It used to be that when it came to dinnertime I would wait until The Daddy returned from his hard day at work and ask him what he was cooking tonight.

And then things changed, and I found myself in control of the kitchen. Actually, more like out of control in the kitchen, for as many of you will know I am a terrible cook.

Still, there I was, muddling along and not receiving anything in the way of compliments for all my efforts. I was starting to get a bit huffy about the whole thing really. I mean there are only so many times a person can hear words such as “burnt”, “bland”,  “tough” and “inedible” applied to her cooking before starting to feel, oh I don’t know, a little bit miffed?

Then came the fateful day when the moon and stars must have been aligned and the gods smiling and my lucky day, all rolled into one. The day I stumbled upon THE SOLUTION.

It did not start out well. I had bought a nice piece of beef which would have to be put in to roast early and was very proud of myself for remembering to take it out of the fridge on time. But when I looked at it, it turned out that I had accidentally not bought a nice piece of beef, but just a piece of beef, which would have to be put in to stew early. At this point I almost abandoned my abandonment of Twitter to tweet “Help! How do I make a beef stew with no ingredients?”

Then I remembered Mark. Mark is an old friend of ours from way back, when The Daddy and I used to have time to watch TV, and would watch his New York Times podcasts on simple cooking. Despite my well-documented hatred of the culinary arts, somehow I never minded watching his podcasts. He seems kind of … nice. It was Mark who taught The Daddy how to cook Paella and it was on his recommendation that I stopped buying those expensive kitchen knives and instead bought myself two restaurant knives for $16 from Costco. They have plastic handles but still I have received compliments.

I am not sure how I came to have Mark’s book, “How To Cook Everything“. I know that it came via Amazon, probably ordered by me in a fit of optimism after seeing a random ad. I also know that the moment it arrived I looked at the cover, thought “this might come in useful one day” and put it straight onto the shelf.

So there we were, several months later. I opened the book and discovered it contains tons and tons of simple recipes for simple people like me. Who don’t have 20 exotic ingredients in their pantry and really don’t feel like rushing out to buy them. Who very possibly don’t even have the most basic of ingredients. That night Mark didn’t try to make me feel guilty for not throwing three tired kids in the car and rushing them to the crowded supermarket to buy beef stock. He gave me permission to cook with water.

Imagine that! Needless to say, How to Cook Everything no longer lives on the living room shelf. It now has a permanent home on the kitchen counter. In fact, it is probably stuck there. With gravy.

And this is why Mark will always have a special place in my heart:  I spend less time cooking. I can usually find a recipe to accommodate my gruesome lack of fancy ingredients. Oh, and here is a real and honest quote from 5 minutes ago as The Daddy finished eating yet another of Mark’s 20 minute meals:

“It used to be depressing eating your dinners. Some days I almost wanted to kill myself. But that was great.”

No kidding.

(PS: Yet again this is an unpaid review. What can I say, I am a mug.)

“Mommy!

Ashley and Ryan loved my little red heart tattoo with the face that you put on my hand so-o-o-o-o-o much. I don’t want them to see that you took it off, Mommy.

That is why I am going to wear my Tinkerbell glove all the time now, at home and at school…. That way they won’t see it went away and get disappointed.

OK? “

My life has been mysteriously following the same path as Marinka’s recently.

Well, actually … NO.

But I did get a cat!

It was all planned for a few weeks ago, and then there were complications. But finally, last week, the T-Bot, Wictor and I went in to pick up Fiji.

I happen to love black cats and did you know they are eight times more likely to be euthanized than other cats? I picked him up and that afternoon the shelter replaced his picture on their website with three more black cats.

So, he is settling in surprisingly well, especially considering the fact that for the first two days, whenever he ventured out from his hidey-hole under our bed he was greeted with toddler and pre-schooler squeals of delight, which of course sent him scuttling right back under there.

And, although he had hardly been out of his 4 ft square cage since October, he is playful, cuddly and curious. He is sitting purring under my desk right now.

And his name? Well, he came from the shelter called Fuji. And for want of further inspiration we called him that until -duh- it occurred to us that Fuji sounds exactly like Fugee. Lightbulb moment! He hadn’t been named after an apple after all! By then we couldn’t think of anything else to call him that wasn’t obvious, pretentious or difficult to pronounce. So we just changed a vowel. That way when the kids get confused we can just pretend it was a slip of the tongue. Or many slips of the tongue. Or that they all have terrible diction. Oh, wait a minute, they do.

Kind of in the same way Baby Sister will present some elaborate and fanciful excuse for a wrongdoing after the fact,  we’ll just forget that we have never even been to Fiji, and it that doesn’t actually look like this, and pretend that this is why we named him:

We’ll also try and forget that I don’t even really like this painting.

(*Yes, Fiji is a budget vacation destination - if you live in New Zealand. )

Sometimes, for no apparent reason, the world will suddenly, imperceptibly, tilt on its axis. And life will never be quite the same again.

