent, and sat up. The cat, alerted that someone was moving, raced to the foot of the bed and curled up. It was like catching a four-year-old roaming the house after bedtime and watching them run back and pretend to be asleep. Matt, who by this time was standing, looked at me. "Do you still want me to take him out?" he asked hopefully.

Knowing, as I did, that if we simply went back to sleep, the cat would just be a pest again half an hour later, I told Matt to go ahead and take him out. "I can't believe he did it again, though!" But now we know: At four in the morning, the cat doesn't really want to be fed, nor does he want attention and affection. He just wants us to be awake.

Alas.

15 March 2000

I really ought to start writing things down right away. Last night at dinner, I made up about four things completely off the top of my head in response to questions from my brother. I can remember thinking, "I should tell the journal tomorrow what a fantastic bullshit artist I am," but of course I can only remember one of the examples, and it wasn't all that impressive.

Oh, well. Matt and I decided to hell with the diets (amazing how that matches the year-ago link) and had dessert - hot apple pie with extra brandy-butter sauce - Mmmmmm... And we went to Barnes and Noble after dinner and I bought a couple of books to get me through the month of not being allowed to buy things before our anniversary.

Speaking of which, does anyone have any ideas of what to get a guy for a romantic gift? I keep giving Matt goofy, silly presents, and while some of them have been obvious hits, I feel sortof dumb because I can't come up with an idea for an anniversary present that's actually romantic.

I've got three ideas for things to get him this year, and they range from childish and silly to completely bizarre and silly. Maybe I should push for him to pierce an ear so I can spend a couple of years buying him jewelry. Would it be really lame if I got him porch furniture or a new battery for his watch?

Of course, he's been complaining for weeks now that he has no idea what to get me, either. I'm sure he'd appreciate any suggestions you have.

Three-thirty this morning, the cat jumped up on the bed and started batting at my alarm clock. This is a noise that drives me crazy, so it woke me up right away. Groggily hoping that if I gave the cat enough room to lie down, he would, I scooted over, then reached out and forcibly turned the cat away from the clock.

He looked at the newly-cleared space, shrugged, and lay down. I closed my eyes gratefully, thinking it would be at least another half-hour before I'd have to get up to put him in the garage.

creakclickcreakpop

I opened one bleary eye. The cat was still lying down, and batting at the cord. I sighed and sat up. Usually, the cat would jump up and precede me down the stairs, trying his best to trip me on the stairs. This morning, he lay there and looked at me.

I put on my sweatpants, stood up, and looked at him. He looked at me, and then rolled over into my space just a little bit further.

"You faker!" I told him. Matt woke up. "Huh?" Oops. "Nothing," I said. "Go back to sleep." Matt didn't need to be told twice.

I picked up the cat, and he started purring. Sigh. Slowly, mindful of my bad feet, I plodded down the stairs and deposited the cat in the garage. He was quite happy to stay there, as long as I put the food dish in with him. Dumb cat.

I plodded back up the stairs to bed, and while I'd been gone, Matt had taken the Oatmeal Bear (a small teddy bear I'd given him for Valentine's Day) and placed him carefully on my pillow. Irritation melted, and I crawled under the warm and cozy covers and snuggled up to my husband and went back to sleep.

14 March 2000

Mike lost his cat yesterday. I don't mean she ran off and hasn't come home, yet. I mean that Friday evening she got hit by a car and yesterday morning the vet told Mike that he thought she should be put to sleep, because the alternative was for her to live the rest of her life crippled and in pain. After a lot of agony, Mike agreed with the vet.

It was a somber, quiet day in our office. There was work to be got on with, and we got on with it, but the usual jokes and goofing around were absent. It was a poor welcome-home for Becky.

In the afternoon, I got an e-mail from him explaining what had happened. (When he came to the game on Saturday, he'd thought the cat would be able to pull through.) Except for a brief eulogy to Viber, I've summed up what he said, so there's no need to publicly post his pain here.

I actually want to discuss the very first part of his mail, though, the part where he said, "I'm not good at speaking words, so I figured I'd write down what happened. It's easier for me to explain things this way."

I knew what he meant. I've been keeping this journal for over a year, and a lot of the stories and anecdotes I tell here are also told to friends verbally. Some of them are much better stories when I can include facial expressions and body language. I've omitted stories from this journal because they had no impact, written down.

