Slow Cooked

If I'm gonna post every day, some of the posts are going to have to be daily recaps. Not every post can be some deep essay about a single subject.

So, today started with one of my least favorite activities, making a grocery list. I hate all the planning involved in food preparation. But, you know, as Weight Watchers will tell you, if you fail to plan, you plan to fail.

Anyway. As I mentioned last week, I borrowed Not Your Mother's Slow Cooker Cookbook from the library. So I decided to make this an all-Crock Pot week. My mom is visiting, which means we'll be out doing fun touristy things during the day, and it will be nice to come home to a nice, aromatic meal. Also we're both doing Weight Watchers, so we'll need to have food ready to preempt the ordering of takeout.

So, even though it's not your mother's cookbook, my mother and I will be eating 4 slow-cooked recipes this week: minestrone soup, split pea soup, chicken/potatoes, and a turkey breast.

Just to add a little more excitement to the day, it was picture day at Nathan's school. I was disappointed to see that the photographer would be taking full-body photos of the kids in front of a somewhat formal-looking background. Therefore, I would have to find a way to make Nathan's whole body look presentable, and not just his shoulders on up. So I bought him an outfit that cost like $25 at Target, but was ADORABLE with a little button-down plaid shirt and a train vest. So, of course he had to have dressy shoes, which were like another $16, and suddenly my attempt to use the school photos as cheap Christmas gifts didn't seem so cheap anymore. And plus, those little shoes were nearly impossible to cram my kid's feet into.

So, Nathan was thus appropriately clad and dropped off at school, and I had no more excuses but to go to the gym. I am doing this !@#$$% run on Saturday, and I just don't feel like it's going to go well. And then they sent this e-mail saying you had to at least run a 15-minute mile, and I'm like, what?!

Anyway, I went to the gym. And what better reward for going to the gym than to go on another pain-in-the-ass errand? So I went on this epic grocery-shopping trip to buy all these Crock Pot ingredients. Then on the way out, I saw police swarming this bank across the street. It turned out there was a robbery there, and the police shot one of the suspects. I have to say, even though I was across the street, I found the whole thing unnerving. And if I had had Nathan with me ... forget about it. I would have freaked out and left my giant cart of groceries right there in the parking lot as I drove away. Because if there's one thing I know, it's that you don't sit around and stare at a situation involving arrests and police standoffs. You especially don't whip out your camera and take pictures of the suspects, as the man mentioned in this article did. Because then you become a witness, and have to enter the witness relocation program. And I really couldn't pull off being a blonde. Also "Same Old Roberta" doesn't have the same ring to it.

Having survived my brush with crime, I got the groceries home, picked up Nathan, threw together a Crock Pot minestrone, set up the breadmaker for a nice wheat loaf, and finished my housecleaning. My home was thus prepared for the perfect olfactory experience to greet my houseguest upon arrival: a mixture of soup, bread, and a Bath and Body Works Sweet Cinnamon Pumpkin air freshener.

So, now that my house was cleaned and my food was prepared, I had time to go out and vote. Because even though it has been 90 years since women got the right to vote, I still had to plan my trip to the polls around cooking and cleaning.

Anyway, I had this vision of teaching my kid all about the electoral process and doing his civic duty. But when I told him about going to vote, he said, "I HATE VOTING!" And then when we got to the polling place, there was a crazy line for the touchscreen voting, probably because there are 15 pages of voting, and afterward you have to review each one approximately 37 times. So in this long wait, Nathan entertained himself by throwing himself on the floor, and running up and down this wheelchair ramp that they had at the school cafeteria where I vote. Meanwhile, another little girl about his age just stood nicely next to her mom the whole time in the line.

Now, the one thing the poll workers tell you is not to remove your little activation card until you see this message that tells you it's okay to do so. And it's like, these voting mechanisms are designed to be fairly fool-proof, unless that fool is a 3-year-old. So, like two pages into the voting, Nathan yanks my card out and the receipt thing prints a big-ass "VOID." And I have to tell the poll workers that I violated the one and only rule of the electronic voting, which was not to remove your damn card.

After some confusion on the part of the workers, my machine was reset and I voted for about 4 of the important offices, then skipped the next 11 pages of judges because I didn't want Nathan to yank my card out again (though at that point he was banished to sitting on some kind of risers, probably there because this cafeteria is actually a cafetorium like my elementary school had).

Then we went to the car wash. I picked the mango air freshener, in case you were curious. (The only choices are cherry, mango, new car, and fresh 'n clean.)

Next we had a perfect airport pickup when we went to Midway to get my mom. We went home and, as I had hoped, her first words upon entering my house were, "God it smells good in here."

And the minestrone was good, and then we tried to get my kid to go to sleep for HOURS AND HOURS, which is my newest frustration, but that's a post for another day.