Brownies, Earned the Hard Way

MMMMMMMMM . . . Brownies!  Can't you just smell them?  Probably not.  It's one of the greatest shortcomings of modern electronics, this ongoing inability to transmit the smell of freshly baked brownies from my kitchen to yours.  Think how great an improvement it would be if you could email a friend some essence of brownie, or parfum de freshly brewed coffee in the morning.  I suppose the source of the holdup  is  social responsibility, not technological shortcomings.  Considering the potential for abuse (spam scented spam?  email stinkbombs for people you're really mad at?), no self-respecting scientist wants to offer up a technology that could be used to create such misery.  Imagine if an entire office full of people opened  expressively scented hate-e-mail all at once.  Dreadful.

But this is not important.  What counts here is that I have a pan full of just baked brownies in my kitchen and I deserve them.  I like to pretend that since we don't celebrate Christmas, I am free every year to sit back and enjoy the music and lights and  cookies and all that festive spirit without having to pay the price of the retail nightmares that flourish at the same time.  But I'm only kidding myself.  Sometime in December it dawns on me that I have to provide for Chanukah gifts for my kids and nephews, holiday "thank you for all you do" gifts for teachers, bus drivers, letter carriers, etc., and --here's the one that causes all the stress-- a birthday present for El Husbando that will do at least some justice to the man who spoils me so shamelessly on my birthday.  Not that it's a competition, of course, but I can't fall too far behind.  I get some of the work done online, but this year, the bulk of it came down to one massive day of erranding.

That day was today.

And it is Friday, which means grocery shopping too, although this is much less of a time commitment now that all of the kids are in school instead of in the store begging for food and drinks and snacks and potty breaks.

So I'm tired and my credit card is still steaming a little from all the swiping today. My head aches  too, though not as much as it did when I was in the book store trying to sort out presents for  a dozen people and probably looked as befuddled as if I had wandered in from another planet.  And  there are still a few gifts left to buy, including one for a child who has inherited his father's "impossible to shop for" gene and whose spot on the to do list still looks like this: ?????


But I have brownies.  And it was a spectacular mail day, marked by the arrival of both a knitting book (yay, alibris!!! I love buying used books) and my order of weaving stuff (4 weird colors of 8/2 cotton for more towels and three issues of Weaver's Craft so I know how to make those weird towels). It is also possible that I treated myself to a new book (Out of Oz, hardcover edition because it's a new release and I can't get it in soft cover or used yet--how decadent!).  It's equally possible that I further pampered myself with a wireless keyboard for my iPad, which might also keep El Husbando from giving me the evil eye while I'm clicking away on the iPad itself.  I'm not sure which he hates more, the noise that my fingers make on the screen or the clicking that the screen makes when turn on the sound to cover the noise of my fingers.  Either way, I think the problem has been solved, and I look forward to using a keyboard that can input all of the letters I use, unlike the iPad which--much as I adore it-- is stuck at about an 85% success rate.

Did I mention the brownies?  I'm going to go have some (more) and see if they make my head stop buzzing. Then maybe I'll make some dinner and definitely I'll do some knitting and I'm going to try very hard not to buy anything else because I'm afraid the credit card company is going to call and ask for an explanation.

Right.  Brownies.