But some things are easier to convey through the written word. Especially dark or hurtful things. When I was laid off from 3GI, feeling betrayed and hurt just at the very moment I'd begun to rediscover enjoyment in my job after months of dissatisfaction - I couldn't have spoken anything as eloquent as the open letter I sent to my notification list. It's a trifle melodramatic, but still, I think, very good. (If you're not a member of the list, you'll have to join before you read it. Now that I have a journal again, it's a very low-volume list.)

Today's year ago link is another good example. I couldn't have told Matt that it bothered me that we watched a lot of television. It would have come across as whiny nagging. But written, I was able to explore the vague feeling of frustration I felt without letting my emotions get carried away and over-exaggerating.

That's what the written word does for us: It allows us to lessen the intensity of our emotions and therefore keep digging beyond the point where the spoken word has dried up in our throats. As a result, the written word is both more distant and more intimate than the spoken word, at the same time.

My brother is coming to Williamsburg today. He'll have lunch with my dad and me, then run some errands during the afternoon, and then come and have dinner with Matt and me this evening. (With gas prices the way they are, I'd suggested that he make just one trip to Williamsburg instead of two.)

It's funny. I'd thought that by the time I was this close to thirty (and my brother into the second half of his twenties) we'd be independant adults. And we are - John's been on his own for a couple of years, living on his own and scraping together a living as a teacher. I just bought a house, for petesake.

But we all still treat each other like my brother and I are still in college. My dad tells me that Mom fusses at him to take me out to lunch more often. When John comes to town for a visit, we all leap to take him out to lunch or dinner.

Do we ever stop feeling the need to take care of our siblings? Will there ever be a point at which I meet with my brother and can listen to his troubles sympathetically without trying to help him out?

Guess I'm just feeling introspective today.

13 March 2000

It started with my mom looking at my Zaurus and being interested in it. She wanted to borrow it for a while and see how she liked it. She offered me her Palm Pilot in the meantime, but I waved it off and let her walk off with my Zaurus.

Then it was time to go to work, but I thought I'd go in late so I could spend some time with my daughter. I picked the baby up and cuddled her and took her over to Anita's to show her off. She was a beautiful baby. Her big blue eyes kept rolling around, searching... "She's definitely a daddy's girl," I told the others who were there. "I haven't actually been able to hold her since I got home from the hospital." The others chuckled, assuming I was exaggerating, but I wasn't - Matt insisted on doing all the baby-carrying, and the baby just pandered to him.

A whiff told me that she needed to be changed, and I realized how much I'd grown used to Matt caring for the baby - it hadn't even occurred to me to bring along the bag with diaper-changing equipment. Anita laughed and gave me a diaper to use, and then mixed a vitamin D powder up with some milk to put in a bottle for her. (I felt like a terrible mother - I hadn't even known you were supposed to add vitamin D powder to milk.)

While I was feeding the baby, I realized that it was already after noon, and I should call work and tell them I just wasn't going to make it in today, so I handed the baby to someone to hold, and picked up the phone... and realized I had no idea what the number was for my office. I guessed a couple of times, wrongly, and then remembered I had it in my Zaurus... And then I remembered that my mom had borrowed the Zaurus.

And that dream is why I'm still tired this morning.

We did a lot of work on the yard this weekend.

Friday, after verifying that my part of the project did what I'd wanted it to do by that preliminary deadline, I went home early, and decided that I'd start breaking the ground where we were going to plant some plants and put down a mulch bed.

A blister formed on my thumb in the first five minutes of wielding the shovel, but I'd only barely started, so I decided there was no point in giving up so early. I thought I'd keep going until I'd turned over the dirt (clay) - and I'd let Matt break it up and add peat moss to it when he got home. I remembered the gardening gloves I'd bought, put them on, and kept going.

Forty-five minutes later, I'd turned over all the dirt and broken up most of the bigger chunks of clay. It looked terrible, like some dirt monster had puked in a triangle around our tree. So I thought, it wouldn't take much longer or be much more effort to go ahead and turn in the peat moss. I lugged out the half-bale we had left and dumped shovels-full of peat all over the triangle.

That barely took five minutes, and the CD I'd popped in Matt's boom box was still going, so I started to turn the peat under, breaking up some more clay as I went. I finished that at about the same time the CD ran out, so I sat down on the porch and drank several cups of water and looked proudly at what I'd accomplished.

Then I looked at the plants destined for the mulch bed, which were sitting on the porch. I was going to have to plant them anyway, I reasoned, since Matt had made it clear that this was all my "vision" - so I lugged myself up and carried the pots down into the yard, then went into the garage for my gardening tools.

