Cocktail Confessions

It’s been a bit of a stretch since I last rattled off a humorous little true tale.  At least I can say tthat after a few days, this story has indeed become more humorous to me as opposed to my initial disappointment and frustration when it took place a few evening ago.

First, let me give you all a little of the setup, or background.  I have an 18 year old step daughter, whom by all accounts is a very creative individual.  However, that being said, doesn’t always translate into practical street smarts or the comprehension of the obvious.  Often, my wife and and I find ourselves having to explain things to the “n-th” degree.  At times, it really can turn into an exercise in patience and I often ponder if this is a continual test from the creator to that is supposed to teach me a valuable lesson (which I find myself constantly failing BTW), or that He, in all His glory and wisdom has a gets bored on occasion and likes to amuse Himself by playing various Prank’d jokes on us all to see how we will react.

My step-daughter also only works part time.  And when I say part time, I literally mean about 16 hours a week.  She is currently not enrolled in traditional school (she’s attempting to get her GED or diploma equivlency through some ridiculous CA government run program that screams retail all over it).  All you, as the reader, need to know is this translates to my wife and I both working full time anywhere between 45-50 hours each a week, and allows my step-daughter to watch Sponge Bob or Comedy Central marathons at the equivalent of 8 hours day.  Something that will change shortly, by the way.

It would occasionally be nice to come home to maybe …., oh, say…. a prepared meal for the family seeing that we work all day long.  Is that too much to ask?  Is it out of line to think the that the house could be vacuumed, the kitchen floor mopped, or the plants watered occasionally,…..say between commercials, or is that oh soooo busy day of sitting on the couch pondering about getting a drivers license taking up too much valuable time?  Apparently so.

More times that I’d like to admit, either my wife or myself are the ones that come home from a long day at work, only to find ourselves doing the cleaning and making dinner.  Hardly seems fair, but also we need it done correctly and not half-assed, or as my a friend put it the other day, ‘quarter-assed’.

So the other night it was approaching 7pm and I had yet to start dinner (after a ten hour day) and my wife was bowling as she does once a week on a league.  My daughter came to me and inquired about dinner. Ugh, are you kidding me??  Again, and I know this may come off as sounding rude, mean, or not very understanding, but the fact that she was waiting for me yet once again to provide her sustenance after she sat home and did nothing all day long really irked me.  I think she got the initial gist of my facial contortion as she quickly recovered and offered up, ”Would you like me to make dinner for us?”

My jaw just about dropped.  Not only did she offer to make dinner, but she also included me into the mix and not as an afterthought or non-thought as is the usual case.  I said, “That would be nice.  There is some prepackaged fish in the freezer.  Just preheat the oven and pop them in.  I’m going to take a shower and be down in a bit.”, and I watched her scamper back downstairs and heard both the freezer open and oven start.  I thought everything was okay at this point. 

I should also know better by now.

After my shower, I began to traipse downstairs only to smell something slightly burning.  She was sitting on the couch, laptop in hand, exchanging glances between the TV screen and the computer she was inevitably harvesting crops in FarmVille.

I walked into the kitchen and opened the oven.

There were our fish fillets, on a cookie sheet, uncovered or protected, with their toppings having melted and slid off the fish and began to burn and bubble in a pool inside the oven.  I quickly pulled the cookie sheet out to avoid further burning and grabbed the box in which the fillets came.

Directions:

1. Preheat the oven to 425 degrees,
2. PLACE FISH IN OVEN SAFE DISH
3. COVER
4. Bake for 22-25 minutes, or until fish is opaque in color

That’s it folks.  Four points of instruction in our native tongue of English.

Somehow, someway, and don’t even ask me to explain because I can’t and I’m just as left in the dark as you are, my daughter skipped over steps 2 & 3.  She got the oven to 425, and set the timer for 25 minutes, yet somehow was able to miss the part where you place the fish in an oven safe dish and then to cover them.  These instructions, I imagine, were there for the sole purpose to purposely avoid the topping spill over and burning.  When I asked her about this, the blank stare of a deer in head-lights spoke volumes.

I was just barely able to salvage the fillets with only half the toppings.  I then looked about the rest of the kitchen to see what else was being prepared.  Usually with a fish fillet dinner or when someone offers to cook you a dinner, one might expect to see a salad and/or a side dish as well.  A piece of bread may be a topper on a meal such as this.  Sadly, and not really to my surprise, there was nothing else on the menu this evening.  Nope, just over-cooked, dried-out fish on a cookie sheet.

