The hate in Hoosier Hospitality

I've probably used the phrase "Hoosier Hospitality" more than a thousand times. Tens of thousands? Maybe.

I don't think I'll be using it again. Because for too many Indiana residents, it's a spirit not fully extended to those whose complexions, accents, true selves aren't what nice Hoosier boys and girls learn in white Sunday School.

Yep. I said it. I mean it, too. I grew up in an all-white community where otherwise well-meaning and Christian-like people toss out hateful words as if they were simple adjectives. There's been progress, sure. But not enough.

When State Senator Aaron Freeman stripped the guts out of a bias crimes bill and said, "In the next five weeks, I'm going to pop popcorn, kick my feet up and watch the show in the House and let them deal with it," I was disgusted.

"Let them deal with it," said this guy elected to represent the will of the people of Indiana.

"It" is the discussion over whether judges should have the ability to add addition time to sentences for for people found guilty of harming other people because of their race, religion, age, ethnicity, national origin, disabilities, gender identity and sexual orientation.

Think about that a little bit.

We're talking about people found guilty of harming others because of things those victims cannot control. We're talking about hate-motivated actions against other human beings.

The state Chamber of Commerce says 75 percent of Indiana residents want a bias crime on the books that includes those protected classes, and I hope that's true. Because I want my state to be a state where hospitality extends to everyone. Where there's no room for hate. Where haters are punished appropriately for their hateful actions.

I honestly don't understand why this bill is so controversial. Worried your whiteness or straightness is going to be targeted? You're protected, too. Not that, statistically you should be worried. Surely you're not worried that you'll be facing additional years or months in prison for committing a hate crime?

Would it help you to remember the  Golden Rule? You remember that one: "do unto others as you would have them do unto you. (Matthew 7:12) Matthew apparently thought we would understood that "others" mean everyone.

This discussion exhausts me. Maybe instead of putting his feet up and snacking while others take up the mantle of statesmanship, Sen. Freeman should just give the majority of us what we want: a state where hate crimes are unacceptable.

Hold my beer

One of these things is not like the other...

I went to my first beer share this weekend. If you're unfamiliar with the term, a beer share is like a wine tasting, but with craft beer. All of my beer share knowledge comes via the Captain.

Give him a chance and he'll spin yarns of beer shares among thousands of people in the cold, cold springtime rain of northern Indiana or with a few buddies in the heat of summer in someone's back yard. Or in parking lots between beer lovers who connected online and find a stolen moment when one is driving through the other's state and meet in real life to exchange beers the other can't easily get. 

Jeff has a large group of guys who rotate hosting shares. There are women, too, who take part, but it's mostly a male crew. Beer shares are where friends or strangers from around the globe are united by their deep love of craft beer. They drink from tiny cups with short pours of all sorts of fluids that resemble the beer of your youth much like butterfly wings resemble steel wool. 

Sours, stouts, wheats, saisons, pale ales. Hoppy, acidic, chocolatey, piney, chalky. The adjectives roll off their tongues like rain on a Seattle roof as they sip and swish and swallow. 

I love them all, and they are sincere in their appreciation, but I confess to making light of the conversation when Jeff and his beer buddies get together. They can describe beer so poetically you'd think they were speaking of the loves of their life. And I guess, in a way, they are...

Smart beer sharers arrange their rides home ahead of time because while each sip of the nectar is a small one, within the space of a few hours, you can imbibe from dozens of cans and bottles. See the shot above -- the required "kill shot" that memorializes the samplings of the night. That compilation is in addition to everyone "checking in" the beers they tried on a beer app where people around the world exhalt or bemoan each of the beers they've consumed.

I was in no danger of drunk driving as A.) the beer share was in our basement and B.) some of the beers cracked open last night were beverages I had no interest in. 

I'd opened the wrong bottle of champagne on Valentine's Day and had been nursing that lesser-vintage bottle since Friday. So I brought my own brew to the party and stuck around (mostly) because my friend Sara was also there. She's a more sophisticated beer drinker than I am, though I think it's fair to say her husband loves it more. 

That's right: I went to a beer share and drank (mostly) champagne.  

I usually make myself scarce when Jeff hosts a beer share, and I don't think I've ever gone to one outside my own home. I can't keep up with that crowd for volume or type. I don't have -- and don't really want -- a palate that appreciates beers as dark as Dick Cheney's heart, as thick as a lumberjack's bicep or as sour as a persimmon in May. The range of beer these guys drink is immense. Some of it poured like motor oil. No exaggeration.