I had four big pots of sturdy decorative grass ("mondo grass" for the curious), and my original intent had been to cut each pot into several chunks and spread the chunks out over the bed, so they'd spread to cover it. I gave that up when even with a knife, I couldn't cut through the tight-woven root network in the first pot. Quickly re-evaluating my plan, I dug shallow depressions in the dirt and dumped the roots and their attendant dirt in. Roots that thick will probably spread the plant without my help anyway.

The three pots of strawberry parfait dianthus (light green plants with beautiful pink-and-fuschia flowers) went one to each corner of the triangle I'd dug. I discovered one of the plants was disintegrating - I think it had been under-watered during the week it had spent on the porch - but the rest of it looked relatively healthy, so I'm hoping it will recover now that it's in the ground and getting watered regularly.

With nothing else to do until Dad brought over the mulch, I packed up my tools and put them in the garage (and boy do I need a set of shelves for gardening crap), turned on the sprinkler, took off my muddy shoes, and collapsed on the couch. A few minutes later I heaved myself back up to get a band-aid for my blisters (which to my astonishment hadn't burst after I put the gloves on). The whole thing had taken me about an hour and a half, including time spent leaning on the shovel and wheezing.

Matt harumphed at me anyway when he got home a bit later.

Saturday, my dad and brother came over in the morning with a truckload of mulch. I'd told Dad that there was no way Matt and I could use more than half a truckload - and even that would be a lot - but he'd gotten an entire truckload anyway. (It was still cheaper than buying mulch in bales, since Dad's truckload was only about $10.)

John was there only to visit with me and Matt, so he mostly just stood around chatting while Dad and Matt shovelled mulch into the wheelbarrow and hauled it over to the designated beds and dumped it, and I scooped it around the bases of the plants and raked it smooth.

I'd been worried about the mulch covering and killing my grape hyacinths, which are all still fairly low to the ground, but Matt came up with the idea of taking the pots left over from the mondo grass and dianthus and putting them upside-down over the flowers while they shovelled the mulch. We werent' sure how to protect the daffodils - which were taller than the pots - until I thought that maybe the pot the tree had come in would be tall enough.

Mulching the new triangular bed and the area around the bushes only took about an hour and a third of the mulch. (There are pictures in the photo album, go look!) When it was over, we took Dad and John out to Second Street for lunch, and then went home to relax and prepare for my AD&D game.

Due to some pretty ugly storms on the Southside, Greg called to cancel, but K.T., Mike, and Matt did all right after I'd scaled down the forces they'd be facing a bit. I'd been worried that the plot I'd cooked up wouldn't have enough for K.T. to do, but she managed to make herself very useful, actually. And as usual, the players surprised me, though once I thought about it, I realized it shouldn't have.

The plot involved helping a dwarven woodsman rescue his children from the clutches of an orcish tribe - the orcs had taken them to be slaves. This tribe actually had a fair number of slaves, and when the three crazy dwarves started actually winning the orcish women, children, and slaves who hadn't been chained to the wall - the broken ones who'd been serving at the feast - ran for it. They took a hidden passageway to escape, and at that point I'd assumed the characters would free the captives chained to the wall, loot the place, and go.

They left the woodsman watching over the freed captives and pursued - not to kill the remaining orcs, but to free the rest of the slaves. As I said, I should have expected that, but it hadn't been part of my original plot. I had to very quickly invent something, because it was clear that they had no intention of stopping until they'd tracked them down.

When I told Matt later that everything after the dwarf's children had been freed had been made up on the spur of the moment, he was surprised, so I guess I carried it off pretty well.

All in all, I had a pretty good weekend, even if my back is still sore today. I'm still mildly obsessed with gardening, but I have plenty of directions to take it. If nothing else, my tulip sprouts are starting to look wilted and brown - I think I put too many of them in a single pot - so I may attempt to transplant some of them to a new pot and hope that helps. And there's still the neverending battle to make grass grow on our clay.

Sometime this week, Matt and I will take my brother out for dinner, and Saturday K.T. is hosting a St. Patrick's Day party. (It's a day late, but Kevin and the people he works with that they want to invite are working Friday night.) She's asked everyone coming to bring something that's either green or Irish (potato skins, for example) to the party, so I need to come up with something for that, and make it.

