incidents and accidents

Adventures in Pi(e)-Making

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Tomorrow is Pi(e) Day, and so I must do my nerdly patriotic duty and make pie. (Don’t tell anyone, but I also bought a pie because strawberry rhubarb pie is one of my weaknesses and that one feels out of my league at the moment.)

A link for a coconut custard pie crossed my path recently. Looked simple enough, so I googled other recipes for variations and found a few I could mix and match. I figured I’d bake two because I like to share.

It looked simple:

  1. Blind-bake the crust. Done. (I used pre-made crust – saves me time.)
  2. Toast the coconut flakes. Easy.
  3. Mix the filling. No problem!
  4. Pour it into the pie crusts. Well…

I mean, that’s not hard, but I had more filling than will fit into two 9-inch crusts, and this is where things started to get (literally) sticky. I did NOT overfill them. I feel like I need to say that up front, considering what happened next. One of the recipes I found recommended baking the pies on preheated cookie sheets, and I am SO glad I followed that advice. Advice I could have used: pour the filling into the pie crusts as close to the oven as you can possibly get to avoid carrying a pie full of liquid across the entire kitchen. I had the oven open, the rack out (mistake #2, although it was the lower rack and I don’t know what else I could have done), and I had banished Jack to the pantry. I didn’t drip any filling onto the kitchen floor, but lowering myself down to the level of the lower rack in the oven was not so successful. Yeah, that’s pie filling on the window in the oven door. Yes, that’s pie filling on the cookie sheet the pie is going to sit on. And no, the rack did not slide smoothly back into the oven, so yes, I lost even more pie filling to the cookie sheet as it jolted back into place. The second pie, going to the top rack, lost less filling. I got the oven closed.

THEN, as always happens with my cookie sheets in the oven, I heard a loud metal sound because my cookie sheets bend in the heat, and of COURSE they’re going to do it today. I turned the light on and looked through the cloudy pie-filling-covered oven window. The pie still had all of its filling, but it’s tilted dangerously to the back and super uneven now in the crust.

They’re both baking now, and what could have been a lovely smell of warm coconut is drowned out by the smell of burnt milk and eggs.

Update: out of the oven, they look okay, and the smell up close is much nicer.

Here’s the not-quite-as-filled one, with burnt filling all around.

Here’s the lopsided one.

Happy Pi(e) Day!

Will we see him again?

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Update on the farmhouse table. The Facebook guy who was building us a farmhouse table delivered it to us Sunday afternoon, and it’s not exactly right. We got it in the house, put it in place in the dining room, looked at it, looked at each other, and reached for the tape measure.

Dude got some of the dimensions mixed up, I think. It was supposed to be six feet long (it is, close enough), 32 inches high (it’s closer to 34, which is really not gonna work, but is something we could fix ourselves), and 42 inches wide. It is NOT 42 inches wide. It is only 32 inches wide, which is not going to work and is not something we can fix ourselves.

John raced back outside to catch the guy before he left. From John’s account, the guy was cool about it and said he’d make us a new one this week and come to swap them out. I texted him right after that, nicely, with the exact dimensions again.

He didn’t respond. We spent the rest of yesterday wondering if we’ll ever see him again or if we’re stuck with a table 10 inches narrower than we wanted. This is what we get for buying something sight-unseen, or at least for not checking the dimensions before handing over the money.

He still hadn’t responded as of this morning, so I pasted the same message in our Facebook chat, and (WHEW) he responded with an apology about the mix-up, saying he’s working on the new table right now, and he’ll text me when it’s done in a few days.

I feel better about that, I guess, but I’m not completely confident round two will be right. Stay tuned for an update.

I did check Facebook, and YES, I can confirm that I gave him the right numbers to start with. Good to have it writing somewhere, even if it is Facebook.

Starting the day off wrong

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I scheduled a grocery pick-up from Stop & Shop for this morning at 8am. This is not unusual. After I finish working for the morning, I get dressed, John gets Jack dressed, and Jack comes along for the ride to pick up the groceries while John starts work. We pick up coffee on the way home.

