Alecto's Ophelia

2010 - Coming Home

The last 90 minutes of 2009 frizzled out while I was sleeping. When my contacts are fogged enough I'm stabbing myself with a needle every third stitch it's time to go to bed. I left the girls in front of the television, gathered up my animals, peeled the contacts off my eyeballs (and I do hope I'm going to find them in solution) and went to bed. I wish I'd brushed my teeth. Sometime in the night a small tribe of Pygmies set up camp and decided to have a rain dance on my tongue. It was dry, dry, dry in there. This morning I staggered to the bathroom,spit them unceremoniously into the sink and proceeded to beat the hell out of my mouth until I looked into the mirror and noticed I was just South of rabid. That's usually a good indicator.

The alarm on the iPod went off at 7:30 like it does every weekday morning. I was dreaming it was something else until I woke up enough to turn it off and then climb back into bed warning the dog that it was technically still the middle of the night. Somewhere. I haven't bothered to turn that alarm off because it makes a good 15 minute warning before Little Girl needs to head out to the bus stop (which is the end of the driveway) and on weekends it doesn't go off at all although Simon will generally put his great slobbery face right up against mine (or the back of my head if I'm lucky) and breathe heavily while moaning pathetically about the fact that he's not going to be able to keep his legs crossed forever. Simon has no trouble getting my attention in the morning. He is 79 inches long snout to tail tip, 31 inches at the whithers and his head is massive. Someday I'll figure out how to weigh it. Maybe I can slide the flat digital kitchen scale under his head while he's sleeping. Remind me to try that. The drop from the top of my mattress to the floor is 36 inches and while that's five inches above his whithers we must consider the length between whithers and snout. Unless I'm sleeping in the middle of the bed there's really no escape and if I don't want St. Bernard slobber ON my sheets I need to respond fairly quickly even if it means telling him to lay the hell back down and go to sleep. If his need is not immanent he will. He's a good boy. 

Little Girl let him out this morning. I was out cold. I have no recollection of the door opening and closing again after my baby boy lumbered across the threshold, made an abrupt 90 degree right turn and galloped down the hall coming to his usual skidding stop at the top of the stairs. When he's got his bearings he tip toes down the six carpeted stairs and stands patiently at the front door followed shortly by the manic Rat Terrier. The only time the Rat Terrier is not manic is when he's overslept and slinks up the stairs from the lower level hoping I won't notice but knowing perfectly well he's been caught sleeping on the couch again. Sometimes he hides until I'm back upstairs. He's sly and has great bladder control.

I nuked a cup of yesterday's coffee and here I sit thinking about what to write while my fingers typed out three paragraphs (which I just read) while I wasn't looking. I was thinking about resolutions.

I have no resolutions. I don't do resolutions. The only time I made a resolution was in the first few minutes of the last year of the twentieth century and that was more of an invocation to the fertility gods (it worked too, I delivered Little Girl on December 11, 2000).

I have nothing to invoke this year except maybe patience, perseverance and the strength to let be the things I have no right to control. I know perfectly well what those are too I just have a really hard time not panicking and grasping a float that has no intention of being grasped. The float does like to be grasped at though. I think it makes him feel wanted and needed. I think that's poison for me.However, invoking a negative does not create a positive. So here they are, my resolutions in spite of not doing resolutions (because God forbid I don't keep them):

1. Bake more bread. We lost that in 2009.
2. Order the seeds and actually start the seedlings.
3. Repair the fence and till the garden hopefully one week after the last hard freeze (sometime in March most years).
4. Compost. Everything that ought to be composted. Lost that in 2009 too.
5. Put the seedlings in just after Mother's Day and protect the tomato plants with plastic bottle hot houses. Pay attention to the weather and don't boil them.
6. This year pull UP all the volunteers from last year. That was fun but unproductive.
7. Cultivate early and often.
8. Order more broiler chicks. Maybe even eggs if I can work out an incubator and commit to turning them every day.
9. Get back on the elliptical in the morning at least until the heavier garden work is in full swing. Bikram is not enough.
10. Walk away from 2009 and don't look back. I can't imagine turning into a pillar of salt particularly pleasant.

That's it. I'm stopping at ten because I'm an over achiever and usually bite off more than I can chew without choking. Those ten are probably a big mouthful but maybe there should be an 11th:

    11. Give myself permission to fall down and get up again. You know, permission to be a bona fide member of he human race. The expectation of perfection is a horrible conceit.