I'm a pale ale or juicy Maine Beer Company kind of girl when I drink beer. I would much rather drink champagne. And not Miller High Life, which as everyone know, is the champagne of beers. 

Bubbly wine doesn't have to be from France to make me happy, and it doesn't have to be expensive. We did, however, have a lovely, 2004 Perrier-Jouet Belle Epoque for our anniversary that Jeff had found at a bargain price and had been saving for a special occasion. 

In my opinion, the best side effect of his craft beer obsession is that he often comes home with wine for me. If liquor stores ever focus only on beer, I will be bereft. The bottle I'd opened ahead of the pricey PJ was a Veuve du Vernay Brut, which can retail for less than $10 a bottle. So you can imagine Jeff's dismay when I popped the wrong cork... 

Neither Sara nor I lasted the entirety of the beer share. We watched part of Saturday Night Live drink-free before she and her husband left to take care of their dogs. I went to bed and it was another couple of hours or so before the beer sipping stopped. 

Once he'd made it out of bed this morning, Jeff asked Ali if his revelry had kept her up late. Silly dad.  "I had my headphones on," she said. 

This wasn't Ali's first beer share rodeo. Sometimes I wonder if she's going to enjoy college. She's been surrounded with this high-end, complicated beer for so long I'm pretty sure that kegs of Bud Lite aren't going to excite her. 

I'm OK with that side effect, too.

Speaking of the redhead, here's a picture of her Herron High School record-breaking relay team and a fun shot taken at the end-of-the-season get together. She declared the other day that she has only 99 days of high school left, which may or may not have resulted in me having extra bottles of bubbly in the fridge...

Naked Monkey v. Hairy Beast

Last weekend, Ali accompanied me to Massage Envy in Avon to attend a celebration of my friend Bree's 10th year in business there.

Bree used to be my favorite mogul. She's a kick-ass businesswoman and an even better mom and friend. Or she was until she offered me free stuff.

"Think about what you want waxed for free," she said when I told her I was bringing Ali with me to her event.

I'm not one to make an effort to get free stuff. I generally follow the old adage of "you get what you pay for."  (See a future blog about my sister Diane and the Indiana State Fair for a philosophy counter to mine.) But I love -- I mean loved -- Bree, so I wanted to celebrate with her.

So off we went. Bree's Massage Envy is well worth your drive. The people are lovely and there's a lot more than massage available. Skin care, candles, snail poop to keep eye bags away... you name it. It's there.

Ali and I got a little bit of a muscle-relaxing treatment that's a pre-cursor to a massage and it was pretty amazing. Ali was ready to make an appointment right after the little device started pummeling her shoulder.

We had to get to a swim lesson Ali was teaching, so we only had time for one more thing. That one more thing was the waxing station.

I'd never had a professional wax job, but it seemed intriguing. The only time I'd tried wax to rip the hair off my legs, it didn't go well. I might have been in high school. I just remember having trouble heating the wax and finding that, while a bit painful, more hair was left behind than came off on the strip of paper.

In my never-ending quest to not resemble an Afghan Hound, I go the razor route. Even though I'm a seasoned pro, I still have near-tragic shaving accidents when I shave my legs. But I persist.

Let's be clear: I am truly a hairy beast. I shave my legs and other parts every time I shower lest I develop Steve Carrell-like patches here and there.

In recent years, my leg hair has apparently had a chat with my chin hair, and the chin hair has given growth lessons to my upper lip hair.

If I'm not shaving, I'm plucking or jumping a little bit as I feel another hair burst through the skin on my chin or lip. I don't know if I really feel them emerge, but it seems like an endless battle keeping the  damn things at bay.

When you're as weary from the black-hair wars as I am, you're vulnerable to suggestions that you wax your hairs away. Alison, who's witnessed me fighting my follicles, did not volunteer to also get something waxed.

Instead, she readied her phone.

I blacked out shortly after learning my esthetician's name. Much like Bree, she seemed like a lovely person. We started with my chin and she gave me all kinds of great information. She gently cleansed my skin and then applied a warm goo that felt kind of nice to tell you the truth.

Then, she ripped it off and I almost peed myself. Seriously. And I had plucked my chin not the day before! I thought I'd gotten all the big one.

"We got some really thick ones," the formerly nice lady remarked as Alison cackled.

Before I knew it, she'd drizzled more wax to get the other side. I clutched the sheets and prepared my Kegels.

