The Blogging of the Chores

I learned something this weekend.

I learned that if, on Saturday morning, you wife is in the kitchen, and she starts slamming things onto the counter and yelling, "I'm so sick of having to prepare every single meal all by myself without any help!" that the proper response is not to yell, "I'm so sick of earning every dollar we spend all by myself without any help!"

I'd say that would be something not to do, excepting that would require a whole different format for this post, and I'm not really feeling up to that right now.

The thing is, I don't really eat breakfast. Eating early in the morning makes me feel sick to my stomach.

So anyways, having learned my lesson, bright and early Sunday morning, I made breakfast. Bright and early for me is around 9:30, cuz the smell of breakfast earlier than that will make me want to hurl.

Sheesh. I feel like Ellie with all the commentary about feeling sick and wanting to hurl. Poor Ellie. She barfs a lot. I blame her mother.

Now, the problem with me making breakfast is that I never really know what we have in the refrigerators (two of them) or freezers (three of them), so I root around until I find something that looks interesting, and I start cooking it while I root around for something else. And this goes on until I have enough stuff going that the smell starts to make me nauseous.

This morning, the first thing I laid eyes upon that looked good was a big Sam's Club-sized bag of Ore-Ida crinkle fries. Wow. I just realized that Ore-Ida was like Oregon-Idaho, the two states from where the potatoes come. I didn't think you could trademark a contraction. I bet the rest of you knew that all along.

Bizarro!

So I said to myself, "Self, I bet you could make hashbrowns out of fries of you chopped them up." I proceeded to try to chop them up, but they were frozen like bricks.

Hookay, into the pan for a little frying to soften them up.

Root around a little more...Ahh Briwn'n'Serve breakfast sausages. I bet they'll taste good chopped up in the hashbrowns.

On the counter is a basket of produce harvested from the garden (last big harvest before next week's frost). Couple of chopped tomatoes and some green onions, into the pan! The fries are soft enough to chop, so I do that.

Salt. Pepper. Bullseye Original barbecue sauce - new recipe contains no high fructose corn syrup! (Which, I believe, strains the definition of "original", but who really gives a rat's ass, eh?)

I located our last jar of turkey gravy. Heated that up in a saucepan and umped it over the top of the hashbrowns, which are now not really hashbrowns so much as they are just hash.

Fried up some eggs, sunny-side up, and served them on top of a big spoonful of the glop. Top it off with a little Frank's Original red hot sauce.

Yum.

That should hold her for a while.

We then went off shopping. I dropped The Mrs. and HannahC off at JoAnn's Fabric to do whatever wacky stuff it is that women do at fabric stores, which is kinda the dual of what men do at Lowe's. Except Lowe's, sneaky bastards that they are, has a big plant section from which my wife always manages to fill up a cart while I'm off doing my man thang. I have never, ever filled up a cart at JoAnn's. I bought some string there once for our blinds, but that's pretty much it.

MaxieC and I headed to Liquor Max, which is MaxieC's favorite liquor store on account of it has his name in the store name.

That, plus they always give him a sucker.

I fulfilled my duties as requested here. I managed to 'splain to my fambly how the title of that post was actually a Motörhead song, but that I was pretty sure I was the only one who got the reference (show of hands?), though online opinions differ as to whether the song was named "999 Emergency" or just "Emergency," and I'm all settled in for the night and don't feel like checking the CD. Plus, I 'splained how in Europe, 999 is what you dial for emergencies, their version of our 911.

Yes, I just can't seem to get very far through life without pontificating on something. My genius is just so damned large that it needs to come out all the time. It must be so difficult to live with me.

After the liquor store, we hit The Home Depot on account of I gots $100 in gift cards, and I've been jonesing for a pressure washer, which I figure I owe to myself now, having forgone the bass boat. I also have about $100 of Sears gift cards, so I was checking what the Depot had to compare to Sears (which I did online later). If'n you decide that you don't really need a commercial grade washer to wash pigeon poop off the stucco, wasp nests off the eaves, and maybe clean the deck a bit before re-staining it once a year, then HD wins hands down. Even considering Sears has almost all their stuff on "clearance". Sears has a model that's $250 off, and that brings it down to the same price a slightly better model is at HD. But if you go another hundred bucks upscale, Sears is winning right now.

I borrow the neighbor's brother's air compressor again this year to blow out the sprinkler lines. Normally, I'd wait like two more weeks to do that, but we turned the sprinklers off about three weeks ago given how much rain we've been having, and The Mrs. swears we're going to have snow next week.

35 zones. Each one takes about one minute to blow out, which doesn't seem too bad. But the flow rate of the compressor is such that you need to let it recharge the tank for 5 minutes for every one minute you actually blast it. So this ended up taking like 3-4 hours. That's shorter than it took last year, as last year I had a leak in one of the supply pipes that bled off pressure constantly. That has been fixed twice now, once by a plumber, and then once again by me yesterday after the old fix came loose.

The Mrs. finished making curtains for the window seat of the school room. I hung them up today. It went about as well as could be expected. When she finished the window seat cushion, I'll post a photo.

OK, that's all.