Right before I left the house, I got the email they always send that says what parts of your order they had to substitute or leave out altogether. I had a couple of substitution ideas for the items they left out (for instance, they didn’t substitute another honey for the one I picked, and I REALLY don’t care what kind of honey we get, so let’s just pick any other honey, okay?), so I called from the car.

“Um, we don’t have an order for you.” “But I got the confirmation email not 10 minutes ago.” “Are you sure it’s for this location?” “How could it not be for this location?” I pulled over and checked my email. “Oh no….” For reasons that I think cannot be understood, my order for grocery pickup at a Narragansett location was sent to Glen Burnie. Which is in MARYLAND, people. It’s a good thing I had already pulled over because I hung up the phone, and I cried.

It’s been a rough week. Work has been super-busy, and Jack hasn’t napped in two full weeks. In order to get the work done, I have to either lose sleep (early or late) or neglect Jack for hours at a time. John’s work week has been insane, so he hasn’t been able to help.

We’re not going to go hungry. It didn’t affect any of today’s meals or even tomorrow’s. It was just too much for me this morning. So I cried. And there was Jack, in his car seat in the back, “Mommy, you sad?” “Yes, sweetie, I’m sad, but I’m okay.” Then I heard the sound of him blowing me a kiss. “Mommy, you feel better now?” “Yes, sweetie, thank you. I’m starting to feel better.”

So we went to Starbucks and came home without the groceries. I’ll try again tomorrow.

Christmas is for the birds

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I keep forgetting to tell this story. And then when I think about telling this story, I keep getting bogged down in the most boring way to tell it. I’m out of practice (although that assumes I wasn’t telling boring stories back when I was doing this regularly, and I’m not ready to make that assumption).

Let me give this a try.

Cast your mind back to Christmas, which already feels like several years ago instead of barely a month ago. We were able to bubble up with Emily, Sean, and the kids for the month of December because Sean’s school closed for the holidays (and the pandemic) right before Thanksgiving. It was great – the kids got to play together several times a week, for hours on end, inside both houses. It felt practically normal.

They came over to our house Christmas Day to have dinner (Italian catered – SO GOOD) and exchange presents and play. It was a really nice day, and then a bird flew into our house.

They were mostly in the car, heading out, and I was waving out the open back door when it happened. This bird swooped in the back door (by the driveway) with lots of flapping and took an immediate left up the back stairs. I shouted something along the lines of “HOLY FUCK A BIRD JUST FLEW IN THE HOUSE!” I slammed the door shut and chased it up the stairs. It landed on the baby gate at the top, then hopped to the floor. I carefully opened the gate, and it took off down the hallway. It flew the entire length of the house, straight down the hallway, and perched on the baby gate at the top of the front stairs, which is directly across from the front door. I shouted to John to open the front door, and while he was doing that, I crept down the hallway. Once it was open, I shooed at the bird with my hands. I may have muttered something to it about getting out of my damn house.

It listened. It flew down the stairs and straight out the front door. I was starting to feel sorry for the poor thing when I got back to the back stairs and realized there was bird shit on two of the risers and the wall. I suppose it was scared, but COME ON. Why are you flying in my house?

The thing is, this wasn’t even the first time. A few days earlier, also when Emily and Sean and the kids were leaving, a bird (same bird?) flew in as we opened the back door. It flew right back out that time. We think it might have been sitting on the super-fake, not remotely real, glitter-covered wreath. The wreath came down pretty soon after Christmas, and we haven’t had any bird sightings since.

It was like a cartoon

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There is no possible way you will guess what happened to us this evening.  It’s so far out of the realm of normal – you just couldn’t guess.  So I’ll tell you.

Bees.

LOTS of bees.

(Everyone is fine.)

Jack and I were in the front yard, near-ish the road, playing before dinner.  It was around 4:45 or so.  I was herding him in the direction of the back door when I happened to look over at the area in front of our front door.  I saw lots of flying bugs.  My first thought was that it was a huge cloud of gnats.  You know how gnats get.  But they looked bigger, and I thought I heard buzzing.  In retrospect, I’m surprised the buzzing was as quiet as it was.  I snatched Jack up, and we went inside.

Went up the back stairs, paused at the door to John’s office, “something is swarming out front,” heard a “what?”, and headed for the guest room windows.  Yeah, guys, it was a swarm of bees.  I googled “beekeepers near me” and found the Rhode Island Beekeepers Association.  Miracle of miracles: someone answered the phone.

