My Poor Dusty Blog

 I have about fifteen drafts from this week, because this week, like the many weeks before it, despite the absence of outside errands, has been packed.   I figure, it's only fair to give an update.   

1) What am I writing?  Well, I'm writing poems, I'm editing my book. I've thrashed at words but they're repetitive or just don't get where they need to go or they sound too stressed and I don't want to worry my mom.    

2) What am I reading?  Well I'm glad you asked, though you didn't.  We're reading Harry Potter's Order of the Phoenix with my youngest, The Book of Three with Paul --he's into it, and others keep hovering around not really listening you understand, but nearby.  I'm trying to get my next two to listen to A Horse and His Boy.  I'm going to keep trying.  I've also started Our Mutual Friend with my son John...and I'm hoping that one catches more of them too.   

3) Are you Exercising...three times this week I did...then it rained...and I've discovered an inverse theorem...if I dress to exercise, I don't.    

4) Are you praying?   Every day I drop off for school, I drop by the outside adoration chapel near my home for at least five minutes.  So yes.   

5) What else are you doing?  Teaching.  Managing the house...everyone's home now.   I'm also helping to organize a conference for January for writers ---so that counts.   

6) I haven't seen any links lately ...why is that?  Sometimes, you get dry spells.   This is one of them. I'm submitting, sometimes three pieces in a week...but they're getting what I'd call dead cat bounces.  Not to worry, I have a lot more to throw at them.   Visualizing me throwing cats at the editors...it's helpful.  

7) Will you ever be funny again...as a blog?   ---wait, I wasn't?   

Small Success Thursday

Come join us over at Catholicmom.com and share your successes from the past week!

The Ratio of Humble Pie is...

Oh who cares?  I'm eating the whole pie.

Which is good because while I know Pi =3.14159265359...I've never once understood why, not even when I learned it.  Back in the day, I just memorized and regurgitated, without ever understanding.  Perhaps because few math facts ever were digested, it continues to disagree with me.  At the very least, we lack tolerance for one another. However this discipline and I have worked out an uneasy truce, born of years of systemic consenting neglect, reinforcing our mutual disdain.

But today, I forced myself to reenter the math world, and discovered a whole new reason to hate it.

I'm studying for the Praxis, and that means passing the math.   That means studying.   It also means my teenagers get to mock me mercilessly for my errors.   I'd love to tell them to knock it off, but it's hard to do that when you need them to explain the problems.   It is the cost of doing business with adolescent tutors.

I took the English practice Praxis.  I scored a 99 of 100 and finished in 1/3 of the time.

I took the Math practice and got a 63.   If they don't let me use scratch paper, it will be far worse.

During the exam, I could hear my gray cells squeaking and creaking, as the neurons fired up and found that a whole section of my grey matter needs dusting.   I did remember the slope formula y=mx+b.  Alas, I found it a slippery slope formula as I couldn't remember what to do with it.   On a multiple choice quiz, you don't get any points for recalling partially what is needed, and eenie-meenie-miney-moe proved itself to be an unreliable method of determining the answer.  So much so, I'm fairly certain when I take the actual test, there will be a word problem as follows:

If Sherry guesses at the Praxis on the math section for 1/5 of the 40 problems and gets only 1/5 of those guesses correct, what total number did she miss by guessing?  (I'm not going to go easy on you and give you the answer not because I'm mean but because I actually don't know, don't want to know, and don't want to know even if you know, how to know it).  

So after listening to my children question how I could not know what I obviously did not, how I could forget so much, how I've managed to walk upright and drive given my limited command of arithmetic, I went back to the world of words and took another test.  But my brain felt tired.  I scored only a 92.

Looking at the score with disgust and fatigue, all I could say was, "Et tu Brutus?" and wonder if I failed badly enough, would they send me to 7th grade as a student?   My only comfort, one day, these teenagers will grow up, they'll become adults in the adult world, and hopefully, they'll have children.  Hopefully, one day they'll discover they've been lapped by their kids, and I'll be right there, handing them the recipe for humble pie or Pi.   You take 3.14159265359...

Happy Birthday!

Today I turn 45.  I'm happy to be here.  Not really freaked by the number or the mileage, glad to have my birthday on a Sunday as we all got to go to mass together, a good way to celebrate.  This afternoon, we made My cake. 

Ordinarily, I've received a box cake --or a cake from the store.  My cake is the cake my mom made me most birthdays.

It is evil. 
It is delicious. 
It is not good for you. 
And I'm going to share My cake recipe. 
It cures what ails you --provided you have a quart of milk and a gallon of vanillia ice cream to wash it down. 

My Mom's Birthday Cake for Sherry

Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

Dry ingredients:
2 cups flour
2 cups sugar
1 tsp. cinnamon
1 tsp. baking soda.
Combine in mixing bowl.  Set aside.

Wet ingredients:
In a sauce pan melt 2 sticks of butter and 1 cup of water and 4 tablespoons of cocoa powder.  Bring to a boil.  Mix well.

Separate Wet ingredients.
In a small bowl combine 2 eggs
1/2 cup buttermilk
1 teaspoon vanilla
mix well. 

Pour boiling cocoa/butter/water mixture into flour mixture while the mixer is on, allow to mix well.
Pour eggs/buttermilk vanillia mixture into chocolate/flour batter. Mix well.

Pour whole thing into a rectangular 9x13 pan (greased or sprayed with cooking spray), bake for 25 minutes.

While cake is baking --see, this is an impatient cake --so I like it for that reason.

7 minutes before the cake is out, start your frosting.

Melt in a sauce pan 1 stick of butter,
4 tablespoons of cocoa,
6 tablespoons of milk
and 1 teaspoon of vanillia. 

Stir until it is one bubbling consolidated liquid. 

Add one box of powdered sugar and keep stirring until it is glossy smooth.

Add one cup of pecans if desired. Mix well.

Take cake out of oven.
Pour icing over cake while still hot.

Eat. Enjoy.
Spend next 364 days working it off so you can do it again next year.
Tomorrow, you get the story of the cake.  Sugar coma from cake is preventing further thought.