Flops and Failures

           This week was full of flops and failures.

          Really, truly, “full of” might be an exaggeration but when things don’t go right or people let you down, flops and failures can overshadow your whole week.

          My beautiful friend Jody had a birthday this past week. I invited her to have lunch with us and I gave her the choice of which cake I would bake.

          “Do you want pineapple, chocolate, or apple cake?” I asked.

          “Chocolate,” she chose.

          I have this really good recipe for a chocolate cake that’s really moist. It’s paired with a frosting that’s not very sweet. I haven’t made it in a long time but from what I remember, it was good.

          The cake was beautiful when I pulled it from the oven. A little later, when I went to see if it was cool enough to cover, I see a big old depression in the middle of my cake where there had been a lovely soft mound before.

          It fell.

          There are lots of reasons a cake will fall. Over-beating the batter, under-baking the cake, too much baking soda or baking powder, opening the oven door too early, or closing it too sharply, cooling too fast, or letting the batter sit too long before you bake it.

          I suspect my problem, my mistake, was in measuring my baking soda. Pulling my box of baking soda from the shelf, I opened it and peered down inside. There wasn’t very much in there. A glance up into the cupboard showed me I had a new box on the top shelf. I scooped as much as I could onto the measuring spoon, but had to tap some from the box to make it level full. Looking back in the box, there was hardly anything left.

          I’m not putting that back in the cupboard, I thought and tipped the dregs into the mixing bowl before tossing the empty carton.

          No sooner had I done that than I realized it could be a mistake. It was my intention to take a little back out of the bowl but looking at the heap of white flour, white sugar, white baking powder, and white baking soda, I couldn’t tell which was which.

          I left it.

          “Just fill it with frosting,” my peeps told me in the next morning’s love note.

          The frosting I made called for you to cook milk and flour, let it cool, then mix it with sugar, butter, shortening, vanilla, and beat for ten whole freakin’ minutes! That’s a long time to stand over a mixing bowl. But I knew it had to be done or the sugar wouldn’t dissolve and the frosting would be grainy.

          The No-Peek Beef Tips I made and served over mashed potatoes with green beans on the side were good. The cake...

          Not so good.

          “I think it’s good!” Jody said, but was she really just being kind? She’s that way, you know. She’s a very kind and gentle soul who would never do or say anything to hurt anyone’s feelings if she could help it.

          After lunch, we played All Fives and Quiddler.

          “I like Quiddler better than All Fives,” Jody said.

          And we played by my cute little red-haired sister’s rule of making a sentence from the words you play. It adds a fun and interesting twist to the game.

          “I can’t make up a sentence with these words!” Jody lamented.

          “It doesn’t have to make sense,” I told her.

After thinking about it for a moment, she did come up with a sentence, and it was a good one too! But I don’t remember what it was. Something with the words “jute” and “swing.”

          It was super-duper nice to spend a couple of hours with my friend.

          I took some of the flop cake down to the Kipps.

          “It’s good,” Lamar said. After a few bites, he passed the dish to Rosie.

          “I think it’s good,” she said after eating a bite.

          “If I eat any more of it, I’ll probably scrape the nasty frosting off,” I said.

          “But that’s one thing that I really like about it,” Miss Rosie said. “I like that it’s not too sweet.”

          Maybe it was just me then.

          Even as long as I’ve been baking, I’m occasionally a failure at it. 

          We had a heavy frost. I took Raini out for a run and took a few pictures.  

      

          Christmas is coming, but I bet you knew that.

          When we went to Dickson City, I went into Hobby Lobby looking for some flesh-colored glass as well as a solid color white and black. All they had was the solid black. If I want to make Santas or elves this year, I’d need some flesh tones for faces and white for Santa beard.

          “Peg! Google it!” you say.

          “Google bad,” Nick said at our last CDI class.

          “Okay, Duck-Duck-Go-it then,” I said.

          Henceforth, we will say, “Google,” no matter which search engine you use.

          I did Google it. And I Amazoned it, too. They want to sell multipacks and I didn’t find any with the flesh tones in them.

          I remembered there’s a glass shop in Vestal, New York that I’ve been to a few times. I called and Carol said she had flesh-colored glass.

          You know what that means, don’t you?

          “Road pictures!” you say, and you'd be right!

          The tree is really pulling the lines down.

          “Do you think our internet comes in on those lines?” Mike asked, but I wouldn’t know.

          The river was so calm it had reflections. 

          A hawk. I know he’s too far away for a good picture — it doesn’t stop me from trying.

          Mike and I had to laugh a little at this, even though it really isn’t funny.