Happy New Year, peoples. I wish you joy, love, passion, strength and surrender.

Peace out - Alecto

 
Borrowed without permission from an artist who's name I can no longer locate.

On being catless

Catless is just weird, weird, weird. I’ve had a cat since I was four years old. There may have been a month or two after I left home before I got another but I’ve always had at least one. My daughter, all her life.

 

Now. No cats, no cats nowhere. We haven’t even removed the litter box yet even though it’s perfectly clean because before she went there was nothing going in and nothing coming out.

 

We don’t even know where she is. That’s the hard part. No smell, no sign, chance she slipped outside but hard to say. We know we have to tear the house up sooner rather than later but there’s been so much going on we’re in avoidance.

 

We talked about getting another but now is not the time. Daughter just wants to know it will happen before she goes to college. She has one more year of high school, I suspect we’ll have another rescue kitty by then.

 

Just not now. Now we are catless. Lets see how that feels for a bit.

Happy

There's a lot I can't change in this world. I can do a lot of praying and I can have a boat load of faith and I can be intent as hell on a result but I can only change me. I'm working on that. Hard.

On the other hand, here I am again, back a lot sooner than I expected and I've discovered a couple of remarkable (to me) things.

1. I'm strong. As in Seriously, stupendously amazingly strong.
2. I am resilient to the point that I scratch my head sometimes and say, oh really, Alecto? You don't say.
3. I am persistent as all get out (Ok, I knew that).

And I am really, really happy to be here. In this space, with you.

Unexpected

I bought the usual bulb in a box at a hardware store a month before Christmas, followed the requisite instructions and up popped a mediocre bloom (which is better than the one I took to the office which did nothing). However, my expectations were met given what I bought and where and continued to water it while the old bloom finished it's process.

And then the most amazing thing happened. Another shoot came up off the bulb. I thought, this isn't going anywhere but the bulb knows what it's doing and one day there were three magnificent blossoms on the one stalk.

Looking out my kitchen window in the quiet of falling snow, the juxtaposition of the unexpected and beautiful just felt to profound not to share.

A Love Story - part 4

I'm going to start this with a statement about this blog which is about to turn 2 years old in a couple of days. This space started out as a way for me to journal the things in my life. You know, day to day events that were noteworthy to me. This rapidly turned into a life blog (which it probably was in the first place) and the entries became raw, painful, sometimes joyous but mostly incredibly emotionally honest. And then some rather extreme events occurred (OK, a lot of extreme events occurred but toward the end of 2007 they got REALLY hairy) and the focused turned away from the rawness of how I experience my life to a more prosaic detailing of what I was doing. There is a big difference between discussing the 'being' and documenting the 'doing'.

Well, we just came full circle and we're back to what most people call TMI and I'm not even going to apologize for that, this is my blog and it's for me. So here I am.

And yes, love's got everything to do with it.

I have another blog, some of you know where it is and you are welcome to go there otherwise I'm not going to advertise it because it is a journal, sometimes moment by moment of what I'm experiencing right this second and I've got to write it down somewhere just to keep myself focused and aware.

So the love story today is about emotional exhaustion. I am completely exhausted. I don't eat much, I don't sleep much and I drive my body to the brink in order to feed on those endorphins whenever possible. I swill coffee at an alarming rate and smoke like a chimney (hey, don't judge it, nicotine is a very powerful drug and I have no intention of keeping it) and at night I drink wine in front of my computer writing in my journal and praying for contact. And I do get contact and lately it's been very nice and I am grateful for whatever he can give me. A simple 'I love you' or 'I love you too' is enough to reduce me to tears and they aren't the bad kind.

I also want to talk about the tube and the cheese because of a comment MC left and my response to that comment. Unfortunately somebody took this metaphor and wrote a book called Who Moved My Cheese and the metaphor became trite and useless (and if you found it useful, I apologize but the version of the exercise (and it's an exercise, not a book) is a very powerful experience.

Rats are smarter than people:

The Rat
Imagine there are five tubes and at the end of tube five is a piece of cheese. The rat knows where the cheese is and every day he goes and gets it until one day the cheese isn't there. The rats sniffs around to see if he's missing something and then heads right back out of the tube. He goes into tube 4 and then 3 and then 2 and then 1 and there is the cheese. He eats it and he's happy. Each day the cheese moves and each day the rat goes and finds it wasting no time wondering why is fucking cheese keeps moving.

