Sticky.

So I came home late and I was really, really hungry which is awkward. You can eat earlier in the evening but theoretically if I get home after midnight I should go right to bed so I don’t turn into a pumpkin in the morning. Instead I’ve chosen to eat some toaster-ovened French toast. In the dark I gently poured maple syrup on my pile of French toast bits, watching to make sure it drained into the little wells left by the sad emptiness of not-French-toast space, but nowhere else. Very little syrup showed up. Ah, I said. Ah, it has all soaked into the toasty goodness.

It did not occur to me that perhaps… it hadn’t?

I sat on the sofa with my toasty pile. I read Whoopee and laughed. I ate French toast. I felt cosmopolitan in my jammies with French toast. My French toast pile grew somewhat smaller.

And then from a heretofore unknown crevice of space came a deluge of maple syrup, from an untipped plate pouring over two opposite sides of the plate at once, like water filling a newly-dug well. I looked for somewhere to put the plate, to put the computer. Where, for the love of Pete, where?

When it was all over I looked at my poor sofa, with its sticky deep chasms of syrup still waiting to be excavated, and I knew.

Responsible eating of French toast requires constant surveillance. And a table. Meh.

So it’s a quarter to midnight. Time for a sandwich and my once-a-month blog post. Yay!

So tonight, I was singing to my son as I do every night at bedtime. And as I do every night at bedtime, I was thinking of all kinds of other things. Lest you think this is awful of me, be aware that I learned this as a parenting technique many years ago: the Boy goes to sleep much more quickly and serenely if my thoughts are occupied with something of a technical, mechanical or manipulative nature. In other words, something that puts me in a zen or restful space. Like weaving, or knitting, or mental puzzles.

When he was a baby we had a digital clock in our room and I would make up relationships between the numbers before the colon and the numbers after the colon. Like this:

12:15

Okay, so this one is easy. Imagine it as a digital clock. The number “1” is made up of two lines, one above the other. The “2” and the “5” use the same number of lines. This one would bore me and I’d have to wait until…

12:16

So, I couldn’t do the line thing, because it would be 7:8. But then I might think, okay, the “12” has 7 lines, the “16” has 8 lines, is there some kind of relationship there? Maybe “16” is 8, “12” is 7, “10” is 6, “9” is 5, “8.5” is 4…

And so on.

Tonight I made a list in my head, of things to do before I go to bed. But because I was afraid I’d fall asleep in the dark, warm room before I could go accomplish any of these tasks, I made an acronym:

CLASPYA

C-Chair. I wanted to think about a chair for Geeklet, for school.
L-Library. I have some work to do on the SD Space library.
A-I needed to email a friend named Anne.
S-I needed to work up the details of a sweater I’d like to knit.
P-I wanted to make some pickle.
Y-I also wanted to make some yogurt.
A-

And hence, my problem.

I could remember everything else, but I cannot for the life of me think of what that final A is for. I might have gone to bed by now but for this. I know, by now, that I am not going to get to everything on my list–but at least I know what the others are. This is driving me on the very short trip to the Happy Land freeway exit.

The reason I’m not going to get to everything is that pickle. I made truly disgusting pickle tonight. Once, I made some carrot-and-cabbage pickle. Shredded vegetable, salt, ginger, whey, out of the Nourishing Traditions cookbook. It was pretty yummy, and also fairly attractive. So I wanted to make the wakame-and-carrot pickle from the Vegetarian Mother cookbook, using whey and because of a lack of carrot, augmenting with cabbage. It looks awful. The wakame is soaked and therefore slimy. It is very red, due to my nutritious carrots. But, as I told the studious TMoTH, if nothing else I am now quite sculpted, as you have to pound the mixture for 10-15 minutes and I was doing it with the Boy’s small wooden kitchen mallet due to not having a meat tenderizer due to not ever tenderizing any meat ever.

Yes. I do in fact use my 6-year-old son’s kitchen toys in my cooking. Hush. I usually ask first.

So I have a large jar of very red, very orange pulverized bits with small slimy green things floating about in. It sits on my counter. I am determined that this will keep me from senescence. It will. I will need to eat it first.

Before I do–have you figured out what A is?