          The last time we were up this way, the white fence was the only one there. I guess one fence between them wasn’t enough.

          It’s said that good fences make good neighbors. All I know is when I look at this, I see dispute and contention. I see failure to be good neighbors.

          Carol, at Carol’s Creations, had the glass I wanted as well as some lead came I need for a future project. We got to talking and I showed her my book of commissions.

          “I have a whole bunch of books with all kinds of that stuff in it,” Carol said. “I had them here in the shop for a while but no one wanted them, so I took them home. If you want them, you can have them.”

          Since she said it had patterns in it, I’m guessing they’re books on Tole Art.

          “I’ll save them for you. Just let me know when you’re coming back up this way and I’ll bring them back to the shop for you.”

          She didn’t have any solid white glass but maybe she will have by the time we go back up again. She does buyouts and has crates of glass stored in her garage and her son’s barn.

          Something else we did while we were in Vestal was go to Lowes and get a faucet for my new old kitchen sink.

          While at Lowes, I used the restroom. They have new hand driers that use UV light and HEPA filters. Do you think it’ll kill germs better than the old hand dryers?

          I also like that there are foot pulls on the inside of the restroom doors. 

          Speaking of the kitchen sink, my cabinets were delivered Friday.

          “When they opened the back of the truck, there was stuff fallen all over the place,” Mike told me. “Some of it was broken. One of our boxes didn’t look right so I made them open it up. Something had fallen on the top of the box and the drawer was broken.”

          “Did they take it back?” I asked.

          “Yeah.”

          “Now what?” I wanted to know.

          “I have to call and they’ll send a replacement.”

          Mike spent the next half hour on the phone trying to get it resolved. The gal wanted to charge Mike more for the replacement cabinet than we paid for the one that was delivered broken. We’d gotten them on the last day of a sale. Mike didn’t agree to that and she adjusted the price. Then she wanted to charge another delivery fee. Mike didn’t agree to that either and she got the delivery charge waived. Then she wanted Mike’s credit card number for the replacement cabinet.

          “When the broken one comes back in, we’ll refund it to the credit card,” she said.

          “Why don’t we just wait until it comes back to the shop, then you can send out the replacement and you won’t need our credit card?” I asked.

          “It’s automatically credited back to your account when it comes back in,” she patiently explained.

          I guess I didn’t know how it worked.

          Our new cabinet is supposed to be here Monday. Then we’ll be busy for a couple of days getting them and my new old farm sink put in.

          “When they see how much stuff comes back broken on that truck, someone’s going to be in trouble,” I speculated.

As drivers delivering goods, they were failures.         

          I spent a fair amount of time in front of my computer this week, way more than I should’ve. I had two things going on, one was fun, one was not.

          The not-fun thing had to do with my download folder.

          I download a lot of stuff from a website called Creative Fabrica. They give away a lot of free fonts and patterns in many different formats. They also give you a commercial license so you can make and sell things from the patterns they send. The only thing I don’t like about it is it takes me a long time searching through my downloads to try and find a particular element. I wish they were linked to a search so I could search by subject, but they’re not.

          I really like the new Vintage Christmas bundle they sent. This is one of the designs. It’d be cute painted on a sign or printed on a card.

          Mid-week, I tried to open my download folder and it wouldn’t open. I spent two days trying to fix it. I won’t bore you with all the things I tried that didn’t work, but I did find a solution. I had to go into my settings and change the view to include subfolders and it worked. I’m back in business.

          The fun thing I spent way too much time on was my puzzle game 3003 Crystal Mazes.

          I love, love, love this game! I think the creators are so clever in the designs of the mazes. And I’ve heard that puzzles that exercise your brain muscles are good to ward off Old Timers disease. This game really does that.

          Sure! I get frustrated when the answer doesn’t come to me after playing it four or five or ten times. I can get super frustrated when I play the same puzzle over and over again for months on end. That’s my tenacity, my stick-to-it-ness, or maybe it’s just plain old-fashioned stubbornness that won’t let me go to the next puzzle until I’ve solved the current one. But I’ll tell you this. The harder the puzzle is to figure out, the more proud of myself I am when I do figure it out! Sometimes, after I’ve figured out an especially difficult puzzle, I’ll replay it several more times just for the fun of it.

          Spitfire, our mighty hunter, called from the kitchen a couple of nights ago.

          “Meow meow meow meow meow!” he said. That translates into, “Come and see what I got!” I’m not making this up. He really does have a certain way of meowing that alerts all of us that he’s brought in a present.

          We were all curled in my big recliner, Bondi, Raini, and me, when Spitfire called. Raini gets up so fast! She has no regard for her toenails, whether gripping blanket, recliner fabric, or ripping through the delicate skin of one old lady’s arm.