The Man (apologies to men, this could equally be a woman but that's not how the story was told to me)
Imagine there are five tubes and at the end of tube five is the mans significant other, committed partner, what have you. Each day on the way to tube five, the man has a look down tubes 1 through 4 just to have a look at the view and see if there's anything better down there. This causes conflict in the relationship and trust becomes a problem.

The Woman (could be a man too but in my case, it's me)
Imagine there are five tubes and at the end of tube five is a man. Each day on the way to tube five the woman rushes right to the tube and throws her arms around the man, or pisses him off, or asks too much or refuses to be responsible or just doesn't keep up with who and what he is or needs. One day the man walks out of the tube. The woman says, no! you can't do this, this is not what we do in a committed relationship! We stay and we work it out. But no, he says, I must go and he goes saying that he will return in a few short days. The woman waits, the days pass and he does not return. There is very little communication. What she knows comes from a third party. Initially the woman fights it tooth and nail. She cries all day, cannot leave the house, picks up smoking again but what she does do, which is unprecedented for her, is call a friend. After that she calls another friend and then another letting them all into her vulnerability and telling her story from as responsible a place as possible (no victim, it's his fault shit). And then she turns outward and focuses on the man. First up. He is not in tube 5. Letting go of that is so hard she bangs her head (metaphorically) against her own delusions until she realizes he's another tube. He hasn't said he doesn't love her, he hasn't said he won't come home, he's only said he can't come home just yet.

The rat goes tube to tube until he finds the cheese. The woman stews in it feeling abandoned and lost until she realizes he's just in another tube. Now, she can go get him, she can go find him, she can join him in the cube or they can go to a new tube together. What cannot, or should not do, is go back to tube five. That didn't work so well.

And that is the story of the rat, the cheese, the tubes and the people.

And I'm so damn tired I have lost the ability to resist. Can we have a Hallelujah chorus please.

A Love Story - Part 3

Love's got everything to do with it.

I recently made a statement (borrowed shamelessly from Grey's Anatomy) that I lived every day these days at an 8. And that was the truth. What I am discovering is that there are 8s and then there are 8s. The second does not negate the first, it's just of an entire other flavor.

To clarify, my original 8 centered around overwhelm, fear and a probable need to have my freaking meds adjusted as well as some unresolved issues and my stubborn refusal to let anything go until I'd reconciled it to something I could understand and live with. What that really boiled down to was my base line belief that I would be hurt no matter what. I recall telling my husband that the 8 didn't necessarily have a lot to do with him directly, it just was what it was. That's hard to hear if you think you're supposed to do something about it and the truth is nobody can do that nor should they be expected to.

Another flavor of pain at an 8 is the physical kind. Turns out I'm really good at dealing with that. I can sink right into myself and either be with it or ride the waves. I am not a screamer when it comes to physical pain. Unfortunately I tend to seriously under report and that's nearly gotten me dead once or twice.

The third flavor of pain is is the pain of grief. As it turns out, for me at least, this is not a suicidal fear or pain at all. It's purely functional, as in how do I get up, work out (because I think those endorphins are the one thing that kicks me off with a fighting chance), shower, shave (because that's normalcy, right?), dress, apply make up, put in my contacts if I think I can keep the tears to a minimum and my glasses if I believe I cannot.

There are moments when I believe I simply cannot bear it one second longer and will do something rash. Not rash as in hurt myself, that need seems to be gone right out the window (maybe it's self preservation or a final surrender, I'm betting it's surrender and THAT is a very reassuring thought). But rash in terms of causing undo pain or harm to others. Of believing I cannot be functional when in fact I know that is not true. Not for me, it isn't my way.

An event is just that. An event. We make of it what we will. We can choose to be mired or we can choose to let it wash over us leaving us engulphed in the truth of it all. This is not a drowning by any means. It's an acceptance. The more I fight it the worse it gets and the harder it is to move through it.

I think of child birth. I've had three children with large gaps in between (five and nine years). With each labor I learned to let go and wash through the waves sometimes chewing the sheets and sometimes just panting. Sometimes there were tears but never any outright crying and certainly no screaming. At the point of transition when the body called mine becomes something else entirely and I have no control there is only one thing to do - push through it. That's a scary thing because the ring of fire we all hear about is exactly that and the only way through is through.

