Hapless Days Are Here Again

I really hesitated to post this because of the bad week I’m having.  But being the glutton for punishment that I am, I felt I must.

So this is the week I’m having so far: I finally overcame my ‘comment shyness’ on another blog site and posted a comment un-anonymously without really reading what I wrote before I hit the post button.  Had I done so, I would have realized the way I wrote my comment was totally inappropriate to the discussion at hand and then had the humiliating experience of having my first ‘known’ comment deleted by the administrator.  The explanation being, “Not sure if your intention was political or honest, either way it would end badly.”  Okay, I’ll eat that one, it was stupid of me to just write a comment off the cuff like that (and so unlike me, as well). Great, I’ll eat my crow with a fork, please!

Then this whole health care reform debacle that I’m trying in earnest to understand because I cannot stand all the bickering, either on TV or within my own family.  As I struggle to figure out what exactly I should be reading, I can’t help but feel like a complete nincompoop! For all my talk about how we should all be good informed citizens, I feel I can’t even walk my own talk.  Doh!

 I tried to tune out the world around me and get back to work on one of my stories in progress and only managed to spit out 300 words for the whole week.  This is a great failure to me, after having been on a good roll, letting at least 1200 – 3000 words flow out effortlessly a day for last several weeks. Ay carumba!

One of the more recent changes I’ve made in my life has been to bake my own bread, both for economical and taste reasons.  The other day I attempted a French bread that ran through the whole French bread cycle, according to my Breadman Ultimate and had to put it back on the ‘bake only’ cycle for another 90 minutes after which it was still under baked. What went wrong?  Only the Goddess of the Kitchen knows and she’s not talking to me lately. Oy vey!

So this morning I tried a different recipe.  I was going rogue and planned on using my oven, this time.  Damn that Mark Bittman and his How to Cook Everything book!  There must have been a typo, because I mixed all ingredients according to his “Easy French Bread” recipe and made a big bowl of glue instead.  Was my yeast still good?  I took some from the very same packet I used in the recipe, added some warm water and within mere minutes it was creamy and very much alive.  Okay, not the yeast.  What then?  Ah, must be me!  I once read in the Baking with Julia Child book that sometimes dough just comes out bad no matter what and it could very well be the mood the baker is in.  A-ha!  So it IS me, after all!

Okay, so I decided to vacuum, thinking at least I couldn’t screw that up.  But the joke’s on me since my dogs are both shedding so much that when I brush them I wind up with a ball of fur about the size of another two whole dogs.  I simply can’t keep up with the constant carpet of hair on our hardwoods. I give up!

While vacuuming, I was thinking about my blog space here on PNN; that I should have some kind of theme to my posts other then “Jen Whines about Her Life Ad Nauseam”, and again I am at a loss. And to put the cherry on top of it all, I quite possibly (and unintentionally) may have pissed off HannahBanana with a comment I made on another thread.  EEK!   I am just having a bad week where everything I touch seems to turn to shit and I know it will pass.  Now I think I’ll go soak my head until next week. Calgon take me away!!!!