“Um, there are a TON of bees, like, swarming in front of my house. What should we do?”

A calm voice said, “That’s very likely this time of year.  Swarming is exactly what they do, and they don’t sting when they’re doing it.”  Seriously, that’s the first thing he said.  He knows what he’s doing, this guy.  “Where are they?”

So I told him they’re on a branch in a tree in our front yard, we discussed how high up it is and if he needs a ladder or could cut down the branch, and then he said, “Text me your address and send me a picture. I’ll be there in half an hour.”

No delays!

He showed up right on time, Steve the Beekeeper (lawyer by day, beekeeper by free-time).  He put one of those hive boxes down the ground, cut the branch out of the tree, and with one firm shake of the branch, knocked all the bees from the branch to the ground, right in front of the box.  They wasted no time flooding into it.  He came back an hour later to collect it.

I asked him what he was going to do with them, and he said he’s just going to try to keep them alive.  ‘Tis the season for hives to split, so we were seeing half of an older hive looking for a new place to live.  They would likely have been gone by morning (that tree branch was only a stopover for the night), but if left to their own devices, they probably wouldn’t survive. Bees are apparently bad at surviving (see news about not enough bees in the world).

Want to see what ten thousand bees look like?  If you’re looking out our front door, this is the tree directly in front of you.  It’s right up against our front-yard neighbor’s garage.

And here’s Steve, holding the branch with the bees still on it.

The whole incident took maybe an hour and a half.  What a weird day.

I have forgotten how to grill

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I used to grill a lot.  There was one summer not that long ago when I grilled salmon several times a week.  Me, not John.  I knew how to do this.  But then I tried to grill chicken last week or so.  (Time has no meaning.)  It’s possible I’ve never grilled chicken before, but even so, how could it be this hard?  It took FOREVER.  Also, I set the chicken on fire.  Frequently.  It turned out fine, but I’m not eager to do that again.  (See fire and also forever.)

Then last week I tried salmon again.  Do you like your salmon blackened?  Into a crisp?  Mine was basically inedible because fire.  What the hell, man?  (I mean, I’m assuming I had the burners on too high.)

I’m just out of practice, right?  So I should practice.

Tonight, steak.  Me again – John has faith in me, and hey!  No disasters this time.  The asparagus came out fine (I didn’t lose any in the grill, either), and I basically did the whole five-minutes-per-side thing with the steaks over medium heat. Maybe 7 minutes on the second side.  They were on the rare side of medium, which is how we like them – not charred, not blackened, good without having to drown them in anything (I am just now remembering that I forgot to use the horseradish I put on the table), so maybe I just have to practice with chicken and fish.

Car Trouble in the Time of Covid

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Jack had a very exciting morning yesterday. He got to see a tow truck in action, up close and personal.  I suppose it was exciting for us, too, but tinged with a wide streak of Really? This is happening now?!?

John loaded the car up with some yard waste to take to the transfer station, but he didn’t get far.  The car sputtered to a stop right outside our front-yard neighbor’s house, and he pushed it into the parking area for the apartments right there on the corner.  It had been running rough for the last few days (or the last couple of times I drove it, anyway), but we figured that was a spark plug issue and we were planning that kind of maintenance.

We called our local repair place, got a tow truck dispatched from USAA (using the repair place’s towing service, turns out), and found out this morning that the engine seized up.

I am SO not in the mood for this.  Major engine repair, engine replacement, or new (used) car.  No, thanks!  Not now!  But this is what we will figure out over the next few days.

The tow truck part was pretty cool, though.  It was a flat-bed truck, and we (with Jack) watched the guy winch the car up onto the flat-bed and drive away. I got it on video for Jack’s endless perusal.

