The perils of baking

I was struck, today, with the sudden and uncontrollable urge to bake something.

“Cookies,” my boyfriend said on the phone.

‘Yes,’ my mind replied breathlessly, ‘cookies.’

So as I happily stirred the ingredients together in the kitchen, I pondered how wonderful my cookies would be. It occurred to me that I was going to have a lot of mixture. That meant a lot of cookies – and I had nobody to share them with. I was going to have too many cookies, I thought.

I replied to myself out loud (because I am oh so lonely), “That’s ridiculous. Nobody can ever have too many cookies.”

When I put a tray of cookie mixture into the oven, I checked the online recipe I was using. It said to cook them at 350 degrees Celsius. That was odd. I checked again. 350 Celsius.

Trusting the almighty online baking gods, I turned the oven up to 250 (that was as high as it would go), and went to go watch the rest of an episode of  The Big Bang Theory on my laptop.

When I returned, a scarce ten minutes later, smoke was seeping out of the oven vent and the spot under the element. At least I think it was. There was a lot of smoke, that’s for sure. I dashed over, uttering a few swear words under my breath, and flicked off the switch. When I rescued my cookies from the oven, they were charred black. I’d made one special cookie with a giant marshmallow inside, which I was excited to try. It was burned to a crisp. No marshmallow cookie for me.

Lucky for me, what I thought had been too much cookie mixture ended up being enough, as I’d had half a bowl left over to make the next batch. After triple checking the recipe, I realised I’d gotten the Celsius and Fahrenheit mixed up, even though I thought I’d checked that properly before. Preoccupied minds, huh?

Now I’m checking the new batch of cookies every two minutes, because I’m a little bit scared. This is what happens when I’m left home alone.

Blonde moments and stupid accidents

Yesterday when we were moving furniture to our new house, my flatmate got her finger jammed in the couch and, after screaming, swearing and crying for a bit, settled on laughing through the pain. I, somewhat awkwardly, didn’t know what to do with myself, so wandered off to carry on packing things into the car.

Today, we were unpacking things in our new house. I was in the kitchen, she was in her bedroom, down the hallway. As I unpacked cups and plates and put them away in the cupboard, I heard a noise from the end of the hall. I couldn’t quite tell what it was, because I’d been thumping around with boxes. I paused for a moment to listen, and from her bedroom I heard the faint sound of hysterical laughter, and knew that my flatmate had hurt herself once more.

The day didn’t end until we’d each been hurt several times. For me, most of the times I hurt myself involved banging my head on my car boot. For my flatmate, it was a variety of things. She even cut her finger trying to pick up a pile of blankets that I’d accidentally put down on some broken glass. Whoops.

We each had our blonde moments too. My flatmate spent about five minutes hunting for her car keys and starting to sound as if she were stressing about it, only to find them in the lock on her car boot. I found a big puddle on the laundry floor and tried to dry it with a bathmat, and then said that I didn’t have anything else to mop it up with, completely forgetting that right in front of my very eyes, there was an actual mop sitting in the laundry, just waiting to be used.

Moving is fun.

Unimaginable pain

The other day I pulled a Melissa by opening my bedroom door on my foot. Well, on my big toe.

There are no words to describe the pain I then suffered as a result of this mistake, and it was at least half an hour before I could walk properly again.

I’d gotten up to go out of my room at the same time that my flatmate came knocking on my door. Our eyes met as the door slammed into my toe, and whatever she was about to say to me was lost in my howls of agony. As was the only logical thing to do, I threw myself around the room, hopping on one foot and hammering on my bedroom wall.

After calming down a little, I turned and saw the kitten crouching, terrified, on my bed, with his head down low and his wide, dilated eyes fixed on me. It took awhile for him to get over it and trust me again after seeing me unleash my inner gorilla.

I almost felt guilty.

Boy, 5, kills sister with his gun

I’ve just read a news story about a five year old boy who accidentally shot his two year old sister with a rifle in the US.

What?

The story says “the boy received the .22-calibre rifle, especially made for children, as a gift. He said the rifle was kept in a corner, and the family didn’t realize a bullet was left inside it.”

The boy was apparently playing with the rifle when the accident happened.

I don’t know if I can begin to comprehend the stupidity of this boy’s parents. You don’t buy your five year old a rifle and not follow proper safety precautions. You don’t forget to check if there’s bullets in it, you don’t leave it sitting in a corner instead of locking it in a gun safe, and you don’t leave your five year old unattended to play with it!

I think you’d expect that if parents bought their child a gun, they were doing it to teach him the proper way to handle it and how to be safe. These idiots clearly weren’t doing anything of the sort, and now their son has to live with the knowledge that he killed his little sister.

Also, I think it’s unnecessary to put emphasis on the company that sells the guns – they aren’t the ones who left it sitting in the corner to be played with, and they certainly weren’t the ones that neglected to teach their son that guns aren’t toys.

I know these people have just lost a daughter and I shouldn’t be so hard on them, but I am absolutely disgusted.

My clumsy ways

I used to have scars on my wrists, but not for the reason you’d think.

They’ve faded now, but while they were still etched into my skin they bore testimony to my unbelievable knack for hurting myself in stupid ways.

Let me paint a picture.

It was a crisp, Spring morning, in my final years of high school, and I was home alone. Everyone else had left for school and work, and I was waiting for the school bus.

Our back lawn was higher than our house, so there was a set of concrete steps (about seven) that led up to the grass. With about five minutes before I needed to walk to the bus stop, I decided to lock up the house and go sit up on the lawn for a little while.

Big mistake, apparently.

With a quick look at the time on my phone, I decided I should be on my merry way, and I headed towards the steps.

I’m not entirely sure how I managed it. One moment I was putting my foot forward, and the next moment I was literally tumbling down the steps. It wasn’t even a simple trip and fall, it was a perfectly executed forward roll down the concrete. So before I knew it, I found myself lying at the bottom of the steps, scrapes running up my wrists, shins and ankles, with my dog standing beside me wagging his tail like an idiot.

With nobody at home, and only moments to go before the school bus arrived, I had to painfully limp to the bus stop and go to school anyway. Luckily my friends patched me up with Captain America bandaids when I got to class.

The sad thing is that I’m always hurting myself without quite knowing how. I recently had surgery on my knee after tearing the cartilage by swiveling on my leg in a strange way. A couple of years ago I fractured my foot by, get this, stepping funny. My classmates used to joke “haha, Melissa broke her foot tripping over nothing,” but that’s not true. I didn’t even trip. My foot simply broke.

I don’t know what it is. Maybe danger seeks me out? Maybe I am a gigantic clutz?

I’m a little afraid of what life throws at me next, because I’ll probably break a couple of fingers while I try to catch it.