The esthetician asked Ali if she wanted a treatment. Ali didn't have to vocalize her refusal. I was feeling my baby-soft, hairless chin and coming down off the Pain Mountain.

There were two of us, so we qualified for two treatments......"How about your lip?"

I thought about it for a second. I'd gone into this to determine if wax could get the few hairs I thought I'd missed on my chin. I was pretty sure my lip was next to hairless. How bad could it be? And, it was free...

I asked if it would be very much worse than the chin pain, which was already starting to fade. My tormentor apparently decided my query was permission to peel.

"This could be a tear-jerker," she said, dousing me with wax. Before I could breathe, she ripped off the cooled wax.

I did not scream. I may have whimpered. I think a tear did escape.

When I realized I had three more strips of upper lip waxing to endure, I fought back panic. But I was stuck. I couldn't emerge with only one side of my upper lip bald. It would make the remaining hairs look all the more thick and lustrous.

Have you ever plucked a single hair from the middle of your upper lip? It's kind of like poking yourself in the eye with a toothpick. Or a steak knife. It's a quick stab of pain that lingers like when you burn yourself getting cookies out of the oven. And there's no cookie to ease your pain.

You hop around a little bit and curse with words you forgot you knew. You think about shaving your lip rather than plucking, the warning that you'll have a moustache like your father if you do. Caroline from the Real Housewives of New Jersey shaved her whole face all the time and she doesn't have a 5 o'clock shadow. 

And that's when your facing one stinking hair. And you're home alone.

When the whole herd gets ripped out by a perfect stranger, you'll swear you've been scalped.

This facial experience killed my curiosity of what a Brazilian wax would be like. Oh. My. Lord. How are those Naked Monkey shops in business? You'd have to duct tape me and knock me into serious unconsciousness to get me waxed down there. I'll braid my pubic hair before I'll expose it to hot wax.

I've rediscovered a deep and abiding love for my razor. Sure, it might make me bleed, and it might be a daily-use kind of thing. But it's bite is gentle in comparison.

I was informed that if I continued waxing on, say a schedule of every three or four weeks, the process would slim down my thick and sturdy facial hair. Each waxing session would less painful than the one before.

I'm actually considering it. But I'm staying strictly upstairs, if you get my drift. I'm pretty sure I'd pass out if I let the wax drip down under.

Here's a picture of Ali and me with Bree (next to me) and a Massage Envy staffer who is not the esthetician. This is before I went into the waxing room. Back when I loved Bree...

OK, I'll admit it. I still love Bree. An you will too if you ever meet her. If I ever meet Miss Wax Alot again, it will be after I've emptied a flask of something high in alcohol content.

Call me Popeye

After a weekend learning about the indelicacies of White Castle, I was prepared to take it easy on my internal system this week. I did a fairly decent job of placating my angry intestines and was rewarded with an amazing chicken pot pie at Tina Noel's Euchre Club. (Julie and I also won but that's another story...)

Next up was Friday Book Club, and as we were reading a book based in India, Indian food was the theme. I'm the only one in my house who loves spinach, and hoping there would be left-overs, I had offered to bring the creamed spinach and cheese dish I always start with at the Indian buffet -- saag paneer.

So Friday comes and I go to a great Broad Ripple Indian restaurant we love, wondering how to order this dish, which is generally a side.  We always eat in when we go there, and I had zero ideas about the actual quantity I needed, let alone whether they had an adequate take-out bowl to put it in.

Here's where not wanting to admit I had difficulty with the waiter's accent came back to bite me. He quite rightly initially assumed I wanted lunch, then thought I wanted to order dinner carryout. 

I explained that I only wanted enough spinach to feed a party of eight as part of a pitch-in offering. Oh, and while I was at it, I might have an appetizer, too, also enough for eight.

We were having a great conversation. Everyone was happy. He asked if I also wanted Naan -- the bread they make on premises. I declined, saying another Book Club member was on Naan duty. "It's a pitch-in," I said, again, thinking that explained everything. 

"You'll need rice, then," he said, clearly worried about me not having Naan. Shalimar's Naan is amazing and he was aright to wonder why I was skipping it.

I thought, "OK, sure," and pictured our Chinese carry-out which always has at least one white carton of rice. 

"Soup?" he asked.

Their lentil soup is also amazing. "Sure," I thought. "I'll skip bringing wine and alert Kate so she can adjust if need be."