I’m raising a thief

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Unloading and putting away groceries in the time of coronavirus is an enormous pain in the ass, requiring several steps:

  1. Unload the groceries from the car, still potentially contaminated, leaving them outside of the kitchen behind the closed baby gate so Jack doesn’t try to “help” empty the bags.
  2. Unpack the groceries from the bags, wiping them down one by one, and stage them on various countertops near where they go.
  3. Figure out how to reorganize the cabinets, the pantry, the fridge, and the freezer because we usually don’t buy this much at a time and a) how will all this fit in our tiny freezer, and b) for the pantry stuff, I REALLY need an hour to myself to reorganize because I have, for example, cans of beans spread across at least three different shelves mixed in with all kinds of random stuff.  How am I supposed to shop efficiently if I can’t see what we have?

During step 3, when half of the stuff was put away and the other half was spread out across kitchen counters, I heard footsteps, a sort of crunching THUMP, and excited toddler sounds.

I skidded around the doorway next to the stove and found Jack with the plastic tub of cookies, the top off, three cookies on the floor, and one in his mouth.  He also had the container of strawberries (ignored), both containers stolen from the counter next to the sink.

Who stole the cookie from the cookie jar?

Also, HE’S TOO TALL! The counters are no longer safe.

Scrapes

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Jack fell down yesterday. Okay, he falls down every day, but he fell down in the driveway.  Okay, he falls down in the driveway regularly, too, but this one was different.

We were both outside with him, and he started to run/toddle along the driveway.  He tripped and fell (daily occurrence).  He caught himself on his hands and knees (normal), but then he tipped forward.  It happened so slowly that it didn’t seem like it could have hurt him, but he started crying and I hurried my already-in-progress rush to him.  Picked him up, brushed him off – I didn’t see anything immediately wrong.  He had some dirt and a few pieces of gravel on his face, so I took him inside to clean him up.

He calmed down after a minute and went right back to playing.  It was a few minutes before we could really see the scrapes.  His forehead, the side of his nose, some of his right cheek, and his chin all show evidence of the faceplant onto the driveway.  I’m positive it hurts us more than it hurts him.

John said we shouldn’t let him run on the driveway anymore.  Uh huh.  YOU try and stop him.  I’ll just hover a little closer so I can catch his head next time.  Like a helicopter…oops.

Something happened!

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I have been wondering if I will ever have something to write about other than the baby or the book I’m reading, and the answer is: YES!  But only if it’s something that happened to someone else.  Apparently.  Because the only things happening to me are baby-related.

What happened, you may ask?  And since it didn’t happen to me, why should you care?

My neighbor’s new barn burned to the ground!  And because it’s crazy-dramatic, that’s why!

My front-yard neighbors, Kev and Kerry, bought a house about 10 minutes north of here and moved in last weekend.  On Monday, Kev was burning cardboard boxes in the fire pit and his barn (his new house has had a barn) burned down.  He swears he put the fire out before he left (he was at the old house, getting it ready for tenants when the fire started).  The arson guy (Kev is not being charged with arson) says an ember must have gotten under the barn.

  1. That’s what he gets for not recycling (not my joke).
  2. The previous owner put the fire pit too close to the barn, but that doesn’t excuse Kev since he used it anyway.

No one was home.  The police (or whoever) called Kerry, and when she couldn’t reach Kev, she called Allison (who owns the bookstore across the street from us), and Allison ran over to the house shouting about a fire, so Kev went running for his fire extinguisher thinking the bookstore was on fire, and HOW DID I MISS ALL THIS?  It was Monday.  We were here Monday.  We’re here all day, every day.

I wonder if this is a new curse.  Remember the house that caught on fire across the street from us in Oregon?  Maybe fires happen to those near us.  At least it was their new house, not the old one.  Wait – twice is a coincidence.  Keep your eyes peeled for a third one – that’ll make a pattern.

Lucky

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Maybe I shouldn’t say this (because of the possibility of jinxing – again – I swear I’m not ACTUALLY superstitious), but I’ve been pretty lucky this pregnancy.  All of the classic symptoms and irritations, if I’ve had them at all, have been pretty mild.  My version of morning sickness in the first trimester was just a terrible taste in my mouth for weeks on end.  And sure, I complained plenty (it was disgusting), but it didn’t keep me from doing anything and it was WAY better than constant nausea or vomiting.  I’ve been dealing with pregnancy brain (John just referred to it as my inability to function) when I need to eat, but I haven’t had ANY food cravings or aversions, I haven’t been terribly uncomfortable physically (even now, at 38 weeks), I’ve barely had any hot flashes, I’m not super tired, and any swelling has largely confined itself to my feet and mostly only happens on really hot days.  That has changed a bit in the last week – my feet are almost constantly swollen now – but if that’s the worst, I can hardly complain.

