Blah

I've been having a bad 24 hours, but not horribly bad, just totally unexceptional but really annoying stuff.

It started last night. I took dinner out of the oven, and began walking toward the kitchen counter, which was the only flat surface available, because I'm a slob and I still have not dealt with my dining room, which is suffering from my Christmas Eve wrapping extravaganza.

Dinner never made it to the counter, though, because I tripped and dropped the pizza (because Thursday is choir night so dinner has to be fast and preferably made by someone else, although this one was made by me) flat on it's face.

Then there was the toilet thing, and Paul, I e-mailed you a description of the problem, thank you for offering your help. And Loki still hasn't gotten his vacation approved, and now he's mentioning all the practical things we could do with $2200.00, and I'm having a hard time countering any of them, although I keep coming back to the fact that sinking $2200 into our house, as he is suggesting, would maybe solve a few minor problems, but would be just a drop in the bucket. The bucket is the probably $30,000 we need to spend to get our house in the kind of shape the appraiser seems to think it is actually in. But $2200 for a trip to Europe would be complete, and we would have all these lovely memories, whereas spending $2200 on the house would probably mean we'd have to do the work, and working with Loki is...excruciatingly frustrating. (I'm fast, he's slow, I'm a just get it done kind of person, he's a perfectionist, I have physical issues with manual labor because of my bad hip, he ends up getting frustrated because he has to pick up my slack.)

Anyway, back to the bad-but-not-too-bad stuff.

When I got home from choir, I remembered that tomorrow was the holiday party at work, and I volunteered to make a chocolate dessert. I had the necessary ingredients available to make a chocolate hazelnut gateau, so I got started. I ground the hazelnuts and put them in the oven to toast. I grabbed the hand mixer so I could cream the butter and sugar together. And the hand mixer is not working. Turns out Sio burnt out the motor making something that was much too dense to be mixed with a hand mixer. So then I'm looking around for an alternative. I end up putting the butter and sugar into a the blender. Sio comes into the kitchen and says "Oh, it smells like popcorn in here!", and I remember, too late, the hazelnuts, which have toasted to a rich chocolatey black color. Into the trash they go. It takes a while to cream butter and sugar in a blender, by the way.

I also had to hand beat three egg whites into soft peaks, so I feel like I have new muscles in my right arm today.

I get everything mixed together and into the pan, and pop it into the oven for 25 minutes. When the buzzer goes off, I check it, and the cake is still wet in the middle. I leave it in for 7 minutes, and when I check it again, it's overcooked. Oh well, I like my co-workers, but not that much, so overcooked cake it will be.

At work today, my boss told me that she wanted me to mail something out to the 62 members of a particular council, and I was halfway through collating the copies when she popped her head in and said "Oh, you could have just e-mailed it."

By the time I e-mailed everything, I was the only person left in the office; the person I intended to ride to the party with left while I was making copies. So I called Loki, and he said he would come, but it took him an hour and a half to get there because he sat down on the couch and took a nap first. And I felt so forgotten and unwanted that I had a good cry at my desk.

Loki eventually showed up (a pattern of behavior of his, eventually showing up - my sister said she would either divorce him or kill him if she had to live with him, as much as she adores him), and we went to the party and actually had a good time. I got booze in the Yankee swap, and we left the party, picked up Monkey, and went home, where Loki fell asleep on the couch and I fell asleep on the loveseat while Monkey practiced doing cartwheels and splits in the living room.

Of course, I slept too long, and now I'm awake.