He tells me it'll be ready in 25 minutes and off I trot to the other errands on my list. I go back to the restaurant. He greets me with two bags, one medium-sized and one small. I'm thrilled. He says he'll help me carry it out.

I'm sure I looked at him funny. From the Book Club book, I've learned a little about traditional Indian culture, which is heavy on the man being charge. But I can carry two bags. And then I see the rest of my order.

The spinach was in a 9x3 aluminum pan. If my math is correct, that's at least 12 cups of saag paneer. A nutritionist will tell you that a serving of saag paneer is 3/4 of a cup.

That pan of yummy goodness was big enough to roast a Thanksgiving turkey if you're feeding a family of four. And with it was an equally sized pan of rice. 

I had apparently indicated that our dinner of eight was vegetarian and that we would be eating only spinach, rice, soup and vegetable samosa. And that "pitch-in" meant I alone (other than the phantom Naan supplier) was feeding this small army of anti-carnivores.

I swallowed hard, smiled brightly and handed over my credit card. The overage was entirely my fault for not just owning up to the language/accent barrier. So, I had saag paneer for lunch. And then I had more at Book Club. I have a couple tubs in my freezer, too.

Later that night, I was in bed shielding my ears from the angry shouting of my intestinal tract and wondering if you could die from spinach poisoning. And if I did die from it, would I be found in a puddle of green ooze? Was there a green-tinged cloud of noxious vapor hovering over me already?

Turns out spinach can, indeed, be toxic. It's the oxalic acid that'll do you in. The interwebs told me, it would take about 25 grams of oxalic acid to cause death in a 145-pound person, which is about 7.3 pounds of spinach. 

That's about 14 bags of grocery-story spinach, right? Cooking spinach greatly reduces its size, so what does 7.3 pounds of cooked spinach look like, I wondered. Plus, saag paneer has other ingredients in it, so after much internal anxiety, I decided I'd probably survive the night. Spoiler alert: I did.

But at 2 a.m., I wasn't as confident as I am now. It's possible I prayed not to wake up dead. And that any residual gaseousness wouldn't do in the Captain.

This morning, all I can hear is Popeye's song ringing in my head. If you run into me this week and I say, "Well, blow me down," in response to your news, don't be surprised.

"I'm Popeye the sailor man.

I'm Popeye the sailor man.

I'm strong to the fin-ich

'cause I eats me spin-ach,

I'm Popeye the sailor man!"

In Alison news, we are still in the college exploration stage. She's been accepted at a few schools already so we know she'll be going somewhere. But she has a few more interviews with fancy schools to go and then the wait for whether she'll go farther in their process.

If you happen to get a call from an Ivy League school looking for intel on the redhead, don't tell them about this blog.

Le Chateau de Blanc and Chateau de Pee-ew

I don't mean to cause any trouble here, but last night I had my first night on my new mattress with a proper foundation. I also had my first White Castle experience. The two will be forever enshrined in my olfactory system.

For those of you not blessed with White Castle in your region, it's a mostly Midwest burger chain that some people -- mostly men despite the photos on its website -- claim is next to manna from Heaven. There's even a White Castle Hall of Fame for those who've gone to great lengths to satisfy "the crave" -- think helicopter delivery to people at sea or in other areas of wilderness where there's not "Whitey" delivery.

Somehow I had escaped the actual eating of a slider lo these many years in Hoosierland. My friend Peter used to bring them in by the truckload at Angie's List, and Jeff always includes it in the rotation when we're trying to find something fast to eat.

Last night at the Christ the King Trivia Night, I caved. They're two-bite sized little things. Warm and fragrant, they have onions and pickles. I love pickles. The wait staff convinced Jeff he needed onion fries and crinkle fries as well, so we had those, too. (Knowing we'd have a bunch of bad-for-us-food, I brought a veggie platter with garlic hummus as one of our apps as well.)

I had three sliders and a good portion of both kinds of fries along with champagne (because, if you're going to drink, you should drink champagne) M&Ms, some jalapeno things, a cheesy-cauliflower bacon thing and some guilt-laced portions of the veggies because I'd gone off the rails dietarily.

There were more than 400 people packed into the CKS gym, and they were loud. Particularly the tables around me. Which was a good thing.

Because one of the side effects of White Castle sliders is flatulence. Thanks for that warning, Jeff. Yeah. Like, a lot. Jeff bought 18 sliders. Some with cheese. There were none remaining so I'm pretty sure we gassed up the place like it's never been gassed before. (It's a gym, so thank the good Lord for high ceilings.)