The worst thing that has happened during this pregnancy isn’t pregnancy-related at all.  We (me, John, the doctor) think I had a brush with poison ivy about a week ago.  It’s mostly on my feet, maybe a little bit on my ankles and my fingers, and IT’S AWFUL AND I HATE IT AND WHEN WILL IT GO AWAY?

It’s a constant burning/itching that gets worse at night and nothing seems to help except soaking in cold water, but I can’t live my life with my feet in a tub and my hands in a bowl and JESUS CHRIST IT’S DRIVING ME CRAZY.  Also, I can’t sleep through it, and for the last week or so (since Saturday, maybe?) I haven’t slept more than an hour at a time until around 2am, when I get up to soak my feet for an hour or two, and then I’m able to sleep for 2-3 hours until I can’t anymore and I just get up.  I have to fall asleep quickly, while my feet are still numb-ish, and if I accidentally rub them on something, it’s game over.

Weirdly, I’m not napping during the day and I don’t feel as exhausted as I should.  Maybe I’m adapting early to the (lack of) sleep schedule I’m anticipating when the baby comes.

On the bright side, I’m getting a lot of reading done in those hours with my feet in the tub.

The day the toaster died

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We are now on the market for a new toaster.  I’ll probably just buy a cheap pop-up toaster tonight for immediate use (hello, Amazon Prime), but I’m going to get a new toaster oven eventually.  I like them.  And that’s what died.

I  mentioned the issues we were having with the toaster back in November (link here), and we’ve been coasting along in that state since then (plug in the toaster, watch it like a hawk, unplug when done).  I had toast this morning, no problem.  I picked up a panini from Starbucks on my walk at lunch, and when I got home, I plugged the toaster oven in so I could heat up the panini.  Seconds later, I heard a small whoosh, I saw some orange flickering, some smoke drifted out with the smell of burning plastic, and then I yanked the plug out of the wall.

Bye-bye, toaster.

The nosebleed that messed up my morning

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Most mornings, we get up early, go to the gym, work all morning, and then I go for a walk mid-day.  Once it gets and stays hot, I’ll probably switch the order so I can walk when it’s comparatively cooler and hit the air-conditioned gym in the mid-day heat, but for the last couple of months, this schedule has been working.

Today should have been no different, but my nose had other thoughts.  I wasn’t moving all that quickly, and John was planning to stop working early to fly, so he headed off to the gym without me.  I figured I’d catch up and meet him there, but then I blew my nose and now I have to clean up a crime scene.  Okay, fine, that’s not true.  No crime scene.  But plenty of bloody kleenex.  And it took FOREVER to stop.  Like, more than half an hour.  I had to google what to do because I couldn’t remember if I should tilt my head back or forward.  I eventually just sat in front of my laptop, doing work with one hand (I figured I’d start early so I can take off late morning to make up the missed workout) with my head tilted forward (thank you, Google) while using the other hand to pinch my nose shut, periodically switching out kleenex.  Uncomfortable, annoying, and kind of gross.

I don’t think I was ever prone to nosebleeds.  I can only remember two.  The more recent was on my first deployment, sometime in the second half of 2002.  Not exactly recent.  We were in the Persian Gulf, so I assume it was the inevitable result of months of hot, dry air.  The issue wasn’t that it happened, but that it happened right as the general quarters alarm sounded, and I was trying to figure out how to stop the bleeding and still get to my post quickly (in aft steering, which is the very very very back of the ship, several decks down and right at or maybe below the waterline).  (It was a drill, not the real thing, but still.)

The other one I can remember was in Louisville, maybe around age 10?  11?  Before we moved off the base, for sure.  I was out with Mrs. Campbell – no idea what our plans were or why it was just the two of us – and my nose started bleeding in the car.  My shirt got destroyed, so we went to the mall and she bought me a new one.  Maybe we were going to the mall anyway, but why would Mrs. Campbell have been taking me shopping?  Whatever.  I had to walk through the mall in a blood-soaked t-shirt, so there’s no chance I would forget that incident.