I think of love that way these days. And by love I don't mean the romantic flowers and puppy dog love. I mean the enduring commitment that has us move mountains. I think that in the letting go of the me creates the space for something infinitely greater and quite honestly, precious beyond belief.

So here is an event. I have it. I am in it and the only way to be is just 'is'.

Try that sometime. I am.

A Love Story - Part 2

And yes, loves got everything to do with it.

Commitment is Binary.

kind of like being pregnant, you either are committed or you are not.There are no conditions attached to commitment. And while we're on the subject there is no such thing as 110% committed. That's just not feasible; 100% is the whole thing and anything else is imaginary hyperbole generally designed to disguise a lack of commitment. Rah rah and all that.

Love is not enough you say? Then maybe we need to have a look at what love means. And I'm not talking the romantic kind either although most relationships certainly start out that way. I'm talking about the kind of love that will do the hard things, move the mountains and live through what might appear to be unendurable pain. Love that sees the bottomness in all of us and is the very foundation for the word commitment.

And I'll tell you something scary too; it doesn't necessarily take two to tango. One voice can be enough. Not the easiest approach but possible in a world where we bandy about the word impossible or inconceivable all too freely and we wind up in a consumer top loaded society that chews through people as fast as it chews up what credit can buy.

I walked away from two marriages before I finally got hit upside the head with what commitment really means and well, what love is and what it is not. We live in a me oriented world where if I'm not happy then I have to do something about it or you have to do something about it and it's just not OK. We walk away from our families tearing our children and communities (not to mention properties and anything else with inherent value) asunder. We lose our support structures when we turn our backs and walk away because it's just too hard or I'm not getting what I want or I don't want to give up who me is.

My mother, in her infinite love for me, asked if I really wanted this because she didn't want to see me give up who I am for the sake of a relationship that may not be giving me what I believe I must have. I'm pretty sure by the time I was done speaking she had a good idea where I was headed and it wasn't out of the marriage by any means.

I used to wonder how the hell people stayed married. In some cases maybe it's pure compatibility and there's just magic or no expectation of magic. In some cases maybe it's because there's no viable alternative. And as one dear friend said to me of her marriage of at least 35 years, 'it's inertia, my dear, it gets you through the tough spots.'

Which brings us back to the culture of me. Where in God's name do any of us get off buying that happily ever after tale? Buggers to the authors of the Victorian fairy tales - they just don't cut the mustard no matter how sweat and desirable they may seem.

And life just keeps right on lifing. If it was easy and painless it would be boring as sin and we'd all put our heads in the proverbial oven out of sheer despair.

 

 

And these pretty rings we love to put on our fingers have come to represent something far less than the original hand fasting they eventually replaced (in the Victorian era I might add).

 

I am not giving up who I am. I am making some major modifications because who I am being just isn't working for this relationship and I'm here to tell you that the relationship comes first.

Because I say so and that's a pretty strong statement coming from me.

Oh yeah, and one other thing, we don't always know how we're going to get from point A to point Z but that doesn't mean we can't or won't.

 

 

A Love Story - part 1

And yes, love's got everything to do with it.

Once upon a time a hard assed warrior of the female persuasion put on the facsimile of a dress, slung her broad sword over her shoulder, disguised her beaver skin medicine bag as some sort of purse like thing and went looking for love. Love, it turned out, was everywhere. However, there is a shortage of love appropriate for a hard assed warrior no matter what those boys might tell ya. It’s the truth.

 

To make a very long and mostly painful story short, the hard ass warrior chewed her way through one control freak prince and one emotionally underdeveloped frog who ended up so aghast at the entire thing he found himself just as well away from it all (hopped back in the pond and bloody well stayed there too). Not that there wasn’t pain, mind you, there were buckets of it all around.

And then one day this hard assed warrior happened to be doing battle along side a warrior of the male persuasion and realized she loved him. Hard. You know the way you do when it’s more than just the breath knocked from your middle; there’s some central core that says YES well beyond the confines of lust. She sat on this for quite awhile, just kind of having it. In the mean time they were close; they fought side by side and had a great deal of mutual respect. The belief of trust was implicit and belief is everything, isn’t it?

