My Husband: My next video is going to feature dancing. (He gets up from the breakfast table and start dancing around wildly while looking at himself the mirror.)
Me: Really?
My Husband: And at the end I’ll take off my shirt.
Me: I think you should leave your shirt on.
My Husband: It’ll be like in the movies. It’ll be funny.
Me: Like in what movies?
My Husband: You know, the movies.
Me: I really think you should leave your shirt on.
I have a problem with following instructions. I don’t like to admit it, but realistically I do. If someone tells me how to do something I’ll usually do what I’m told, but if given a set of instructions to read I usually don’t bother. So I guess my real problem is reading instructions not necessarily following them.
I decided to start making kefir about a month ago. I though it would be a good way to get some healthy fermented foods in my family’s diet. I bought some kefir grains online. Kefir grains are the bacteria cultures used to make kefir. I ordered them from a woman who calls herself the Kefirlady. The Kefirlady owns Nigerian Pygmy goats and grows her kefir grains in fresh raw milk. The Kefirlady is also untrusting of the banking systems and only excepts payment in the form of cash mailed directly to her home. I picture her as a hunched old woman with scarf tied around her head, a shepherd’s staff and bony hands.
I put my payment in the mail and nervously waited for my kefir grains to arrive. A week later they did, along with 10 pages of instructions which I sort of read–if sort means reading the first paragraph and putting it on my desk to be buried under a bunch of other papers.
So I re-hydrated my grains in water for 24 hours. Then I put them in milk and thought I’d have delicious kefir in 1 week. After a week of changing my kefir’s milk roughly every 24 hours, I didn’t have delicious kefir at all. What I had was a thin milky substance that tasted like something that was wrung out of a sheep. Now I know what a barnyard tastes like and it’s not good. This can’t be right, I thought the first time I tasted it. Undeterred, I kept my sheepy kefir grains fed in fresh milk for two more weeks. It just kept getting sheepier and sheepier tasting. Finally, I gave up and got rid of the whole concoction.
After disposing of the Great Kefir Experiment of 2009, I decided to sit down and read the instructions that came with my kefir grains only to discover that my failure may have been my own fault. That’s unfortunate because I was sure the Kefirlady had tried to kill me. I pictured her taking my $10 bill from the envelop, putting in her apron pocket, then rubbing her bony hands together and saying, “Thanks for he $10, dearie. Now I will poison you.”
The kefir rules I broke:
1. Stir kefir with a plastic spoon. I only broke this rule once, but maybe once is enough.
2. Change the milk every 24 hours. On the 5th day, I got this brilliant idea to just put some new milk in with the old milk my kefir grains where already in. 12 hours later I went to swirl the jar to see how my kefir was doing and it was solid. That led to the breaking of rule number 3.
3. Don’t squeeze the kefir grains. Initially, when reading this rule you may think, why would anyone squeeze kefir grains? When I accidentally made the block of kefir cheese mentioned above I was horrified. How would I find would I find my kefir grains in that? I wondered. I dumped it all out and started squeezing it through my fingers to find the little rubbery kefir grains. Does pinching each grain really hard count as squeezing? I afraid it might.
Lesson learned:
If something you’ve purchased comes with instructions you might want to consider reading them unless the instructions are too long, you’re too busy to be bothered, or you think you can figure it out on your own.
My husband is making music videos again. He emailed me this song about two weeks ago and happily told me that he wrote the lyrics himself. Then last week he set up the camera in the living room and started doing a bunch of strange movements. “This video is going to be great!” he kept saying.
Here is the great video we’ve all been waiting for. Maybe he should send it to Celestial Seasons or Bigelow. It could be their next herbal tea commercial.
I’m not sure why he thinks showing his teeth the whole time is somehow menacing and frightening.
My husband, who initially hated the show, has suddenly become a huge “Lost” fan. He missed the first three seasons so we joined a movie club just so he could watch the early seasons and get caught up. We can’t watched them for free online here. Trust me we’ve tried and it just can’t be done.
Now he talks about “Lost” all the time. He acts like he knows the people. He wonders about what’s going to happen next at the dinner table. He wonders about what he would do if he were on the island. Sometimes he’ll see someone on the street and ask, “What if he were on the island?”
When I found these Dharma Initiative food labels online I thought it would be great to surprise him. He always eats a bowl of cereal late at night after a gig so I covered some food with the Dharma labels and put it in the cereal cabinet. When he got home I was so excited for him to see the labels, but I had mistakenly baked cookies that night so he didn’t eat any cereal.
That was fine. I could wait for the morning. I milled around the living room for a while waiting for him to fix breakfast the next morning. He was taking an unusually long time to get around to doing it that morning. It always happens like that when you’ve planned a surprise for someone. I kept wanting to say, “Aren’t you going to have breakfast?” I had to hold my tongue though because I didn’t want him to suspect anything.
When he finally opened the cabinet he said, “Where’s the cereal?” Then he closed the cabinet. Then he opened it again and said, “Why’d you buy all this Dharma food?” and closed the cabinet again. It was so uneventful. Then he opened the cabinet a third time and asked, “Where did this stuff come from?”
My husband is so caught up in the world of “Lost” that he’s lost track of reality. It took him a little while to register that the Dharma Initiative isn’t real and you can’t just buy that stuff at Sainbury’s.
One of my husband’s favorite things to do when he comes home from a gig in London is open up Google Maps and show me exactly how he got to the gig.
“And then I came down this street. And then down this street. This street was really busy. There was a lot of traffic. It took me 15 minutes to get from here to here,” he’ll say as I stare blankly at the computer screen. “And I parked on this street. Then I had to carry my amp up this street and down this street…”
Last week, I went camping not because I wanted to but because I had to. I was a chaperon for my church’s girls camp. Before camp all the girls and leaders seemed to be really excited about it. All I could think was, “Am I really going to have to sleep outside for four nights?” Maybe I’m spoiled, but I just don’t understand the idea of choosing not to have the luxury of running water, electricity and a bed when you don’t have to.
So I admit that I went into this whole camping thing with the wrong attitude. While I know I should’ve been more appreciatively of the nature around me, the joy of living in the great outdoors was somehow tarnished by the rainy weather and the fact that I couldn’t stand up in my tiny two man tent.
I struggled to get comfortable in my constrictive sleeping bag as the girls in the tent next to mine shrieked with laughter. At two in the morning when my bladder was bursting with the hot chocolate I drink before bed, I shuddered at the thought of wandering down the path with my tiny wind-up flashlight to bathroom.
There was shrieking in the woods–a terrible high pitched noise that sounded like someone was killing a baby or a cat. The next day one of the other camp leaders told me that deer where making the noise. The news was quite disappointing because I pictured some half-cat-half-man beast with bloody fangs tearing through the forest in his half torn off clothes. When I heard the noises again the following night I was convinced she must be wrong.
I have to admit that I spent the last two nights of camp at home in my own bed. It’s not because I was afraid of the were-cat in the woods or that fact that my sleeping bag felt like a straitjacket. It’s not even because the toilets stank and my flashlight didn’t work so great. It was just because I was finally able to openly admit that I just don’t like camping.