          I put my blanket aside, lowered the recliner and went to see.

          “Good job!” I told Spitfire and stroked his head. He leaned into my hand, purring his thanks. “That’s a fat little guy you got there!”

          Right on cue, he turned and picked his prize up.

          I know what’s coming next. I turned off the light and left him to his bone-crunching snack.

          There was one mouse that was a failure at hiding.

          Two nights later, we were in our normal evening TV-watching places. Raini was on her back, suffering the ministrations of a tummy scratch when we heard the pet flap in the kitchen. Lickety-split she was flipped over and launched herself off the recliner. Bondi made her way from under the blanket and took off after Raini.

          “Bark! Bark-bark-bark!” Raini said.

          “Does that mean come and see what I’ve got?” I asked Mike.

          “I think so,” he replied.

         I got up and went out into the kitchen. Turning on the light, Spitfire meowed at me from where he was on the butcher block. That’s where I feed them. I found Raini in the utility room with a still-living mouse.

          “Don’t you let him get away,” I warned her.

          She picked the mouse up and tossed it into the air. When it landed, she picked it up again.

          “Let me see it,” I said.

          Obediently, she set the mouse down, looked at me, then back to her mouse.

          “Good girl. You can have it. Take it outside.”

          She is so smart. She picked up the mouse and went right out.

          I have no idea if she ate it or just played with it for a while. I didn’t go looking.

          Another fat little mouse failed to hide, or run fast, or outsmart Spitfire and paid the ultimate price.

          Sunday morning, in my love note to my peeps, I told them, “Today is normal Sunday stuff with one twist.” I wouldn’t tell them what the twist was because I wanted them to have a little anticipation, a little excitement, something to look forward to in this week’s edition of Peggy’s Jibber Jabber.

          “Oh, you little tease!” one of my peeps responded.

          Meep and Meepette have failed to feed their first and second clutch of hatchlings. All of the chicks died within a day of being hatched.

          “I thought you weren’t going to let them have any more?” you say.

          I researched it. I could take the house out. They don’t actually need a house to sleep in. They can sleep perched on a perch. But if they’re really determined to have babies, they’ll turn one of the food cups into a nesting box. I’d need to invest in a different kind of feeder — the tube feeders, which I could do. There’s another consideration though. Sleep is important to birds. Many times through the day Meep and Meepette go into their little house, the opening is turned away from the light, and it’s dark enough that they nap. If I took the house out, they wouldn’t be able to do that.

          Maybe they’ll get the hang of being parents, I consoled myself and left things as they were.

          The third clutch yielded the same results — but I still had high hopes!

          A couple of weeks ago they laid five eggs.

          Saturday afternoon Meep and Meepette both came out of the house and announced the birth of their offspring to the world. Okay, okay! To me. They don’t meep that loud!

          I looked and saw two little mouths open and waiting to be fed.

          I watched Meep and Meepette and at first, I thought they were going to take care of them. Meep was in the food dish, then flew to the house. Unfortunately, that one trip was all I saw him make.

          After a couple of hours of paying attention, I was pretty sure they weren’t feeding them.

          I Googled it. It said that even hand raising them, the chances are they’ll die anyway. But if you’re gonna try, just know that they need to be fed every twenty minutes throughout the day. You don’t have to feed them at night. Use a dropper and feed them a drop at a time.

          I took the nesting formula, ground it as fine as my grinder would grind it, mixed it with warm water, and fed the babies. They were hungry.

          It didn’t take me long to determine that after fifteen minutes they were still sleeping. I stretched it out to half an hour, then to every hour.

          A third baby emerged that afternoon.

          I didn’t know if they would survive the night, but they did and this morning I have four hungry little mouths to feed.

          At first, I was trying to feed them while the house hung in the cage. I was getting food all over the babies!

          An image of someone hand-feeding a baby while holding it in their hand flashed in my mind’s eye.

          I’m a little afraid I’ll drop the house. I did that once long ago before the advent of any eggs. But for the sake and ease of feeding the babies, I decided to take a chance. It’s so much easier to feed them when I dump them out on a towel. Of course, all the crap from inside the nest comes out, too, and the lone unhatched egg.

          I didn’t especially want to care for babies, but I couldn’t bear to watch them die — not when I could do something about it. We shall see how long I can keep them alive. After this, no more babies! I’ll have to take out the house, buy different feeders, AND get a cover for the cage.

          Hands down, the biggest failure of the week, the one that takes the cake, the failure of all failures, is Meep and Meepette. They are total and complete failures at being parents. 

          With that, let’s call this one done!