This post is part of my 2022 Word Project. You can read what that’s about here.
Thursday, December 21, 2023
10:14pm
I’m in a mood.
I don’t want to be in a mood any more than you want to hear about it, but here we both are.
I decided to make a carrot cake for tomorrow’s birthday party dinner. I have a most excellent grater attachment for my stand mixer, so all I had to do was run the carrots through, add the rest of the ingredients, and Bob’s your uncle.
The only problem is that after searching every cabinet and drawer, I could not find the attachment to attach the attachment.
The amount of crap I have is mind-boggling, the gadgets, the pieces, the widgets and accessories and a bucketful of absolute nonsense that I keep, you know, “in case.” And yet I can somehow never turn up the one thing I need, or the one thing that would make half a dozen other things actually useful.
So instead of running carrots through my electric grater, I shredded them by hand. On a six inch box grater. For the next twenty minutes.
At least I didn’t lose any knuckles this time.
Fine. Whatever.
That might have been the end of it except after grating mixing buttering baking and $20 of ingredients later, the cake came out… wrong.
Not just like, oh well it’ll have to do wrong, but you can’t serve this for a birthday dinner party wrong.
Instead of rising, it caved in. I mentioned this to Ralph. He said I’m sure it’s fine. He said taste it.
I cut him a tiny piece. He said hm.
For Ralph to say hm it has to be pretty wrong. Instead of wasting $20 of icing I decided to make it again. Except I don’t have all the ingredients I need anymore, so this is going to necessitate another trip to the grocery store tomorrow, and I don’t think I have to explain how I feel about that.
I would pay any amount of money to be able to drive like one block and pick up the things I need, instead of the seven miles across the highway to the nearest supermarket.
Mood.
I suspect the reason the cake failed is that in the middle of making it, a friend called with a major personal crisis. So part of my brain was on that, and part of it was on trying not to forget the baking powder.
Dear friends,
Stop having personal crises. I am really at my wits end with who is sick, who died, who broke, whose house is collapsing around them, whose family is falling apart. I hereby call a moratorium on bad news.
On top of being emotionally distressing, it makes it really hard for me to sustain an adequate mood about my stupid concave carrot cake.
So I was hoping to be done cooking and cleaning tonight, and be nice and relaxed for pre-birthday-dinner cocktails tomorrow, but since I could not clean the kitchen or mop the floors because I’ll only wreck them all over again when I get back from shopping and try to remake the cake, I guess there won’t be a lot of relaxing.
And remember how I told you I caught my favorite sweatshirt sleeve on something and tore the cuff half off? I figured out what it got caught on. The front panel of my silverware drawer is literally splintered off, so when I opened it tonight the screws were all sticking out and it won’t close again.
Now that I think about it, I remember it got wedged in my sleeve and got yanked out when I turned around.
Why do drawer handles have edges that stick out anyway?
I’m pretty sure that getting a sleeve caught on it shouldn’t have exerted enough force to splinter it in the first place, but that’s a whole other story.
And speaking of quality workmanship, my kitchen sink is backing up. AGAIN.
I have lived in houses all my life and I have never seen anything like it. Four years here and they have snaked the thing out twice, replaced the garbage disposal once, and here we are again. The last time they repaired it, they had to re-caulk the entire thing to the counter because the force of the garbage disposal literally detached it.
A sink should not be that complicated.
Mood.
So I cleaned up a bit, slammed a few doors, threw a few things around that I could be reasonable assured would not break, and flung myself down into my crater to write.
Ralph said did the cake put you in a bad mood?
Maybe. A little.
But I know these things are all insignificant and by tomorrow night I will be pouring cocktails and eating carrot cake that doesn’t resemble my couch crater. Theoretically, anyway. I mean, unless a meteor wants to crash into my car tonight or something. Once the universe gets on a roll with these things you can never really tell.
Photo: a very perfect mug that I used for my tea when I was at a friend’s house. And my stupid broken cake.