Even when I have an evening when I “don’t have anything to do,” I can suddenly realize that it’s 9:41 p.m. and where in the hell did my evening GO?! Out the bloody window, apparently.
At Weightwatchers after work I managed a pleased, if slightly pained smile, at the revelation that I lost 4 hectograms this past week. All summer long I have been struggling with the same damn kilo. It will NOT GET OFF OF ME. It’s like everyone’s nightmare small-child tantrum, clinging with a pincer grip around your legs (or in this case, your hips) and shrieking NO NO NO NO NO! at the top of its lungs despite all your efforts to extricate yourself quietly and gracefully. Of course, when your efforts include several birthday parties, dinner parties, and summer vacation snacking, you (and I do mean you. I could not possibly be talking about me) really only have yourself to blame for that adhesive kilo.
After that I came home and made dinner for the family: macaroni and meatballs with ketchup for Anders and Karin, macaroni and cheese and meatballs for Martin and a big salad and a small bowl of macaroni and cheese for me. Because Martin requested macaroni and cheese and the way I make it involves using a precious can of Campbell’s Cheddar Cheese Soup (purchaseable only in America) I reserve the right to eat some myself.
It’s probably disgraceful that macaroni and cheese made with Campbell’s is really the only macaroni and cheese I like. It’s perfect comfort food. I can’t abide that Kraft Krap though I know it has its fanatic adherents the world over. When I was a child I thought my grandmother’s oven-baked (gasp!) macaroni and cheese was also anathema…too bad we have to grow up to get good taste because by then we’ve moved away and the chances to get some of Grandma’s good cooking are far and few between. She still sends me her to-die-for soft gingersnaps every year for Christmas: a small tin of them with pairs of cookies lovingly wrapped in Saran Wrap for protection against the U.S. Postal Service. She turned 91 this year. Selfishly, I wish she’d live forever just so I could keep on getting those cookies. And don’t say I could make the cookies myself. I’ve tried. It’s just not the same.
Anyway, after that I went to the grocery store. Then I came home and, with the help of the kids, put the groceries away (artichokes! strawberries! sugar snap peas!) and then it was bathtime and then it was bedtime and more of The Long Winter, which, when you read it one chapter at a time at bedtimes, really really lives up to the adjective in its title. I’ve been calling it The Never-Ending Winter. This is actually my favorite of The Little House books. The scenes in it really stuck in my mind as an impressionable child. Twisting hay in the freezing lean-to. Starving on potatoes and brown bread. The trains never coming and the white frosty nailheads in the ceiling. Even the Indian at the beginning, coming into the store and declaiming, “Heap Big Snow” to all the stupified white men.
And then, suddenly it was nearly 10 p.m.! So there, there’s where my evening went. I still have things to do, like feed the fish and answer emails and catch up with blog-reading and work on a few AWC web pages. Zoooooooooooooooooooom!