I'm not one to embrace the fart. It's just not my thing. Jeff celebrates them like it's the Fourth of July, and he's passed this on to Alison. I was just thankful Beth Harriman's party was having a good, loud time.

On the way home, I was discussing my dissatisfaction with the cuisine. More precisely with it's residue, and Jeff laughed. He has a buddy whose new wife won't let him have White Castle sliders if he's going to be in their home. She's away for six days.

What's said buddy doing? Indulging his crave, of course. Probably for all six days. I should have Jeff tell him to light a three-wick candle in every room the night before she comes home. Although a spark might send his house up in a ball of greasy slider fire.

But I spoke of my bed. Yeah. It's finally perfect. Right now it's airing out. It's a good thing I have a lot of candles.

My spate of cleaning last week was inspired by a project to clean my bedroom that came about because we got a new mattress. Getting the mattress meant getting the old box springs and mattress down to the guest bedroom downstairs, getting that set of mattress and box springs up to the back porch awaiting donation to a friend.

You'd think the struggle of moving over-sized, unwieldy items down and around the stairs would have tired me out. But the size of the dust bunnies under the bed frame prompted the cleaning of the floor. That led to the realization that the dust on the top rows of the curtains had to go and then the walls and and then it became an all-out war on the whole house.

Meanwhile, the Captain was in home improvement heaven. He'd done all the research to determine what mattress we wanted and what foundation it would need. He'd gone to Lowe's. He'd gotten out his power tools. He'd measured and sawed and drilled and created the precise number of horizontal slats at the precise width apart and then created new legs running below that to give further support to the Casper foam mattress that arrived via mail because that's how we do things now.

He really worked hard. He'd done a great job. And no blood was spilled during the construction project. We'd avoided any marital spats ala the famous front walk project where he'd come home after I'd spent all morning digging out old stepping stones, widening the path and laying down new, bigger stones. I was sweaty. My arms were approaching noodle status and I had whole families of blisters on my hands. "Did you research the best way to do that?" he'd greeted me. "Did you use a level to be sure the ground is even?"

I was pretty sure we'd divorce before we got the stones in place, or kill each other, but somehow we managed to keep the stones on the ground and not swing a shovel too close to each other's heads.

In Jeff's defense, research is an important part of any project and I confess that I often will dive right into an idea only to find that if I'd slowed down a bit and examined the right way to do something, I'd be better off. (Those stepping stones were no where close to level when he came home...)

While he was exploring the best foundation for the new mattress, he'd asked me if I would be open to having it on a simple bed frame instead of in our sleigh bed frame. "No," I'd replied, not even looking up.

"How about on the floor?" he'd asked. "The hardwood would be good support."

I'd looked up at that one. "We are grown-ups. We sleep in a bed," I'd decreed.

He muttered something about me being an old lady as he turned back to his research, but I stood, well, firm. And thus, he decided we could keep our bed frame, but the current system that held the traditional box spring wasn't worthy.

While he created a better support system, I cleaned in different parts of the house. I quite purposefully stayed out of his way as he trotted back and forth with tools and lumber. Genius, right? I've learned a few things in our 20+ years together...

So. He finishes the slat project. The mattress arrives. We un-box it. I saw it, and I thought to myself. "Hmmm." But I didn't voice anything. I was hoping the thing would inflate a bit after having all the air sucked out of it so it would fit in the box. I think I didn't comment out loud. Here's what it looked like when we first installed it.

In my head, I thought, "No way, buster," but out loud, I think I said, "Uh, honey. Does that look a little low to you?"

He shook me off. He thought it would be fine. We just needed to get used to the look of it.

"Lay down on it and see if it's more firm and better than the old one," he suggested.

I did just that. Now, Jeff is almost a foot taller than me. Our old bed required me to jump up a little to get into it. I had to stoop a little to get into it. I felt like Snow White stumbling into the dwarves' house.

"I feel like I'm sleeping on the floor," I said.

"You'll get used to it," he said.

My pillow fell through a crack between the mattress and the top of the head board that was about the size of a pass-thru between a diner kitchen and the counter area. Later that night, I got out of bed to go to the bathroom, and I stumbled because I was used to sliding down a little bit. In this bed, I had to kind of climb up out of it.

I don't know how to describe how I felt laying in that bed because I've never really thought about the height at which I've slept before. But you've camped out, right? When you camp out, you know you're sleeping on the ground. You don't think about your position in the universe, there's just a lot of it on top of you.

