What a Life!

Joey and I both have colds. The version where you get really congested. I have to suction his nose before I feed him, which he hates. He cries hysterically, but if I don’t, he can hardly nurse because he keeps gasping for breath.

As for me…maybe I’m weird but when I don’t quite feel like myself (this cold seems to be accompanied by fatigue that leaves you dragging), my emotions, shall we say, sharpen a bit. If I’m irritated, I’m about to blow my gasket. If I’m sad, it’s all I can do not to sob. If I’m amused, I laugh so hard I almost can’t stop.

What this means is that Ben’s usual mildly obnoxious behaviors are requiring me to muster up all of the self-control I have. If he goes over and tries to turn Joey’s head or rocks the bouncy seat to hard or tries to tickle him while I’m nursing…

And no, the door to the basement does not need to be closed, and you do not need to have a tantrum if I open it so I can go through it.

And if you drag that toy phone across the wood floor one more time and wake Joey up, I’m going to scream.

Okay, enough. You get the picture.

Here’s some humor for your day.

Last summer Steve wanted to make Beer Can Chicken. Basically, you take a whole chicken and a can of beer, drink a little bit of the beer, and then stick the chicken on the can of beer and stand it on the grill to bake. Supposedly the beer evaporates and keeps the meat moist, and it gets the nice taste of having been cooked on a grill. Or something like that.

Steve followed the recipe I found for him to the letter. He’s a scientist, you know. [I did great in Chemistry class, but never got better than a C in lab because my experiments always failed…which makes you wonder how on earth I manage to cook…but that’s another story…]

He set the chicken on the grill and went out to check it 45 minutes later. He lifted the lid on the grill…and the whole chicken burst into flames!

Steve’s a pretty steady kind of guy, and I’ve never seen him get this upset over anything. It was hysterical! He came storming into the house and told me what had happened. It was everything I could not to just laugh…at him and the situation.

In fact, I have never been able to tell this story in real life without laughing so hard that I had to attempt it three times before the people I was telling it to caught enough of the details to have an idea of what I was talking about.

But for the record, here is a picture of the blackened chicken before he trashed it.

The meat was charred on the outside and raw on the inside, so it did not qualify for “Blackened Chicken” which I believe is also a recipe I come across from time to time. I think I’ve even seen something like that in restaurants but I’ve never been interested in it enough to even read the description.

Oh my!