Spring Break-the-Monotony

So, I had plans for this week. With the husband and youngest child, who turned 15 yesterday, away for the week, I thought maybe I'd get up off my behind and get a little something accomplished this week.

I stocked up on Future floor polish, Murphy's Oil Soap, and some great smelling Mr. Clean something or the other with Febreeze freshness. (Even though Mr. Clean scared the holy hell out of me when I was a child, this stuff does smell quite good.) I'm a sucker for new cleaning products. Promise me that it'll take the paint off an old Buick, and I'll buy it thinking if it sets there on the counter, the cleaning fairies might show up overnight and put all these products to good use.

That hasn't happened, and it's Thursday already, and I've accomplished nothing, essentially. Well, I did start this new blog.

I'm dressed to clean. Skull do-rag, check. Shirt that I don't care if it gets funked up from cleaning products and other unknown substances, check. Rhapsody blasting a house cleaning mix, check. Garbage bag at my feet to collect useless crap, check.

I decided I was hungry. I cooked one of those Hungry Man TV dinners. Hey, they were on sale, and when my oldest son saw them, he thought it sounded good. I opted for the fried chicken one. There's something about a TV dinner that takes me back to my youth, and in a good way, and not a Mr. Clean scaring the crap outta me way.

My grandma thrived on TV dinners. "I've got some TV dinners in the freezer and some real fresh bread," she'd tell me. I never understood the fresh bread thing until well into my adulthood. Stale bread does suck hind teat.

The thing is, you almost need a degree just to cook the damn things. "Remove the plastic sheeting from the meal, but don't take it off the corn. Corn must be cooked until it reaches the melting point. Same goes for the brownie that will take the form of molten lava and burn the roof of your mouth off. When the grease begins pooling under the chicken, then and only then should you poke five precise holes in the plastic over the corn. If done correctly, you'll experience steam burns on all five fingers and on your forehead. Consume immediately to burn top three layers off your tongue."

But yeah, TV dinners remind me of my grandma. That and Eckrich smorgas packs of cold meat. In her later years, she started saving the TV dinner trays and the packaging. She would reuse the trays for plates, even though she had a box on dinnerware she'd never opened and used. The packaging was saved so she could cut the boxes apart and sketch on the plain sides. Didn't matter she had sketch pads that had never been used. She was way ahead of her time when it came to recycling. The bad part was that you could hardly manuever through her house because of the things she saved to reuse. It's safe to assume there was some mental illness/hoarding going on.

I sat down with my Hungry Man, and it wasn't too bad. A few of my minions (my cats) sat waiting patiently for a hand-out. Really, there's nothing like TV dinner mashed potatoes. I'm being serious. I don't mind the taste of them at all. And since the molten lava, err, I mean brownie needed to cool, I saved it for last. About two bites into it, I discovered a piece of corn in my brownie. Not under it. Not beside it. But cooked right in the middle of it. I don't even want to know how that happened.

I know the average person would say, "Well, so what? It all goes to the same place."

Except I'm not that kind of average person. I really prefer that my food doesn't touch each other. I know it all goes to the same place, but it most definitely does not go at the same time. Call it discerning tastebuds or something, but I don't want a taste of corn and chocolate at the same time. I fed the rest of the brownie to the dog.

I'm not a food mixer, that's for sure. I went to dinner a few weeks ago with a friend of mine and her two kids. We went to the Mexican place where the waiters flirt and sometimes give me free drinks and fried ice cream. Her daughter, 11, got her plate and proceeded to stir it all together. She cut up her enchilada, and then started tossing the beans, fried rice, and lettuce all in one big pile. I don't even want to surmise what it looked like, but suffice to say, something that had been partially or previously digested.

I don't believe that I've ever witnessed anything like it. I've seen my husband mix his mashed potatoes and gravy with whatever vegetable he had on his plate. It's not something I'd do, however. But this whole Mexican mess on her plate. It was just wrong. I think if it had been my child, I would have stopped her dead in her tracks and not permitted it. Different strokes for different folks, but for the love of god, don't let your child make slop at the table in a restaurant.

I sort of looked around hoping no one thought it was my kid since she was sitting beside me.