Head in the clouds

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Do you care what I had for breakfast?  I didn’t think so.  You’d think I could come up with something to write about that isn’t my breakfast, but you’d be wrong.

I went for a short walk at lunchtime today (this is not the introduction to me telling you what I had for lunch) that became a slightly longer walk because apparently I forgot where we live.  On my way back, less than four blocks from home, I took the first right instead of the second right because I have no idea why, I just did.  And I didn’t realize I had done that until I was most of the way down a really long block that has no cross streets to cut through to my block.  I turned around.  Safely on my block, heading home, I stopped paying attention again, just long enough to walk right by our house.  At least this time I figured it out before I got more than one house away.

I wish I could tell you I was mapping out my first novel or calculating the escape velocity I’ll need when it’s time for me to come home from my first galactic journey or, I don’t know, pondering the true nature of couscous and if it’s possible to have a single cous, but since I don’t remember what kept me so lost in thought as to forget where I lived, we can only assume I was thinking about breakfast.

 

A moment of reflection

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I had another frustrating run-in with a coworker, and as I walked to CVS, I mapped out an imaginary conversation with her where I tried to find a way for us to get past this stupid thing we keep butting heads about, and I got angrier and angrier because I feel like she’s taking this personally and getting emotional about it and that’s why we’re not able to work through it –

And then I realized how angry I was getting and maybe I’m taking it personally.  Of course, the part I’m taking personally is her reaction to my very reasonable request for her opinion on something because it feels like a personal attack, but still.  It’s work.  It’s not personal.  Or maybe it is for her, but that’s not my problem, and it doesn’t have to be for me.

It’s work.  It’s not my life.

BUT I’M GOING TO THE OFFICE FOR THE NEXT TWO DAYS AND I’LL HAVE TO WORK WITH HER IN PERSON!

 

Time to move!

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Last month, I told you that my toaster has lost its ding.  It still made ticking sounds while it toasted (and it did still toast).  This morning, things got weird.

  1. I put a piece of bread in the toaster and closed the door.  It started ticking.  I did NOT start the toaster.  I twisted the dial until it stopped ticking and then walked away.  (I wasn’t ready to actually toast the bread yet.)
  2. When I came back a few minutes later, John asked me if I was trying to burn the house down.  My piece of bread was practically ash.  John stopped the toaster when he smelled it burning.
  3. I got a new piece of bread, watched it while it toasted, and then twisted the dial to stop the ticking when it had toasted enough.
  4. I unplugged the toaster (just to be sure), and sat down in the dining room to eat my not-burnt toast.
  5. About ten minutes later, I heard the toaster ticking.  IT WAS STILL UNPLUGGED.

The toaster is haunted.

Cookies aren’t supposed to hurt

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One of our dining room cabinets smells like cookies all the time and we have no idea why.  We never put cookies in it, and we’ve cleaned it with cleaning products that decidedly do NOT smell like cookies.  I’m not complaining – I really like being surprised with this pleasant smell every time I open the cabinet door – but it’s weird.  It inspired me to buy a scented candle so I could enjoy a pleasant cookie-like scent in other places in the house.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say I have regrets, but I will handle this differently next time.  Today is a chilly day, high in the mid-50s, and it’s a little overcast.  I remembered the candle, thought “what a nice idea!”, and lit it.  It sat on the corner of my desk for an hour or so before I couldn’t take any more Christmas Cookie.  I blew it out and moved it into another room, in front of an open window.

It’s been half an hour. My headache is subsiding, and so is the scent.  It’s fallen into mild and pleasant again.  Next time – there will be a next time – I will try to remember to leave it somewhere MUCH FARTHER AWAY from my head.  Maybe the hallway.

Headline: I still have two feet

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A horse stepped on me this weekend.  I’m fine (really fine – I ran this morning), but I was a little anxious for a couple of hours on Saturday.  I spent the day at a horse show just south of Portland.  Wendy was there with Tigger, Olive, Dobby (Tigger’s co-dependent pony friend), and Ava (the horse who stepped on me) because two of her 14-year-old students were riding in it.  Their events were first thing Saturday, so I got up early and drove up to watch them.

