Back to school

I did not get any pictures of my kids going back to school. That's how I fail to roll. The boys are relieved to be back around other children after two months of weekending with their cousins. Yesterday ended in a mediation between the eldest two at the kitchen table, wherein I attempted to play relationship counselor after ingesting a fair amount of rum in a botched attempt to frost a German chocolate cake*. It went smoothly, I think. Like a hydroplaning car.

This summer was a bust, internet. There was no travel, because my work year revolves around summer services, and there was no lounging with margaritas, because I have no patio furniture and gave up alcohol** in order to lose the lychee weight. HOWEVER, my in-laws arrived last night, so there may be lasers and tap dancing to liven things up a bit. I'm not rushing out to buy booze, but my abstinence has been modified to exempt beverages placed firmly in my hand by a hairy-eyeballed spouse.

To prepare for his family's arrival, the man has been hammering away in the bathroom all week to install wainscoting. He dropped the sink. And broke a pipe. And bought the wrong replacement part. As he stood staring wretchedly at the pipe pieces in his hand, I called him into the kids' room. "Don't cry," I warned him, and pointed at the neat row of nails hammered right through the wall. He made a little strangled noise.

So the bathroom isn't finished, but I don't mind, because anything is an improvement over its original abandoned-shack condition.



In other news

* I have endeavored to become better at researching genealogy through our library databases. For practice, I looked up my own ancestors, and found documents dating back to 1782 England. Being a well-established fan of Outlander, I was very interested to see what my relatives would have been up to while Jamie and Claire were off chasing redcoats, if we existed in the same imaginary timeline. According to the documents, young William was round-chinned, dark-eyed, straight-nosed, and in prison for stealing books. Stealing books. Damn it, Willie.

* I bought reading glasses. So I could more easily read about ancestors for whom I am paying karmic retribution.

* The doorbell rang while I was making dinner, and I scared the electrician by answering it in my swimsuit while holding a lot of chopped ham. "Come on in, I've got my hands full of meat!" Oh, ffs, self.




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*the man wanted "something with coconut" for his birthday, so I got out the Booze Cakes cookbook and went for it. Then I poured too much rum into a measuring cup which already had sugar in it, so I couldn't just pour it back into the bottle. Instead, I used the sweetened liquor to brush between the layers of cake. But I had forgotten to level the layers beforehand, and ended up carving the tops off and eating the rum-soaked cake. Then I drank the rest out of the measuring cup. That is frugality, folks.

** except when ruining a cake.