If At First You Don't Succeed....

Well, the heat finally broke (who would have thought 85 would feel COOL?) and after many days of lying dormant, I turned on my oven again. Miss Serious' school is having a flag day celebration, and needed cupcakes. As we have planned to have more food there than any class of first graders can reasonably consume, I decided to make mini cupcakes. And, unlike my normal operating procedure, I even remembered to pick up the cupcake wrappers in advance. So far, so good.

Big Trouble and I got to work and mixed up the batter. The cupcake wrappers were foil, and too large to fit into my pans. Apparently this kind just sits on a baking sheet. Fine - I lined them all up and filled them with batter. My usual batch of batter makes enough for 24 regular sized cupcakes. I was planning on 48 minis, and filled the little cups all the way to the top with batter. I bake a lot, and you'd think I would have recognized the problems with this. First of all, 24 regular cupcakes use a lot more batter than 48 minis. And, as batter cooks, it rises quite a bit. Thus, if you use a full recipe of batter to fill these cups, and then in some fit of insanity fill them all to the top of the wrappers, you'll probably end up with something like this:


Yup, an entire batch of 48 mutant cupcakes. In my optimistic (and lazy) way, I thought I would be able to just pull off the excess cake, but after several torn foil wrappers and cupcake crumbs flung all over my kitchen, I saw reason and just mixed up another batch of batter. This time I made the 48 minis AND 12 regular sized cupcakes like I should have done in the first place. The only thing I can say is that my brain must have melted from all the heat stress of the last few days - I'm hoping it will come back soon, because I have things to do.

Miss Serious said that we needed a flag to celebrate flag day, so this is what I came up with. Happy (early) Flag Day!

Lesson Learned #3

Today's lesson learned is: appreciate what you have.

Like, when you write a whining blog post about how hot it is and complain that you only have fans; then you lose power in the middle of the night, and wake up because you find yourself lying in a tepid pool of your own sweat. You then suddenly realize that fans are the most wonderful invention ever created and that you appreciate them more than you can say.

Thank you, fans. We love you.

Totally Hot!

And not in a good way. We are in the middle of a kick-your-hieney heat wave here, and I have had enough. We live on the fourth floor, and in a (perhaps misguided) fit of trying to be greener (and save some $ on the electric bill), we put our air conditioner on freecycle. It was promptly picked up by a woman who marveled that we were getting rid of it. "Don't you know it's going to be hot?" she asked as she happily hauled it away.

Well yes, we knew it was going to be hot, I just didn't expect it so soon. Now the hot is here, and it's quite spectacular. We do have some systems in place to combat the heat, as we did without the air conditioner all last summer as well. We pull the drapes/close the blinds to keep out excess sun, and run all the fans that we can fit into our little apartment throughout the day. It helps, but when I opened the door for a friend earlier today, I did welcome her to hell.

I know that this too shall pass, and we are trying to remain cheerful and upbeat while the sweat pours down our faces. We've been spending lots of time at the local libraries (air conditioned and free!), so at least we're catching up on our reading.

Lesson Learned #2

After the previous post about the Bronx Zoo debacle, I thought that when I can't think of anything else to write it might be fun to jot down lessons that I've learned throughout this thrilling, madcap, roller-coaster of a life I've been having. Some of these lessons (like this one) were learned a while ago, while others are so fresh they still have that new car smell. The one I learned about the Bronx Zoo will count as the first lesson, so onto lesson learned #2:

When you see firemen running across the street towards your apartment building with hoses, it's probably not a false alarm and it might be wise to grab your babies and get out as soon as possible.

I'm going to add a corollary to lesson #2 in the form of lesson #2a:

When escaping your presumed aflame apartment building, if at all possible bring your purse.

Not sure if these will ever come in handy for anyone else, but it never hurts to be prepared.

Older and Wiser

When you're in school to become a teacher, a phrase that gets bandied about on a regular basis is "life-long learner." This phrase is ostensibly used to describe the types of teachers we should want to be who continue our education and stretch our knowledge base. Personally, I think it's just a term they handed us so that when we're sitting in a job interview and full of stress we'll have something to say when asked what kind of teacher we want to be, rather than something pithy like, "One with a job."