That part, the whole day really, minus the part where I got stepped on, was pretty cool.  I got to see my lesson horses compete and do more than I’ve asked them to do, and I got to watch a whole lot of really good riders on really big horses do really cool things.  The weather was beautiful (not a cloud in sight), and it was really neat to just hang out and watch all the riding and jumping.

The stepped on part: Wendy needed to clean out stalls, so Elaine (my friend who wrote the romance novel) and I volunteered to take Olive and Ava for a walk to give Wendy time.  Ava was anxious, even right next to Olive, and I couldn’t calm her down, so we headed back to the stalls.  We got separated (too many people), and Ava basically freaked out.  Then someone zipped by on a scooter, and a golf cart passed us, Ava spun around, and while I was trying to turn her the right direction to go home, she stepped on my right foot.  Like, STEPPED on with her full weight because she was walking.  It was…painful, and I may have yelled some things in front of some children, and then she stepped off and we made our way back over to Wendy.  Wendy wasn’t done with her stall, though, so I still had to deal with a giant* nervous horse.  I was letting her eat grass, but we were near a food truck and there was an extension cord, and she didn’t like me trying to move her away from the extension cord to keep her from eating it and she was still high-strung even being closer to her herdmates, whirling around every time a car went by, and I wasn’t super calm since my foot hurt and she was making me nervous and I’m sure I wasn’t successfully radiating serenity even though I was trying to, and it was a whole not-fun thing.  I was relieved to put her back in her stall.

*I’m not kidding about giant.  I mean, there are bigger horses, but she’s the biggest one I’ve had to do anything about.  She’s half thoroughbred and half shire (workhorse along the lines of a Clydesdale), and she’s 16.2 hands at her withers (top of her shoulder, a tad higher than the top of the base of her neck), which puts her withers at the top of my head (because if I did the math right, 16.2 hands is 66 inches – the .2 refers to two inches, not two-tenths of a hand – which is my height).  That’s big.

I was wearing my chucks that day, not boots, so basically no protection, and I spent the next several hours wiggling my toes and flexing my foot to make sure I still could.  The pain faded to an ache, and then that faded, too, and by the time I drove home, I was totally fine.  I have a fun bruise I keep poking at, but no lasting damage.  Until one day the front half of my foot falls off because it turns out I have a hairline fracture or something and I didn’t rest or treat it because it didn’t hurt, but eh – why borrow trouble?

Brush with death

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I was nearly brained by a falling branch during my run the other day.  I don’t know what made me jump out of the way – maybe I saw the movement? – but SOMEthing warned me, which was good because this branch was LARGE.  It could have done serious damage if it had landed on my head, which I’m pretty sure is what would have happened.  (It just scratched my calf.)  A couple of people saw it and came over to check on me, but I was totally fine, still on my feet, aside from being a little shaken.  I have NO idea what made it fall, at all or just then.  It wasn’t terribly windy, there weren’t any animals or evil henchmen cackling up in that tree, and really, what else could have caused it if not angry squirrels or evil henchmen?

Chunks don’t make anything better. Unless they’re chocolate.

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Today did not start out well.  I had a 9am meeting (that’s 6am for me), which is never a good start, even if the meeting goes fine (like this one did).  John went out for coffee, but he brought me back the wrong drink.  I’m sure he ordered the right thing, but what came back was dark, bitter, and thick like mud.  Blech.  So I made tea, and I discovered that the milk was bad when it poured chunks into my mug.  After I managed not to throw up on the counter, I tried again with the new jug of milk – thank goodness I went to the store on Sunday.  My third attempt at caffeine was successful.

Then work was weird – a couple of projects aren’t going well, and it’s unsettling.  On top of that, my work computer decided to break Outlook, so the last hour of my day was spent IMing with IT while handling conference calls on my phone with no computer support.  Not fun.

The day got better.  My riding lesson was GREAT.  Smooth sailing.  I had control of Tigger, and everything just felt easier.  Then I walked in the door to the aroma of the brisket I had so thoughtfully put in the oven several hours before.  It’s a rainy, slightly chilly evening – perfect for brisket.  All weather is perfect for brisket.