Unlawful entries

I had a bit of a scare last Friday night/Saturday morning. I was sleeping in Xander's bed with him, after he started crying at 3:30 in the morning. Xander's bedroom is first one at the top of the stairs. Down the hall in our bedroom, Jessica was sleeping in bed with Hari.

At some point after I crawled into bed with Xander I heard a noise. It sounded distinctly like a door opening and closing. Now, I'm paranoid about that lately because I can't stop thinking about the murder in NH last year where 4 high school boys killed a woman and injured her daughter when they picked the house because it was easy to get into. Our doors aren't always locked (though now they will be).

At first, I thought maybe it was the cat, even it did really sound like the door. But the cat was sleeping on top of me. I tried to shrug it off for a minute or two.

Then I heard what sounded like footsteps. I swear.

I popped out of bed, ran down the hall, and woke up Hari. Times like that I was very glad to be married to a police officer. He woke up immediately, got out his gun and went downstairs.

I don't know what was worse, listening to him move around downstairs or the couple of minutes when he must have stopped and there was no noise, except for the sound of my imagination picturing him being held at gunpoint by an intruder. That was when I started to think about the statistic that you're more likely to be shot by your own gun than to shoot an intruder.

He started moving again, and I heard him go downstairs into the basement, then into the garage. I walked across the room, making the floor creak accidentally.

Hari immediately ran up the basement stairs and verified it was me making the creaking noise and not the alleged intruder.

A few more minutes passed and I became more convinced there was no one unexpected in the house. I came down the stairs and peaked around the corner. Hari saw me and said it was a good thing he hadn't shot me, which I hadn't thought of.

All's well that ends well, although I didn't go back to sleep for a good hour or so afterwards.

It reminded of the time my sister thought she heard an intruder back when we both lived in our parents' house.

She heard something on the roof, got out of bed and woke our father.

"Get the gun," she said. Dad used to keep a sawed off rifle behind his bedroom door.

He got it.

I don't remember what kind of inspection he did. No one had broken in.

When pressed to describe the sound she had heard, my sister said, and this is a direct quote, that it sounded like "A squirrel reading a letter."

Let's get take-out

It's been a tough day in the kitchen. I think my body is trying to tell me it doesn't like cooking anymore. Let's see, first I filled the kitchen with smoke. Now, I did this a lot when we first moved here 3 years ago, because I wasn't used to cooking with an electric stove. For some reason lately, both Hari and I have been setting it off a lot. I think both our stovetop and oven need deep cleaning. Anyway, the last time the kitchen got filled with smoke (Hari was cooking FYI), we kept waiting for the alarm to go off, because that's how we gauge whether or not our cooking is smoking too much.

It didn't go off. I glanced at it briefly, thought maybe the rapid green blinking might mean the batteries needed to be replaced, then promptly forgot about it.

Today I saw the frying pan was getting a little smoky then figured, if the alarm doesn't go off, it can't be too bad. After it became evident to me (perhaps from the coughing) that it was pretty bad, I remembered about the batteries. After about 20 minutes of the bathroom fan on with the window open and the kitchen hood fan on high, the smoke started to filter out.

I also took the cast iron off medium high heat, let it cool for about 45 seconds while I turned the heat to low, then poured in my yogurt based sauce which immediately started to sizzle. I'm typing this while the food is cooking so I'm not sure I ruined the sauce but I sure wouldn't be surprised.

I switched the pan to a different cooler burner, then forgot to turn off the burner that I had been using.

Instead of using the "timer" option on my microwave, I set it for 41 minutes on HIGH. Fortunately, I noticed that after only 2 or 3 minutes.

I had to leave in the middle of cooking to pick up the kids from school. The entire time out I wasn't sure whether or not I had turned off the stove. Turns out I had.

When I turned the stove top back on to finish cooking the meal, I turned on the front burner, even though the pan was on the back burner. That only took me 8 or 9 minutes to figure out.