 

Eventually she walked right up to the warrior and she told him, in plain sight of anyone caring to listen and said “I am completely smitten with you and I just want you to know that.” He didn’t run screaming. Good sign, she thought, but it didn’t occur to her to do a damn thing about it other than having made the statement.

 

Battles waged, losses occurred both personal and otherwise and the two found themselves in a distant country, out of context but surrounded by the familiar all the same. She declared her love again and this time he returned a similar statement. It was a difficult four days of push me pull me maybe I will oh I can’t oh I can oh I love you want you need you but cannot find my way past all this fear and commitment and the hard assed warrior female never backed down from a fight a day in her life. You see, things need a resolution or she’ll just about lose her mind.

 

She had to settle with no resolution but you see she loved the guy and decided to ride out the storm for better or worse. It was a rough ride. She decided he was worth it. And you know, he is.

 

The long and short of it was the ride got rough and stayed that way for close to two years for one reason or another. And with the possible exception of a few unmentionable moments they crawled inside each other and took root.

 

And here is where we come to the happily ever after part. You know, where all things are conquered and they ride off into the sunset and we never hear jack shit about it again, right? Heh.

 

The truth is (and I just KNOW a good number of you can back me up on this) the commitment to a life partner is exactly that. A commitment. It’s not negotiable. Lots of things are negotiable, but not that. It’s that whole for better or for worse thing that gives us what it takes to pass over those often deadly holes. And as for the female of this story, that was a tough pill to swallow because she gives no quarter, takes no prisoners and puts up with just about nuthin.

 

And because of that she broke the back of the marriage and sits in the wreckage holding her own bleeding heart in her hands. Just kind of looking at it like it might up and say something useful.

 

And it turns out the heart had plenty to say. It said give yourself back to the winds and the water of what is for alway and accept that this is where your marriage is today and that you can bring it back to some other place, if you can bend and wait and not have to fight every battle to the bitter end.

 

And from that place, broad sword slung for other things and medicine bag no longer disguised she moves forward into the light of day.

 

And lastly she might not have Jeffrey but she sure does have Ann. And Momma too.

 

Why I loves the Internet

 This is a pictorial waltz through a day in the life except it starts at 7:50 PM and ends now, at 8:36 PM. Stage is set; assume I've been working all day (I have) and that I have to drive to work and home again (I do) and that I walked in the door in my cfm boots, took the dog out, chastised one or two girls, got the fire going again, looked at homework, signed some homework, checked the roasting chicken that daughter number one put in at 6, put my coat back on, went down the back steps with a flashlight and a bowl of water, tucked the girls (chickens) in and changed their water, picked up another egg, locked the side door, kissed a chicken one more time and then went upstairs to make dinner. There was a glass of wine involved in all this as well.

And we ate dinner in the living room in front of the television and the wood burning stove inserted in what used to be a fire place (yes, I did feed my family in front of the Barry Manilow infomercial on Entertainment tonight and NO I do not want to hear about it). And when dinner was just about done and I was tired of hearing the sniveling coming from three directions (I think we were all cranky tonight) I thought I needed some nummies and of course we don't keep ready made nummies in the house.

Problem.

I do, however, keep lots of supplies on hand hidden in various and assorted locations (chocolate chips back left corner of lower shelf of the indoor freezer (there are two more freezers in the garage and while they might contain half a cow and other various and assorted frozen things they do not contain any chocolate parts)).

Here is what after dinner looks like in my kitchen:

 

Here is the Internet in my kitchen (cute, huh?):

   

In case you didn't notice, the Internet has provided a loose recipe for chocolate chip cookies which I have chopped in half, eliminated some of the butter (because I only had 3/4 stick soft) and added some vinegar because I kind of like it that way and also I had an accident with the vanilla bottle because I do not measure often and had at least half a glass of wine in me and well, I spilled). In the mean time, NoMans is being a pain in the ass because he needs the microwave which is in the kitchen to soup up his tobacco curing chamber which we have because I grew a butt load of tobacco this summer kind of by accident and he refuses to waste it despite the fact that we quit smoking over two years ago.

 

By the way, that's the box our turkey arrived in. Please do not ask me to explain that or the brick of dry ice or the carbon footprint involved in obtaining a pastured bird in the state of Connecticut where everything I want to do is illegal (J Saladin). Because my guilt is legion. Really, people, it is.

Here is little girl licking the bowl:

 

Here are the cookies right out of the oven. Notice they needed about 90 seconds more? I lost my mind and pulled them out anyway.