The mattress is great. It was beautifully supported and I did sleep better than in the old one. Jeff did too, but he claims I drift over to him and move around a lot and that keeps him up. The old mattress had formed a bit of a trough which made it easier for me to roll over onto his side. The new one, of course, doesn't have that and apparently I keep more to myself now.

Horizontally, it was lovely. Vertically, though. And it looked weird!!!!

"It's fine," said the man. "You'll get used to it. We are the only ones who see our bedroom, anyway."

When I suggested -- again -- we needed to elevate the mattress, Jeff was less-than-enthused. He had done the research, the work and he had done a great job. It's true.

"Fine," he finally said. "But you're doing the box spring research."

We ended up with a steel box spring that's suggested for the mattress we have. It came UPS. He worked to improve the wooden structure he'd built -- yay! power tools -- and I read the instructions. They were more pictures than words, but I bent to the task.

It didn't take long at all, and of course it required a little more cleaning after all the cardboard bits and pieces were collected.

Alison was home while we worked on this, and she's witnessed our attempts to work together. She found herself a nest in the living room and put on her headphones. (The girl has learned a few things over the years...)

We used all the parts that came with the thing and assembled the steel box. It's literally a steel box with vertical slats covered in a zippered fabric shell. Its light, but strong and will be all the box spring we will ever need.

"I bet that the support you built will make this even better," I said, sucking up a tiny bit, but honestly believing it, too.

It's slightly lower than the old set but I don't have to jump up to get into it. The pillows don't slide underneath the head board and when I go to the bathroom at night, I slide off and over rather than having to climb up to the floor like I'm on a submarine.

Here's what it looks like now. Not that anyone but the Captain and I will ever see it...

It's better, right?! And we are still married...

For the love of God, please

Please don't ever look too closely at the tops of your kitchen cabinet doors. Or the little bit of cabinetry that surrounds your stove. Don't wonder if your hand can fit under that bottom drawer under your oven. And don't consider checking out the back of your free-standing microwave.

These are places you should should never, ever think about.

Heed my warning or you'll end up spending most of your Sunday morning on your hands and knees scrubbing at grime and grease that's been living in those spaces rent-free and happy as a grimy lark for years.

Unless you're better than me and deep clean more often. I made the mistake of looking at the spaces I tend to ignore after telling the Captain I was almost out of Costco's Kirkland disinfectant cleaning wipes. It was an innocent mistake. I'd nearly emptied the packet of them I had upstairs in a bid to eliminate some of the grossness of sharing a bathroom with a man.

To be fair, I shed hair like a Shetland sheepdog undergoing chemotherapy. It's gross, too. But my white tiled bathroom floor is clean now, and there's not a speck of dribble on the porcelain throne.

And it turned out that when the Chief Dribbler and Shopper of the family came home with a new case of cleaning cloths, I was actually almost out of the first pack of the 3-pack they come in. When I realized I was now over-stocked with the handy cloths, I decided to wipe down the kitchen counters.

I was done with that and ready to read the paper when I made the mistake of opening one of the cabinet doors, cleaning cloth in hand.

Ever looked at the inside of your kitchen cabinet doors? DON'T DO IT. Otherwise, if you're a real human being with a real human family, you'll see a CSI unit's DNA wet dream.

Neither Jeff nor Alison is particularly tidy in the kitchen. And they're in the kitchen a lot. I don't usually complain because I tend to get some tasty treats out of the deal. I also get dishpan hands cleaning up after them.

One memorable cookie extravaganza of Ali's left a film of powdered sugar over the entire room. This was AFTER she'd cleaned up. The cookies were beautiful and delicious, I grant you. Jeff can't heat up soup without leaving spots of it from heating source to bowl. (There's a pattern here...)

Anyway, most my kitchen is sparkling right now. I finished the open pack and got about half-way through the second in my original Costco case.

I had to play chauffeur before I got to the inside of the refrigerator, and I ended that task with a trip to the gym. In a surprising turn of events, I managed to keep from driving through the drive-thrus of the multiple Dairy Queens I passed. I was hoping to keep from eating until after the gym, and I did! Personal record, Tracy Wiseman: I didn't eat until 4 p.m. when I got home.

And no, I didn't cook any of it. Thank God for leftovers. I'm too exhausted to tackle the inside of the fridge. If I get my way, it'll be take-out menus for the rest of the month.