The more I thought about it it that evening the angrier I was getting, but then I had an epiphany the following day.  Maybe my daughter is actually a genius!  Maybe by intentionally screwing up this meal, this is her way of saying “Look old man, maybe you need to cook dinner all the time.  I can’t possibly be bothered by reading instructions and therefor you will be more inclined to start dinner when you get home from work and how dare you interrupt my Facebook time.”  If that is indeed the case, then she is actually brilliant and a well played scheme on her end.

Hmmmm….

Before I get to the site updates, here’s a but that’s going on:

The step-daughter has moved into our house.  At 17 years of age it has been somewhat of an adjustment to undertake and a lot of people are giving us advice.  However, all the advice in the world cannot change the attitude of someone who doesn’t care about school.  Overall, she’s a good kid: she’s polite to neighbors and friends, she doesn’t drink or smoke or do any drugs that we are aware of, no tattoo’s, no errant piercings, no foul mouth.  She just doesn’t do her school work and likes to ditch which has caused her to slip behind….far behind everyone else her age.  And in California where our state is ranked pretty low to begin with in education…..well, as the guidance counselor recently told us….she’s setting herself up for a long life of retail employment.  Sigh.

As far as my diet goes that I self imposed on myself last Sunday, it’s been going ‘okay’.  So far, I only broke down last night when I got home from work and had one Bud Light, otherwise I’ve been drinking water.  I’ve had a few cookies here and there, but overall, my portion sizes have been reduced (although I am a bit hungry and have a mild headache…more so due to my allergies I figure than not enough food), and I’ve been eating a bit healthier.  I could and should even alter my diet a bit more and eat healthier foods (salads, veggies, etc) and need to start some additional exercise.  I had planned on doing some exercise this past week when I get home, but I just haven’t.  No real excuse. I just haven’t.

Halloween is tomorrow, and quite honestly I just don’t care.  I have a costume…more so because my wife wants us to go to a party…but I have no real desire to dress up.  I’m sure I’ll have fun at the party, but I know the temptation of too much drinking may be a factor.  I went to the same party last year, drank a lot, and fell on my ass where I believe I fractures my tail bone.  No joke.  I also had a mild hangover as well…something I’d like to avoid this year.

I have a podcast with my grandfather that I need to complete editing so I can post, and I hope I can do a few recordings this next week as well and supply a bit more content here.

Feedburner: I noticed the other day my regular Feedburner was no longer updating itself correctly and I’m not 100% sure why.  I haven’t made any changes at all to the FeedBurner settings, and after spending quite sometime looking at the various settings pages, account, and some basic troubleshooting it appears it all boils down to possibly a missin “/meta” tag somwhere.  After pinging and validating my pages and getting the “congratulations” response, some further digging revealed that FeedBurner is conflicting with itself somewhere else.  A search of the FAQ stated that this can indeed happen when you copy and paste from MS Office applications like Word or Excel.  Well, I do know I had done some recent cut and paste work from Word and unless I scan line by line the HTML code for the last few posts for a possible errant tag (which I may or may not find), it may or may not fix the issue.  Bums me out since I think WordPress should be smart and compliant enough with Word to not insert additional XML tags, but apparantly not.  Hopefully this will eventually correct itself in the future when I post enough new content to bury the old stuff way down.  So let this be a little knoweldge to you: WordPress, FeedBurner, and MS Word don’t play well with each other.

Site notes:

• BluBerry Power Press updated to v1.0.3.  I think I may try the full service soon as my podcasts aren’t showing up yet on Zune Marketplace and I don’t know why.
• Sociable upgraded to v3.5.2.  No real change for me as I didn’t change my options.
• The Hacker’s Diet – installed v0.9.8b.  This is a plugin behind the scenes in which I should be updating my weight.  You won’t see anything unless I take a snapshot and post it as a picture in a regular post.
• Count Per Day – Updated to v2.4.2 and I use this again behind the scenes.  Traffic monitor.
• WordPress – Still using v2.7.1 although v2.8.5 is available.  I’m a little hesitant to upgrade.  I’m sure it’ll be fine for the most part, but there is always some hidden thing that gets screwed up.