In lieu of profound thoughts

I am waiting for a thought worthy of blogging, but alas, my life has turned into an un-comedy of errors. If I continue to wait for a noble reason or profound thought to share then this blog will echo with the sound of silence or the chirping of crickets.

However, life hasn’t been as dull as I prefer. I offer these three anecdotes as proof:

1) The chicken and the chicken. On Mondays, my 10-year old does not have football practice, so my husband gets to come home from work at 6 p.m. instead of heading straight for the football field. In anticipation of this, I decided to cook a decent dinner and plopped a chicken into the Crock-pot first thing in the morning, even before I went for my morning walk.

Mid-afternoon, I noticed something amiss. I’d turned the dial on the Crock-pot to “warm.” At that temperature, it would take a raw chicken a week and a half to actually cook. So, I cranked that baby up to high and decided to bake frozen pizzas for dinner instead and save the chicken for another day.

Except that last night, after it was finished cooking, I left it on the counter at midnight instead of pulling it off the bones and putting it in the fridge. So, this morning, I tossed the whole chicken, pulled a second chicken from the freezer, defrosted it in the microwave, washed out the Crock-pot and plopped the chicken inside.

I carefully turned the knob to “high” and then double-checked. Yes, still “high.” Awesome.

At about 3 p.m., I noticed something amiss. The Crock-pot was unplugged. One of my teenagers knocked the plug out while grilling a sandwich in an electric sandwich press. He didn’t notice this until I pointed it out (“WHO ate a grilled sandwich?!”) and then he denied responsibility. “Someone stomped in the kitchen and it fell out of the wall.”

At that point, I stomped with great drama and power in the kitchen to demonstrate that the plug would not fall out of the wall due to stomping.

(The chicken was cooked by 8 p.m., when my husband returned with my 10-year old from football practice. So they had chicken. The rest of us ate mashed potatoes and corn-on-the-cob at our usual dinner-time. No chicken as it was not quite cooked.)

2) The bus stop. Monday at 12:05 p.m., the phone rang. The school district was on the line letting me know that the bus driver called them and he was waiting at the bus stop with my kindergarten-aged daughter. I hung up the phone and stupidly sprinted down the street to meet the bus which had pulled to the side of the road. (I should have driven the Giant Green Van, but I was in too much of a panic to think straight.)

This might be my greatest humiliation of the week. (Month? Year?) I actually forgot about picking up my baby girl from the bus stop. I may have forgotten to mention this to my husband, Mr. Safety, so. . . hush. Let’s just keep this between us.

3) The television. Do not mock me, but I am in severe distress because our living room television took one last breath yesterday afternoon and then died. Push the button to turn it on, half the screen appears, the other half totally blackness, and then the television turns itself off within five seconds. Sure, we have four other televisions, but three of the four are small, portable sets that the kids use for video games . . . one is in my daughter’s room (I know, television is bad, it’s rotting our brains, kids shouldn’t have them in their rooms, I know, I know, I know).

But this one is in the living room and it keeps me company all night while I work (until midnight). I am somewhat addicted to my Digital Video Recorder which lets me pause live television and records programs so I can watch them at my leisure.

I moved one of the small televisions into the living room but it’s not the same. So, because we have nothing better to do, we have to figure out how (and when) we can get the television repaired. (And when I say “we”, I mean my husband.)

This is bumming me out. (But at least I remembered to retrieve my daughter from the bus stop today and I placed the cooked chicken in the fridge tonight.)