Jeni’s Crazy, Crispy Day Ends

There are some days I feel like stamping “Operator Error” on and trying again.  This has been one of those days.  Beginning with the frog gone AWOL, it has just been a weird day. 

I did find the frog.  She was on the floor of the front hallway, hidden by bags for Goodwill.  I, being a strong, brave woman, made the two oldest boys take care of the thing.  Bradford informed me she was like a dried prune.  I had read these frogs are famous for their escape artist antics, but when our filter was out and the tank lid was completely off for two weeks, there were no attempted escapes.  No, she waited until she had to squeeze through a 1-inch hole to make her getaway.  We’ve surmised that she was either overcome with guilt about eating the fish or looking for a better life.  One down, one to go…

And then there is the girls’ bedroom wall, which now has many, many pencil marks and only two extra holes from where I put up the mirror for their vanity.  My dad has told me lots of times “measure twice, cut once,” but I have always been measurementially challenged.  I wonder how long it’ll take me to figure out how much dirt I need for the backyard. 

Oh, and a good bit of the morning spent making tapioca pudding from scratch.  Why?  I don’t know.  The pearl tapioca had been soaking since last Wednesday, and I thought I should do something with it.  So I did, but it was a process and a bother on a day I really needed to dedicate to other things, like figuring what to have for lunch.  Menu said grilled cheese, but we had neither enough cheese nor any bread, so I fed the kids a snack of tapioca pudding while I pulled together a surprisingly yummy lunch of taco fixins. 

Dinner, too, was crazy.  I decided on chicken thighs when I found I did not have what the menu said to make.  They were practically frozen when I put them in, and I was concerned they be cooked all the way through.  I tested them with the thermometer, which really isn’t “instant,” and they were still bloody.  About ten minutes later I popped the thermometer in one of the thighs and closed the door, for who has the patience to wait until it figures out what temperature the inside of the chicken is.  Well, I’ll never have to wait on it again, for it is now a lump of mangled, melted plastic on a metal stick. 

Yeah.  Operator Error.