 

Here they are on the cooling rack. You know, I fail to see the problem here. 46 minutes start to finish from the initial desire to the sitting down to write about it.

Heh.

About those fermented bananas

OK, Cookie Crumb, here it comes:

I have a banana problem. I buy them on sale for .39 per pound and then I let them sit on my dining room table until they're so rotten and fermented they leak onto the glass (if it was a normal wood type table I would put paper down, honest). Once leaking I pick up the whole mess (careful not to disengage from the stem) and throw the entire lot into the freezer and forget about it. This can go on for YEARS before I get around to dealing with them. This year was a little over the top because I feel a bit squirrelly lately and kept buying those .39 per pound bananas and throwing them into the freezer and it was even better when we had more freezer and then that damn half a cow showed up and I had to, um, do something about it.

Before I go any further I should give some credit to the stolen and seriously bastardized recipe:

http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Banana-Bread-108415

(That's how it started but you'll notice they don't say jack shit about fermenting and freezing your bananas first which would explain a few things). Anyway:

Fermented banana bread:

1. Buy some bananas. You need about 7 for a full double loaf recipe.
2. Let 'em rot on the counter until the skins threaten to burst and the fruit flies gather.
3. Throw them in the freezer and walk away.
4. When the mood strikes you or the bake sale people come knocking at your door or it's Christmas and your boss happens to like banana bread and has no IDEA it doesn't have to be dry and tasteless or you're just hungry, take 7 frozen bananas out of the freezer and set them on the counter to thaw:
    
5. While your bananas are thawing have a drink. OK, maybe not. Instead throw 3 and 1/4 cups of flour in a bowl along side 2 teaspoons baking soda, half a teaspoon salt and some cinnamon. I like loads, feel free to indulge in anything else that seems nomable. Make sure you mix it up, OK? I'm not going to tell you to sift, I'm going to trust that you realize you need all the powdered parts equally distributed in the flour vehicle.
6. When your bananas have thawed to the soft and won't freeze off your fingers stage, extrude them right into a bowl making sure to squeeze out all the excess banana liquor (yep, it's probably about 150 proof at this point).
   
7. Here comes the magic part. I discovered this the first time I made brownies 30 years ago (omg) when I was working my way through the Joy of Cooking and followed my first not in a box brownie recipe (I want you to know I was TWO at the time and very precocious)and got to the egg and sugar part. See, if you beat the bejesus out of eggs and sugar this really amazing base forms that you can mix some kind of flavor (chocolate, fermented bananas, citron vodka, whatever), add in some flour and a rising agent, bake a bit and wallah! True moist, tastiness. Noms. You get my point. Anyway, take four eggs from four different chickens (OK fine, if you don't have chickens in your backyard use what you can get your hands on although I strongly suggest fresh and untouched by government hands):
    
   Throw these eggs in a standing mixer with two cups of sugar and set to high. Come back ten minutes later (you don't need the stand mixer, you can use a hand mixer but you can't walk away or you can use a whisk and then you REALLY can't walk away unless you can get the dog or kid or husband to do it). When you see magic:
    
   
8. You should add 1 cup of veggie oil, the bananas, 1/4 cup sour cream or whatever, two teaspoons vanilla or half the bottle if you really like vanilla (I do) and mix it up a bit more.
9. In the mean time, please make some bread for tomorrow so the kid has something to eat for breakfast:
    
10. Mix the dry ingredients with the wet stuff and divide into two buttered and floured loaf pans. Pop into a preheated 350 oven and walk away for another 60 minutes. You'll know when they're done when the knife you stick in the middle comes out hot but still sticky. Not cold and sticky, not hot and dry (in which case throw it the hell out and start over). Also, you'll notice I make no mention of nuts. This is really nomable banana bread. Why hose it up with nuts?
11. While you're waiting go to the monster dog rally and see if your oldest (still at home) can still dance around the kitchen with the ten week old beast which has (finally thank you god) figured out how to go up and down stairs.
     
12. When the bread is done let it sit for a minute or two in it's pan (really, JUST a minute or two, don't over cook it now, you're so close) and then turn it out onto the wires:
     
13. Package and sell at the election day bake sale. Or just eat it and don't answer the phone next time.

(Screw the fired nanny. I don't even want to talk about that little piece of Euro Trash. We're all doing much better now, thank you very much.)