I must say, however, that I do think I learn at least something new every day. Sometimes it's a good thing, sometimes a not so good thing. Today I learned that you NEVER go to the Bronx Zoo on a Friday in June.

We are members of the zoo, and go relatively frequently. I try to get there around the time they open the parking lot (another lesson learned - don't go after lunch - parking lots are full, and small children end up weeping with disappointment and recriminations) and usually zip right in, park the car, and am merrily on my way. Not so this time. Miss Serious' class was having their annual field trip to the zoo, and The Professor was chaperoning. I thought it might be a nice idea to take Big Trouble on my own, so he wouldn't feel left out. Why it didn't occur to me that if Miss Serious' class was having their trip to the zoo that day, every school in America would be doing the same I have no idea. Unfortunately, even though I may learn new things every day, I seem to be becoming exponentially less intelligent as my children age. Lack of sleep? Lack of enough quiet time to put 2 coherent thoughts together in a row? Hmmmmm....

I drove happily to our destination, pulled around the corner of the street with the entrance, and was slapped in the face by the image I was presented with - a seemingly endless stream of yellow school buses. This is never a good sign. I mentioned to Big Trouble that maybe this wasn't the best day to go to the zoo, and of course that went over like a ton of bricks. I soldiered on, devoted mother that I am, and half an hour (and God only knows how much breathed-in bus fumes) later we crept up to the front gate, parked the car, and attempted to enter the zoo.

I say attempted, because we had to claw our way through a sea of children; I have never seen so many children in one spot - it was spectacular and I was sorry I had forgotten my camera. We got into the zoo, and I designed our destinations to avoid school groups as much as possible. Luckily the zoo is huge, and even though we had to make a few detours it was a great day. It always amazes me that you can be looking at all these majestic animals, and just past the outer trees you can see the apartment buildings of the Bronx. We left early enough that we wouldn't be caught in the exodus of all the buses (see, I DO learn) and zipped home. Much better than the time we went last year and came out to the parking lot to see one of my tires completely flat. Not sure what I was supposed to learn from that one....

A-Hunting We Will Go

Big Trouble has the incredible knack of finding money pretty much everywhere he goes. He not only looks for money, he listens for it. He can hear the jingle of dropped coins all the way across a crowded Target, and his head swivels around like a shot as he announces "I hear money!" My younger brother had this ability when we were growing up as well. I don't know why he didn't bump into hundreds of telephone poles and signposts (maybe he did and just never admitted it) because he walked with his eyes glued to the ground in search of loot. Once we were on a train, and he put his hand down in between the seats and pulled out a roll of 100 postage stamps. I decided I should do the same, and pulled out my hand covered in black slime.

This week Big Trouble was searching between the couch cushions for a lost toy when he pulled out a quarter; the child's eyes opened quite wide, as this was a whole new avenue of money possibilities opening up before him. I'm pretty sure it was lost by an unsuspecting guest, as we hold onto our change like grim death round these parts, but Big Trouble decided to kick his search up a notch:


The hunt continued for quite a while, including the request that I remove myself from the other cushion of the couch so that he could be more thorough. He didn't come up with any more cash, but it certainly wasn't from lack of effort.

Theory of Relativity

I live in a strange place, moneywise. The area where I live is absolutely beautiful - near the city, near the water, and has lots of wonderful amenities. These amenities are paid for out of the buckets of property taxes that people pay here. Unlike us, who own a 2-bedroom apartment, most people here pay enormous sums of money (the cheapest house around here starts at above half a million, and comes with 2 bedrooms and $12,000 a year in property taxes) to enjoy everything this area has to offer.

It's also an interesting place to live when you don't have an income which rivals the GNP of many developing nations around the world, and leads to a lot of comparisons with the Joneses that we have no business making. We're teachers; we chose our professions because we love them, and knew that they would never make us rich. We have a wonderful quality of life, but it's easy to forget that and wallow in self-pity when you are surrounded by people flying off for spiffy vacations, owning gorgeous homes, and being able to supply their children with pretty much anything they would like. At such times, it's important to remember that wealth is relative, and that we are incredibly lucky to have what we do.

I found this link for the Global Rich List the other day, and it made me more grateful than I have been in a long time. Give it a try, and I'll bet you agree.