Okay, I have beena bit remiss lately. The weather is finally acting like spring and I have grabbed every possible opportunity to be outside, cheerfully neglecting my usual indoor pursuits. Perhaps is was this weather-induced giddiness that led me to agree to allow Charlie to invite friends for a sleepover for his birthday. Usually I restrict "sleepovers" to no more than two friends and the one child I gave birth to as participants. Something got a hold of me and I said yes to Charlie's argument for FOUR friends. There is a reason I do not have more than two children. I thought it was loud around here with Andrew blasting music from his room and Charlie...just being Charlie but I was sorely mistaken. The usual noise level around here is NOTHING compared to the decibel level produced by a gaggle of nine year olds rampaging through your house. Thank goodness Charlie has a nice weather birthday or this event never would have come to pass. The ability to send the group outside for long periods of time became crucial to survival. The cats spent the duration of the event in a heightened state of something I can't quite define. I think the tipping point for the orange cat was when the boys found all three of the laser pointers that had gone missing weeks ago and decided to try and entertain the cat with all three at once. I'll give the little orange guy credit, he gave keeping up with all of them the old college try before collapsing under a chair in the living room with nothing visible but his nose peeking out from underneath. I think he spent most of the rest of the weekend in that exact spot.
Once again I find myself in a new month with an unfinished task on the list, still from March for heaven's sake. The basement is simply destined not to be a shrine to my organizational skills, I have to get that one finished before it throws my whole year long plan out of whack. So June's projects will be simpler, in an effort to finally get March off the books. This month we will be tackling the entire kitchen, all cupboards, drawers, shelving and I am finally going to paint the room a color that is not eye-scorching icy blue. Not a warm room right now. I'm thinking red would be fun in a kitchen but am not sure if I'm that brave. The smaller, but still related, project is going to be a purge of recipes, cookbooks and the like. I'm not an avid cook, nor am I particularly skilled, but I have moments of greatness in the kitchen from time to time (I make great banana bread and an AWESOME cookie pizza). I think I had great dreams of culinary brilliance at some point early in my marriage and went into some sort of cookbook buying frenzy. I have a dozen or so of the damn things and I think I use two of them with any regularity, the rest just look impressive on the shelf. I think someone gave me "The Joy Of Cooking" as a gift and I've barely even opened it as I simply don't have that kind of time. If you never have, browse through that cookbook the next time you're at a bookstore. It's like a time capsule in a lot of ways, harkening back to a time before pre-made, individually frozen, ready to eat everything. This book really gets into the nuts and bolts of the whole process, from selecting, to matching foods with other foods, wines, etc and just about step-by-step butcher your own cow in five easy steps. Honestly, I simply don't have that level of skill or patience for that matter. I also have a recipe box that makes no sense at all. There are pages ripped from magazines (usually missing the crucial page the recipe is 'continued on page 172', thus rendering the first page completely useless. I have half scribbled recipes, hastily written down on napkins at a party between glasses of wine and later stuffed into a pocket and sent through the washer. I tried to neatly copy my favorites down in 3 X 5 index cards and file them perfectly in the box behind the handy category cards like my oldest sister but that process made my brain hurt.
So here we go, June is going to be kitchen month and the basement will be finished! Really...I mean it.
