Cooking and Cleaning

I'm feeling peeved. For two reasons.

First up, fish night.

I try to be a conscientious cook. I bake more than I fry. I try the low-fat versions of all dairy products. I make the kids taste one bite of whatever I cook regardless of how it looks or smells. (I tell them I do it because "taste buds change their minds sometimes.") I make more chicken than beef, because red meat is evil. And I try to serve fish.

I know that fish is healthy. Brain food and all that. I've even exposed our munchkins to canned tuna... and our highly unscientific survey says that one out of every three average kids will actually eat it. (The other two will scrub their mouths for five solid minutes after touching one flake of the fish onto the very tippy top of their tongues.)

Last night was fish night. I baked tilapia.

I like fish. Pretty much any kind, cooked any way. As long as it's cooked thoroughly.

Bruce tolerates fish. And he does so quietly.

The kids' reactions? Yeah, you'd think I took the fish straight out of our aquarium on the counter and tossed them, flipping about, into a casserole dish headed for the piping hot oven.

Supper time last night consisted of such appetizers as whining, crying, moaning and groaning.

I felt like a pressure cooker about to explode.

Tonight we're having Whoppers for supper. Maybe I'll toss in a Fruit Roll Up for color. I try to be a conscientious cook. But a girl needs a break!

The second regular irritant to my homemaker bliss is laundry. But not every load, because, for the most part, washing and drying our clothes is no big deal. Well, the piles are big deals. Huge actually. But the act of returning them to a clean state is not something I generally despise.

But I can't stand washing whites. In hot, bleachy water.

The washing isn't even the problem. It's the drying.

Why is it that drying a load of whites takes about twice as long as drying any other load of laundry? It totally bogs down the process of getting eight loads finished.

And it's not that something is wrong with our dryer. I clean the lint thingy out after every load. And I regularly use a vacuum cleaner hose to suck out the hole you slide the lint thingy into.

Trust me... there's more lint in my kids' bellybuttons than there is in my dryer's lint thingy.

Stupid slow-drying load of whites. You are not my friend.

Tomorrow I'm going grocery shopping. At Wal-mart. And I'm looking more forward to it than I anticipate doing laundry.

But I'm not buying any fish!