Notes from a zombie

I'm not really a zombie today, but I felt like one earlier -- due to the antics of two Very Bad Kitties last night. 

It started with a sandwich. Teen A chose Panera as our restaurant for the night, not my favorite, but their soup is OK. For $50 I had a cup of broccoli cheddar soup and 1/2 a grilled cheese sandwich; Teen A had a bowl of chicken noodle soup and a drink; Teen B had a grilled cheese sandwich and a cup of chicken noodle soup and a drink. $50 sure doesn't get you what it used to.

Anyway, Teen B wanted to bring half of his grilled cheese sandwich home, so I wrapped it in a napkin and brought it with us. And when we got home, like an idiot, I set it on the kitchen counter. We then went into the living room to do homework. Teen A and I were working on a paper when Baby Kitty came into the living room and started washing. Teen A said, "Oh, he's washing himself just like Sillers does after she eats." I said, "He hasn't eaten anything for a while, unless he found a crumb on the floor." Teen A said, "Well, he must have found something, because he's still chewing.

Oh no!

I ran into the kitchen, and there was the unwrapped sandwich, partially eaten, lying on the floor. Sigh. I threw it in the compost bin, cursing myself for my stupidity. (In the photo above, the compost bin is on the left, sitting on a little stool.)

Flash forward a few hours, twins are in bed, I'm in bed reading. I turn out my light and try to go to sleep. Baby Kitty, who has been dozing by my side, jumps off the bed and leaves the room. Then I hear a sound. What is that sound? (I'm trying to fall asleep, I don't want to hear a sound.) Oh! The compost bin!

I turn on the light and run into the kitchen, where Baby Kitty has upended the compost bin and is trying to remove the remains of the sandwich. "No no no," I hiss, and wonder what to do. It's too late to take the bag of compost to the bin outside. A mountain lion or a bear might be sniffing around (seriously). Finally I stash the whole compost bin in the garage and go back to bed.

Then Sillers gets into the act. Rustle, rustle. What is that noise? Again, it takes me a while to place it. Oh, it's the cat door to the garage. I turn on the light again and go out to the dining room. I open the door to the garage and let Sillers back in. She knows how to get into the garage (to explore what happened to the compost bin), but not how to get back into the house, so she scratches at the cat door until I hear her and rescue her. Baby Kitty, for all his brains, does not understand how to use the cat door (or is afraid to). Fortunately. And also fortunately, Sillers does not know how to upend the compost bin by herself.

After all that I have to sit up and read another chapter of my book to be able to get sleepy again. I finally turn off the light for good around 1:30 or so, and even then it is hard to fall asleep (Sillers decides to do some more meowing up and down the hallway). So I'm a bit of a zombie today. But it's OK. The compost bin is back in the kitchen, but I plan to empty it before bedtime tonight.

***

This was a better week, I think. We actually had ANOTHER shooting scare at the kids' school, but it was so clearly a repeat of the previous week's scam that the police didn't do very much. Just a very quick lockdown while they checked it out, and then the all clear. I'm glad they're taking it seriously, because one of these days it could be real, but I'm also glad they're aware that it's likely to be a scam. It must be very hard to know how best to handle these things.

The best news, for me, is that I got our taxes done -- submitted to our tax preparer, that is. She won't look at them for perhaps a month, and that is Just Fine with me. I don't want to hear from her for a month. I just want my part to get done, which now it is. I don't know why the taxes are so stressful for me, but they are they are they are. I was a nervous wreck until I got them submitted. I had them ready to go by Tuesday afternoon (February 28th) but our tax preparer had some trouble opening the portal for me, so I didn't get them in until Thursday. That's OK. It messed up the whole week, but that's OK. It's over.

Because I spent the whole week worrying about the taxes, I did hardly any Mechanical Turk -- earned about $3 total, I think. I don't care about that either. Maybe this week I'll do better.

Cooking didn't go very well, and I can't blame that on the taxes. I'll blame it on the New York Times. I had been planning to make a chicken dish from their website, "Sticky Coconut Chicken and Rice," the week before, but it got pushed to this week. Unfortunately, raw chicken doesn't like to be postponed. By the time I pulled it out of the fridge to cook it, it was two days past its expiration date. But I don't put much faith in expiration dates, so I cooked it anyway. I will never know whether that was (part of) the problem or not. We didn't get sick from it, so maybe not?