Eleven days ago,  on a Wednesday, I was at my friend’s house, drinking tea while our children played outdoors. And then the Earth shifted as her 3 year old was shooting off the end of the slide, sending him sideways and immediately to hospital for an operation, insertion of pins and an overnight stay.

She spent the next week following him around the house so that he didn’t fall in his soft cast and re-break the reset arm.

Ten days ago, on a Thursday, The Daddy was sitting in a small office with his boss’s delegate, for his yearly review. They diligently checked the check boxes and commented the comment spaces for the better part of 40 minutes. An hour later the Earth had upended them too, sweeping them both out onto the street clutching their cardboard boxes.

The Daddy spent the next week tied to the internet and the phone, sending out resumes and talking to recruiters and other contacts.

Good news. My friend’s son now has a hard cast on his arm and she doesn’t have to hover protectively over him any more.

Actually, although she had a busy week, with not a minute to herself, she also appreciated spending  one on one time with him that she would have otherwise missed.

Other good news. The Daddy has a new job, starting Monday.

And actually, this job is probably better than his previous one, using the kind of new technologies he gets excited about. And probably about as recession-proof as you can get these days. It’s a change he wouldn’t otherwise have made.

The Earth has been uneasy lately. It has been scratching its itch.

But we have been among the lucky ones.

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

I haven’t been blogging lately. I just can’t, in all good conscience, make the time. And then there have been little things getting in the way, like for example my husband coming home suddenly in the middle of the day minus his work computer and then hogging mine while I roamed about like a lost soul doing unfamiliar things like … housework … all the while falling further and further behind with what I needed to be doing. We bought a new computer. It took two days to arrive. In the meantime I lost all my marbles. I swear, I was talking gibberish, and then the new computer arrived I almost kissed the UPS man, tight little shorts and all. Which would have been highly embarrassing. We see a lot of him.

But this weekend we had fun! Big Fun! We went to San Antonio for the T-Bot’s birthday and roamed around doing all the fun touristy things that fun tourists in San Antonio do. Like this:

And this:

And this:

We even had our portrait taken!

OK, it was a cheesy fleece-the-tourist portrait sold at the exit to the caves, the kind of thing we never, ever buy. But look! Whole family together!

I think if you read my last post you will realize how amazing this actually is.

(Full points if you noticed this is a not very good photo of a not very good photo. My scanner cable is still awol.)

Let’s finish off  this hurried effort with a picture of the Birthday Boy, who spent almost the whole three hour trip home in the car trying to convince us that he had actually grown a foot since the days - those long ago days - when he was six.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, T-BOT!!!

Because I am not at all a new feminist and because I believe a woman’s place is in the home wrestling with dust bunnies*, this is what my daughter will be getting for her birthday this year:

That way she can get in lots of practice and won’t even notice when we substitute the real thing.

Click through the picture and read the blurb on this one! It made me laugh. A vacuum cleaner for every class! Classy!

*BTW, we don’t have dust bunnies in our house. We have dust dragons.

Wow, it’s been a long time.

So long that I had to read back in time to find out exactly which photos I had promised you. There has been a lot going on here, which I will be sure to blog about later. I know, always later…

In the meantime, I did promise you my 80’s hair. And I always keep my promises, although in this case I really really don’t want to. Had I partaken of the silly juice when I wrote that post? OK. Deep breath. Here goes:

Oops. Looks like my hair got a little flat on top. Maybe I forgot to backcomb it that morning.

The scanner cable hasn’t turned up yet but that’s probably because I haven’t had time to sort through the boxes and boxes of cables and find it. Luckily (why didn’t I think of this before?) I haven’t managed to lose my camera yet. And I see that I also promised pictures of us. At different times. Together. Well, won’t this be a trip down memory lane? And an interesting exercise for my last remaining non-family reader!

Hmm. My parents sent me a bunch of early scanned photos from their archives and dared me to put them online. This, believe it or not, is the best one they could dredge up. The others are CENSORED. This one really should be too. But, you know, they dared me.

And now, what about a wedding photo?

Those caterpillars crawling down the side of his face were all the rage in our circles at the time, for those not willing to go for the full-on goatee look. The Daddy did grow a goatee once but it scared me and I made him shave it off.

And those children? All grown up now.

Yes, it was a lo-o-o-o-ong time ago.

Many many years passed. Eight to be exact. And then we had a baby and traveled halfway around the world with him and here we are snapped pretending to be full of beans and not at all wishing we could just give the baby away to a random stranger and sleep for a thousand years.

Then the baby grew up a little. Here he is at 18 months. Oh, and us in the background, looking, again, faintly manic:

And now, three days before we set off on our great adventure. April 2005. Not sure what was wrong with the T-Bot.

And that, unbelievably, is where our photo story ends.

Want cute photos of my kids? Can oblige, 1000 times over.

Want photos of us together? Come visit! Take one!

I dare you.