Cookies

After a long, emotionally-draining day, I sat with my husband on the couch, glad for his company but too wrapped up in my own mind to notice what we were watching on TV.

"You know what, honey?" I asked him. I probably waited until a car commercial, because even when I'm distracted, I'm good like that.

"What?" He hit the mute button on the remote and turned to me.

I sat up a little straighter.

"I'm a tough goddamn cookie."

He smiled at me. 

"Yes. Yes you are."

"I'm... I'm one of those oatmeal cookies so hard you've gotta dip them in milk first so you don't break a tooth. Tough." I may or may not have flexed a bicep to demonstrate my toughitude.

He considered my statement for a moment.

"No, those are too brittle. You'd just fall to pieces. You're a Chewy Chips Ahoy. You bend but you don't break."

He kissed me, and I cried just a little. Then I wondered if maybe I was awesome enough to be the kind with the rainbow chips.

Food Bank

We were driving home after dinner at a new Italian place, very full and very happy. An aluminum pie plate sat at my feet. The leftover penne and meatballs contained within it made the car smell absolutely delicious. We passed some nondescript brown brick buildings, and Dave read one of the signs out front.

"Look," he said, pointing to the buildings, "A food bank! If you want, we can drop off those leftovers so you can withdraw them later."

"Um, I think food banks give your food to other people."

He feigned shock. "Then that's a horrible bank!"

"They take your deposited food and give it to others," I explained to my husband. "Basically, it's redistribution of food wealth. Fucking commies."

"We should look for a food credit union. We could probably get a better food interest rate."

"And lower fees?" I asked.

"Yeah."

"I wonder if a food bank would have a foreign food transaction fee."

Dave looked over at me. "Like, if you deposited Ramen noodles, they'd take a cut?"

"Yeah."

"Oh, definitely." He nodded vigorously. "That's how they get you."

Linking up with the Yeah Write Moonshine Grid. Click through, kick back and enjoy some fun weekend reading!

It was a dark and foggy night

It was a dark and foggy night as we pulled into the driveway after a lovely dinner out. I stepped out of the car and shivered in the eerie quiet. The porch light cut a faint orange cone through the fog - all else was damp and grey.

 

"Hurry and open the door," I said to my husband. "I don't want to be stuck out here with all the scary creatures in the mist." I held my leftover French dip sandwich a little tighter in its paper bag.

"You mean Werewolves and such?" He looked up and down our silent street. "Don't they live on the moors?"

"Aren't there werewolves in London? They can totally live in cities. The important part is the mist. Werewolves live in the mist." I paused. "With the gorillas."

The note

Dave went on a fishing expedition this weekend, for which he had to be up and out of the house by 5am. When I told him I wanted to get up with him to see him off, he told me that was silly, and he'd let me sleep.

"But I need to kiss you goodbye!" I protested.

"Why? It'll be 5am. You can kiss me when I get home."

I was a little ashamed to admit my reasons. "If... if something happens to you, I won't have kissed you goodbye. I don't think I could live with that."

"Happens to me?" He laughed. "I'm going fishing. For a day. Not even a whole day."

"You could drown! The boat could sink!"

"I can swim."

"But with those stupid boots of yours, you'll sink to the bottom like a rock and meet a watery demise! Never to be seen again!"

He put his hand on mine to reassure me. "We'll stay out of the deep end. I'll be fine."

Not willing to push the issue or to force him to wear floaties in front of his friends, I acquiesced.

"Fine. But can you leave me a note, so I have that to cling to during the lonely nights when I'm mourning your tragic fishing death?"

A twinkle arose in his eyes. "Oh," he smiled, "I'll leave you a note."

This is what I found on the kitchen counter in the morning:

Reads: "Upon my death, please cling here"

Sigh. I married a smartass.

We're not terrible people. Really.

Driving home late one night, Dave complained of a scratchy throat. Being the good wife that I am, I offered him a mint or a Lifesaver to take his mind off the scratchiness. He selected the Lifesaver option, so I dug one of my individually-wrapped, assorted-fruit-flavor sugar rings out of my purse and unwrapped it for him. I held it out for him to take, but he opened his mouth and said "Ahh", with his tongue out.

"Really? You want me to feed it to you?"

He nodded and grunted in the affirmative, tongue still out.

I put the candy on his tongue, at which point he drew it into his mouth and said in all sacriliciousness: "Body of Christ." I tell you, you can take the Catholic out of church...

"Wow, honey, if that's the body of Christ, he's got some serious diabetes."

He shrugged. "Hey, he's made up of all those white bread wafers. Nothing but carbs will do that to a person."

"So, refined carbs were Jesus' downfall?"

He considered that for a second. "Yeah. That and the Romans."

A GPS Moment

Since my husband gets home a few hours after I do, I try to have dinner ready, or at least close to ready, around the time he arrives, so we can eat together. 

The other night, he was a little earlier than usual, or maybe I was running late. Whichever it was, I had just popped the marinated chicken breasts into the oven as he came through the door. It would be half an hour or so before we could eat the main course (Lemon-garlic chicken and purple mashed potatoes), but I threw together a big salad appetizer to tide us over.

We settled into our designated spots on the couch with our big salads, and watched half an hour of something or other, until the oven timer interrupted us with a loud buzz. Down went the salad bowl, and up went I to the kitchen, fumbling to find the oven mitts. I poked the metal spike of the digital meat thermometer into the thickest part of the biggest piece of chicken, and pressed the button. Numbers appeared on the screen and began to climb, slowing to a crawl around 80. Concerned, I checked the setting on the oven - 375 as usual - and then tried the temperature in a different piece of chicken. No difference: the temperature still wouldn't get past 80.

Damn.

"It's going to be a while, honey. I should have pounded these stupid things; they're too fat and they're going to take a while." I offered him some mashed potatoes, but he was content to wait, so I covered the baking dish with some foil and put it back into the heat, setting the timer for 25 more minutes and returning to my mindless TV.

More buzzing, more fumbling for oven mitts, more temperature-taking. This time the numbers stopped near 100. I may have cursed at this point. I may have flapped a dish towel around in frustration.

"Fine", I may have muttered to myself, "if they don't want to cook in the oven, I will nuke these sons of bitches. They won't taste right but we'll be able to eat something before midnight, and maybe this way I won't kill us with salmonella!"

"They won't get up to temp," I informed my hungry husband, "so I'm just going to nuke them so we can eat. They're supposed to get to 165 to not kill us, and they're still way below that."

One and a half minutes of full-power microwaving later, the thermometer still didn't want to get past 105. I flung it onto the counter and tried to think what the hell else I had in the fridge so I could throw together a quick replacement dinner. And that's when I saw it. 

The readout of the digital meat thermometer, still on, a few feet away on the counter.

It said: 21.

Oven-mittened facepalm ensued.

"Um, honey? I think I just had a GPS moment."

There were two seconds of silence, and then a giggle from downstairs.

"Celsius?"

It amazes me that no other explanation was required.

We ate the chicken. On the bright side, even the hyperthermophilic* bacteria that live beside superheated ocean vents can't survive past 105C, so we were definitely safe from Salmonella.

*Hyperthermophilic: loves extreme heat.