10 March 2000

Spring is spoinging all over my yard! Last weekend, we planted a tree, and all week I've been telling Matt, "The buds on it are getting bigger!" He's been humoring me, but I could tell he thinks it's in my imagination. This morning as we left the house, I pointed to it: "Those are almost leaves!" He was forced to agree with me - off quite a few of the limbs of our tree are small, red leaves. Hurrah! We didn't kill the tree!

This morning, I have two fully-bloomed daffodils and at least a dozen thriving grape hyacinths! I was so excited (after being certain a few weeks ago that improper planting had killed both) that I took pictures this morning. The little herb starter-kit that I bought and set up on my kitchen window has shoots in all six pots this morning! (That's two pots each of lemon basil, catnip, and spearmint. I'd have bought the kit just for the spearmint.)

About the only thing that isn't sprouting at the moment is the grass seed I put down early this week. We've been watering every day, but it doesn't look like anything's happening in the grass department. I'm not sure if we need to give it longer, or if the seed we had was too old (left over from last September), but we'll probably give it another week before deciding what to do about it.

Assuming I don't have to work late tonight, my chore for this evening is going to be starting to dig up the bed where we're going to plant some decorative grasses and flowering plants in a mulch bed around the tree. Our yard is 99.9% packed clay, so before any real plants go into it, it needs to be turned over, broken up, and mixed generously with peat.

Depending on how that goes, I may also start breaking some ground on the side of the house for a small garden bed. One of the things I've always said I'd do when I got a house is plant tomatoes - I really miss fresh tomatoes in the summer. And the south side of our house gets plenty of sun. It would just be a narrow bed, but depending on how much effort I'm willing to put into it, there's plenty of room for a couple of tomato plants and maybe a vine of squash. (Hmm. We may need more peat.)

Tomorrow, assuming clement weather, my dad is going to come up with a truckload of mulch and help us put down our mulch beds. The bushes up close to the house could really use a heavier layer (though we'll have to be careful not to smother the flowers) and then we'll put down the bed around the tree. I plan to be up and in the yard working fairly early, because I'd like to get all this finished by early afternoon so I have a little time to plan for my game, which will be tomorrow night.

It promises to be a busy weekend. See you on the other side!

9 March 2000

I'm right at the end of a project at work, and it's been consuming so much of my mental energy that yesterday, driving home, I was trying to think about what I'd write about this morning and not having any luck. I mean, it's one thing to talk briefly about interesting projects, or to complain about people that drive you nuts, but I'm pretty sure even my most fanatic reader doesn't want to hear about how I spent nine hours today tracing through something like two thousand lines of code line by line, looking for the stupid pointer error that was making the whole thing blow up in unpredictable spots.

So that's all I'll say about it. But I was despairing of having a halfway decent journal entry: "Work hell. Tree budding. Flowers growing." Like that.

But then T made dinner for us.

I'd like to state in his defense that T isn't a very experienced cook, and that Matt and I were hovering around the kitchen while he worked distracting him rather a lot. And if it had been only one or two minor blunders, I probably would've just shrugged and moved on.

But the first mistake or so got him flustered, which contributed to more mistakes, which got him even more flustered, which...

Let me start at the beginning.

T had told me that he was planning on making beef stew, which I know from experience is best if allowed to simmer for several hours, but can be rushed for a reasonable meal in about an hour. T lives just about an hour away from us, so I was figuring he wouldn't get to our house until about seven, which meant dinner would be ready around, oh, 8:30-ish. A bit later than we're used to, but not horribly so.

T called around 6:45 to say he was on his way, and didn't get to our place until 7:30. (This is actually pretty amazing, considering the usual state of traffic on the main roads between us.)

Matt and I helped T bring in his bags of groceries and unpack them. T had assured me that he needed nothing more than a large pot and a spoon from my kitchen, so I got those out for him as well. Assuming he knew more or less what he was doing and would need only guidance around an unfamiliar kitchen, I sat down on a stool at the breakfast bar to watch.

It swiftly became obvious that T didn't know very much about onions. He'd brought two gorgeously huge onions - each one the size of both my fists put together - but one of them was sprouting, and he was struggling to get the skin off. I, being the onion freak that I am, started twitching and finally offered to chop the onions for him. He relinquished the cutting board and knife with something like relief, and I started chopping, stripping out the center which had gone mealy as the onion sprouted. The second onion was rotten, but since it had rotted from the inside, this wasn't T's fault - those are pretty hard to spot. I replace it with a couple from my own stash, and soon had a bowl full of stew-sized onion bits.

