Twitching Eyelid, Missing Stovetop

No, this is not a single-mom’s version of Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon…or is it?

So this is where my stovetop used to be…

Yeah. I had a replacement, but it was too small. We can talk later about why it was too small. Let’s just say it was too small. Meanwhile, the nice installation guy had to cut the wires to get the old one out…it was half-functioning, which is still a lot more functional than this hole is. So when we realized it was too small, my day kind of slapped me upside the face.

It’s OK. I got my car back. I’m just going to drive it until whatever caused issues with it up on Sunrise Highway happens again and it dies again. Not much else I can do. He wouldn’t charge me anything for trying to figure it out. I offered him a turkey. The stovetop installation guy also wouldn’t charge me anything for not installing a stovetop. Turkey? No? Getting the car back meant I had time to go to Sears, return the too-small stovetop, and order one that would fit, because the girlchild now had a car to go to her soccer game. The stovetop? For January 19. OK. It’s all right. I have a mostly working oven, a toaster, an electric tea kettle, and a microwave. Oh, and a crock pot. We can eat. We can toast things. We just can’t fry things or make sauces. Or pasta. Although there’s been some contemplation if we boiled water in the tea kettle over and over again and kept pouring it over the pasta, it would cook to some extent. Insert evil eye glare here.

So there’s that. And I went into my classroom and found all the crap for Monday’s lab and organized some stuff and copied the stuff I need for Monday. So I don’t have to go back there until Monday. Which is when school starts, so I really should be there. But I can sort of ignore it for two days. My left eyelid, however, is not ignoring it. It’s still twitching like a motherfucker.

While the guy was not installing my stovetop, I started sorting all of Mariah’s hand-me-down fabrics by color…

The kids say they couldn’t possibly make the decisions I do about multi-colored pieces. Or where I draw the line between brown and orange or white and yellow. Or even green and blue. Whatever. It will probably take me months to do this.

The day kicking my ass found me in a bar (oh yeah) with my sketchbook and a glass of wine, trying to make sense of cancer donation quilts once again…first of all, breast cancer cells are alternately terrifying and beautiful in their spikiness.

But I think I need to draw something not related to cancer. I think these spiky cells will end up in something though. How can they not?

And when I came home, I figured out how to cook the previously planned dinner without a stovetop, because someone, whose name will stay unknown, kept texting me that she was hungry but couldn’t possibly handle making dinner, and then I tried to quilt, but I was really really tired…

Yeah, drinking in the early evening after a long stressful day can do that to you. So I didn’t finish her. And today I’m hiking and I don’t know what else, but it isn’t quilting and it isn’t grading papers…it’s whatever it takes to get the damn eyelid under control. Because that’s a sign of stress and it needs to wander off somewhere else.