I don't have very high hopes for this meal, but at least I didn't burn down the house. Miracles do occur.

Servant

When you get pregnant, no one tells you that among the roles a mother plays (nurterer/caretaker, chauffeur) is indentured servant. "Mom, get me some milk." "Mom, wipe me!"

Xander is now getting into the act. This morning, "Mom! I need water in my sippy." Yelled from upstairs, while I was sitting downstairs.

"Bring it down and I'll fill it up for you."

Thunk. Thunk thunk thunk. The sound of the sippy cup rolling down the stairs then followed.

I thought at first, that was his version of "bringing it down." Turns out, he had just dropped it and he followed it down and handed it to me.

Hmm....maybe there's hope for the boy yet. The girl is really a lost cause.

Memories

We went to Build A Bear earlier this week and came home with 2 animals in boxes. Xander discovered this morning that he could sit inside one of the boxes. Jessica was all set to try this out to before I convinced her that the box would almost certainly break under the weight and size of a 6 year old. To console her, I reminded her of the time she sat inside a box for a 12 pack of beer:

Looking at these pictures got me to browsing other pictures from that time (winter 2004-2005). What I like most about those pictures are not how cute and small Jessica is (which is quite true) but how young I look. = )

Kudos to Itunes

Since Xander is such a little music man, I got him this MP3 player for his birthday. I'm in the process of loading his favorite music on it. He loves Music Together. When I loaded the first Music Together CD, I fully expected it not to be recognized by Itunes and to just show track 1, track 2, etc. But all the information was there. Why did I expect anything less from Itunes?

Blogging to win

Remember last year when I was all about the crockpot and I kept talking about the crazy crockpot lady? Well, turns out she blogs about other things besides crockpotting. Right now she's running a contest to win a nifty new HP TouchSmart 600. If I link to her blog post, I get an extra chance to win.

Voila!

By the way, I know multiple links to the same post doesn't get me more entries. It's just more fun!

Ingratitude

It snowed today. That's worth a different rant but I'm trying to stay on message here.

Hari used the snowblower to clear the driveway. That's one of his jobs, just like scrubbing the toilet and tub is mine (don't get me started on gender inequities: STAY ON MESSAGE). But I glanced out the window after a while and noticed he hadn't gotten very far. I figured the snow was probably pretty wet and heavy. I went outside to help him. He was aware that he was running out of time before work, so he was kind of rushing it and leaving that thin layer of snow that frequently turns into The Layer Of Ice That Will Not Melt All Winter and leaves me unable to get up the driveway in either vehicle. So, I was scraping off the layer of snow he was leaving behind. Heavy wet snow. Not very easy work.

Now, I know he was kind of in a bad mood because of this difficult snow removal and he was rushing around. I didn't expect a medal or a party but I thought maybe some gratitude might be in order. Instead, at one point, he snapped, "Get out of the way" as I shoveled by hand the heavy wet snow. Uphill. Both ways.

He did a cursory completion of the narrowest swath to get his car through and went inside to get ready for work. He asked me to widen the path towards the end of the driveway. I widened it somewhat, shoveling at least 8 to 10 inches of heavy wet snow (because the snowblower had blown extra inches onto what feel), and then returned to the job I thought just as important: making sure we didn't have that annoying Layer Of Ice.

At one point, he must have checked on my work and yelled out to me that I hadn't widened the driveway path enough.

Such gratitude. I'm going to take some advil now for my aching back.

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This and That

I think I have some weird word pronunciation ailment. I just heard the word "insects" as "incest" and I frequently need to think a moment about "tentacles" vs. "testicles." (Thank you, Better Off Dead). This latter confusion is especially weird in the Wiggles song about Henry the Octupus.

Is it just me, or do other people wonder if they've gone deaf the previous time they drove the car, when they get in and the radio is blasting? Since I never bother to turn it off, that is.