In the meantime, T had asked Matt if we could spare some butter. His recipe called for two tablespoons, and since he was halving it, he only needed one. Matt pulled out a partial stick of butter, left over from my spate of holiday baking, and put it on the counter. When next he looked around, T was melting the whole six tablespoons of the stick in a second pot. (T had mentioned the marks on sticks, so he knew they were there - I guess he just assumed that what Matt put in front of him, since it had already been cut, was the amount he'd asked for.) While Matt showed T the marking on the wrapper that corresponded to one tablespoon, I got the butter dish and scooped out the unmelted bit, leaving him with perhaps four tablespoons. But since the butter's purpose was for sauteeing the onions, the extra wasn't going to hurt anything.

T dumped the onion pieces into the pot with the butter, nearly completely filling the pot. (There were a lot of onion pieces.) Following his recipe, he then added the mushrooms, though since each mushroom slice was almost as long as my hand and half as wide, they could have stood a little chopping first, too. This caused the amount of food in the pot to heap over the edge of the pot rather significantly, and after some thought, T decided to transfer the meat - which was done browning anyway - to a strainer, and put the onions and mushrooms in the big pot. I applauded the decision and fetched out the strainer.

Safely once again underway, I sat back down on my stool. Matt asked T if he could help, and T consulted his cookbook and asked Matt to measure out a cup and a half of broth and add to it a cup and a half of flour. It's probably indicative of how drained I've been from work that this didn't set off any warning bells. After Matt had combined the two and complained about the flour being lumpy, I fished out a wisk to help him, and then curiously leaned over to glance at T's recipe, mostly because I was getting hungry and was hoping it would be done soon.

Just as Matt was pouring the broth/flour mix over the beef, I saw it: 3 Tablespoons flour I put my finger down on the book. "T..." He looked down. "Three cups of burgundy wine," he read.

"No, above that," I corrected.

He looked at the book. He looked at the pot of paste-covered meat. He looked at the book. Horror began to spread over his face.

This was the point at which I more or less rudely shoved him out of the way and took over. I did this for several reasons. I've been cooking since I was about eight, and while I don't usually enjoy it, when I put my mind to it I'm very good at it. T had made a series of mistakes that any beginner could make (and probably every beginner has) but it needed a more experienced cook to recover the meal. I started adding water to the thickening paste and told T and Matt to open the bottle of cooking wine.

They struggled with the corkscrew for several minutes before Matt decided to take the plastic wrapping off... and the plastic screw-cap popped off in his hand. We dumped everything into the large pot with the onions and mushrooms and added about half the bottle of wine. When I'd added enough water that it looked like the flour would stop baking itself to the bottom of the pan, I dragged everyone out of the kitchen and we chatted while the mess simmered.

Half an hour later, we were back in the kitchen. I gingerly tasted the broth. It tasted like beef-and-onion flavored paste. So I had Matt fish out the beef and as much of the vegetables as he could, and dumped them into a bowl. With most of the pasty broth gone, the beef and vegetables were actually pretty reasonable.

But this morning, the downstairs still smells vaguely like burnt flour.

Just so T won't think I'm picking on him exclusively, I've made some pretty spectacular blunders myself.

My very first experience with cooking was when I was five or six - my first grade class got together as a group and made cupcakes. There were three teams: one made the cupcakes, one made and spread the icing, and the third decorated the lot with sprinkles. I was on the team making the cupcakes, and since I was the best reader in the class, it was my job to read the directions off the box to the others.

I got my first hint that something had gone wrong when the cupcakes were still mostly liquid at the end of the baking time. They firmed up after another five or ten minutes, but by then I'd consulted the box and knew what had gone wrong: The directions called for three egg whites. I'd told them to put in three eggs.

Everyone agreed that the cupcakes looked lovely, that the icing was very tasty, and that the cupcakes themselves were disgusting. I can remember sitting in my chair, miserable, wiping the icing off my cupcake with my finger and eating it (like the rest of the class) and being sure that they were all staring at me - that they all hated me for messing up their cupcakes.

It was a valuable lesson in reading the directions.

Only a year or so ago, I decided to make a pair of peanut butter pies. This is one of my favorite recipes, and I'd made it several times before. Part of it involves whipped cream, and I think the pie is best if I buy real cream and whip it myself. On this occasion, I stood over the cream with the mixer for at least twenty minutes before I checked the box and realized I'd bought half-and-half instead of whipping cream.

It was a valuable lesson in checking ingredients.