Anyway, the chicken dish was terrible! Bland, boring, and at the same time there was this sense of something bad. Maybe that was the old chicken. I don't know. We all hated it. After the twins had scraped their plates into the compost bin, I picked all the chicken pieces out of the pot and put them in the compost bin (and then took the bag out to the big bin outside). I put the leftover coconut rice in the fridge and had some the next day for lunch. But it was terrible! And then I thought, this is ridiculous, and dumped the rice in the compost and took IT out.

And I made a vow to the twins, and I'm going to try to stick to it -- No More Chicken. I don't like chicken, Rocket Boy doesn't like chicken, Teen A doesn't like chicken, and Teen B only sort of likes chicken. So why have I been cooking chicken? Because there are 50 quadrillion chicken recipes out there, many of them very easy, and being willing to eat chicken means you have access to those recipes.

But it doesn't matter. We don't like chicken and I'm not going to cook any more chicken. Chicken broth is fine -- I'm not a vegetarian purist. And the kids still like chicken noodle soup, so they can eat that (it grosses me out). But no cooking pieces of chicken meat, even cut up really really really small, or even pre-cooked chicken that you can buy in the deli section. No More Chicken.

I don't know what we're going to eat this week -- haven't planned it all out yet. Tonight I think we're having scrambled eggs, and tomorrow maybe just Nacho Cups (the twins' favorite). Tuesday I might try the New York Times' version of Mattar Paneer, which I will make with tofu rather than paneer (I like paneer, but who knows if the twins will, and anyway I'm not sure whether King Soopers carries it). 

Wednesday I don't know, and Thursday -- ack! ack! -- is the twins' birthday, so we should have something special, but I don't know what that will be. 

Having a birthday on a Thursday is sort of a pain, because lots of homework is always due on Friday. We'll have to postpone some of the celebration until the weekend -- or maybe even later than that. Rocket Boy actually FORGOT the twins' birthday was this week, that's worse than me. I didn't forget, I just didn't do anything to prepare. He and I were discussing it yesterday, and he suggested we do something for them during Spring Break, when we are planning to take a huge, complicated road trip that they will HATE. Sounds great to mix in some birthday stuff.

Oh well. They're turning 15, not 5. It'll all work out.

***

It just occurred to me that since it's now March, I should be making new month plans. 

Month of March:

• March's theme is what? It's the twins' birthday month and at the end we've got Spring Break. In between, it's cold and snowy and windy. So I guess it's Winter's Last Blast (there can be lots of snow in April, but by then you can tell it's not really winter anymore). March is perhaps a time to do all the winter things you've been putting off.
  
• Instead of choosing a new goal from my master list, I'm going to go back to the files and piles in the desk room (which were supposed to be my 1st Quarter project). I worked on them a little in February, but then the taxes took over. Now the taxes are submitted, so I'll go back to the files. I have three weeks before Spring Break -- I'll try to get something done.
  
• I'd like to do something special with each twin this month, related to their birthday, but I don't know if it will happen. I'll offer it and see what they say. Otherwise the "special things" can happen during Spring Break week.
  
• I don't think we'll do any socializing until Spring Break, so I won't worry about that.
• And the reading I've talked about in my reading posts: I'm working along on my five books from the pile by the bed, one of those will be the book group book, and I picked up my next presidential biography at the library today.

In the week ahead I have a lot of things to do: Teen A's IEP meeting is tomorrow morning, I need to get blood drawn, and I should go grocery shopping AND birthday shopping. Tuesday I have a physical and I should do some more shopping. Wednesday Teen B has three appointments (wires off at 11:30 am, dentist at 2 pm, and wires back on at 4 pm), so that's a lot of driving and nothing else will get done because he'll be with me. And Thursday is their birthday, which will require who knows what.

One other thing I did this week, quite by accident, was find a bunch of new ancestors (new to me, that is -- they've been dead for hundreds of years). I traced our matrilineal line as far back as I could go, which led me, surprisingly, to the Palatine Germans, a group of refugees who came here in the early 1700s, sponsored by Queen Anne of England. I had never heard of them before and I certainly didn't know I was related to them. But apparently I am. And because I was tracing my matrilineal line, I ended up with a lot of mothers. I mean, they're my great-great-XXX-grandmothers, but the point is that they were somebody's mothers, that's how they got on that line. I found myself wondering what that was like. Did Catharina/Katrina Schram Lampman, born in 1730 (or 1728) in New York, who gave birth to 12 children, ever give a birthday party? I'm guessing not.