Invader
So, I was sleeping and awakened to something going on in the living room. I thought perhaps one of the cats had jumped down and knocked something over, but then I heard a voice speaking. I opened my eyes and it was still dark. It is Sunday and no one is slated to come today! I reached out for the small dispenser of pepper spray I keep by my bed. It is 19 years old. Will it still work?
I got up slowly and as I progressed down the hall, I wondered what I should do–lock myself in the bathroom or slip out the bedroom sliders to the outside? Then I recognized the voice. “Nine hours and 45 minutes. Time to take the banana bread out of the oven. Nine hours and 45 minutes. Time to take the banana bread out of the oven.”
“Alexa!” I shouted, “Turn off the reminder!” Last night when I was setting the timer for the banana bread from Hell, I had set two reminders, one for 40 minutes and one for 45 minutes, but as I did, Alexa had misunderstood one and set it for nine hours and 40 minutes so I had redone it.
In the rush of the excitement over discovering my mistake and dealing with the lava flow in the oven and the other after-effects, two of the reminders had gone off and been silenced, but I had forgotten about the ticking time-bomb of the third.
Six-thirty in the morning and she was as dependable as ever. “Nine hours and 45 minutes. Time to take the banana bread out of the oven.”
“Alexa! Turn off the alarm!!” She finally heard me from two rooms away. I imagine the neighbors did, too.
And this is what, along with caked-on sugar all over the bottom of the oven and a sink full of other dishes associated with the great fiasco, is what awaits me in the kitchen this morning. 
An hour later, oven cleaned. Now on to the next round.
Well, almost. The oven light is burned out, so the oven looked great when I finished, but the flash of the photo has perhaps revealed a bit too much. Guess I have farther to go before getting this mess cleaned up. So this is how i have spent my 9th Sunday of “Shelter in Place” so far.
The Banana Bread Boo Boo II
When last you had word of our bungling baker, she had substituted 1½ cups of powdered sugar for the flour in her banana bread. (Read about this HERE.) When she discovered it 12 minutes into its baking, a disaster had already occurred. She’ll clean up the oven tomorrow.
Dolly at Kool Kosher Kitchen, who really knows what she’s doing when baking as well as cooking, advised “Take it out! Now! Throw it away.” I had already, in a flash of precognition, heeded half of this advice, but I just could not throw all those ingredients away, so I decided to perform a little experiment.
I put a half cup of the now deflated and runny banana, sugar, egg, butter, baking powder, salt, soda, walnut concoction (which at this point tasted a bit like runny banana jam) into a soup bowl and mixed an equal amount of stick-type bran cereal into it and put it in the microwave for 2 minutes. When it came out it was a bit sticky and very sweet. It would make a good ice cream topping I thought, but wouldn’t want to make a meal of it.
Instead, I mixed about a cup and a half of whole wheat flour into the rest of the banana disaster in the pan and divided it into two bowls and a coffee mug. Each one went into the microwave for 2 minutes and I must say the result is not bad. Never say die, say I, hoping 2 minutes in the microwave and 12 minutes in the oven was enough to cook those eggs!
I wonder if I have sufficient courage to give one of the bowls to my next door neighbors–and if I do, if I should tell them about this fiasco ahead of time. We’ll see tomorrow. Perhaps by then I will be so enamored of my new concoction that I won’t give any of it away. Bet you are dying to see pictures, right?
Click on the photos to enlarge them and see the captions.
Postscript: If you try to do this at home, kids, one warning–remember to grease the bowls!!! Guess who didn’t.
Dolly, help me! I just spent an hour making banana bread from scratch, put it in the oven, and as I was cleaning up the kitchen, I discovered I’d used powdered sugar in place of flour!!!! Crushed.
Tempted to let it bake and see what happens, but will my loaf pan be permanently encrusted with it?
Your sympathies and reassurances requested. If I ever needed friends, it is now!!!! Below is how my disaster looked after twelve minutes in the oven. I took it out!! The second photo is how the oven looked after I took it out.
Go HERE to see what ultimately happened to this mess.
The Groom Dances with Grandma
She struggles to keep time as they circle ’round the floor,
her flushed face with its rosy hues signaling “no more!”
This dancing she once lived for has come to be a task,
whereas the problem once was whether any boy would ask.
Standing in the wallflower line, wishing for a fella,
whereas sixty years later, a chair and an umbrella
would serve to meet her wishes, for this dancing in the sun
at her grandson’s wedding has turned out to be no fun.
What she needs in her dotage is not cognate with the dreams
of those age fifteen fantasies that burst her at the seams,
spilling out her future hopes, sure they’d be the same—
that there would be no change of rules in this living game.
Memories of graceful maneuvers through the night
remembered at one’s leisure are a pure delight.
Yet all those youthful dreams of blithely swirling ’round the floor
have matured into her fantasies of sneaking out the door.
Word prompts for today are rosy hues, circle, dancing, cognate and umbrella. Image by Mitchell Orr on Unsplash, used with permission.
Click on photos to enlarge.
This forced isolation has given me incentive to spend days in the studio. An artist challenge where we each contributed items to use in a collage resulted in many items left over so once I had completed my main piece, which you may view HERE, I decided to try to make more pieces from leftovers. The four wreaths are made out of 4 inch rings. We have no idea what they were for. I added the wrappings and embellishments. I then decided to make something of the large plastic straws I had contributed as well as the plastic discs with holes in the middle. I cut up and fringed the straws, then stacked them and pushed the bottom into a stack of the disks. Voilá–a cactus? bromeliad? not sure.
For the Home Photo Challenge.
Here is a poem I wrote a few years ago when Forgottenman and I were driving through Iowa. Since I’ve never put it online before, thought I’d share it with you for Open Link night.
Farming the Wind
We pass a typical Iowa still life:
huge augers sipping the liquid mass of grain
from one of a trio of huge silos.
In the background, a cell phone tower
repeats the scaffolding over the corrugated iron silos,
mimicking nature’s patterning.
Twenty miles farther down the road,
we come upon other Brobdingnagians:
dozens of giant peace symbols rotating in what looks like the still air,
belying the motionless trees in their foreground.
Here nature fuels our technology in ways
that do not so obviously kill us
as petrochemicals or nuclear domes.
In clusters of evenly spaced rows,
the skeletal giants turn in graceful circles,
chronicling the passage of currents that carry the energy
that enables us to watch, cook, travel,
regulate temperature and communicate
without leaving our chairs.
We each become so comfortable in our close world
that we atrophy– venturing out less each year
into the world at large.
What does technology exist for–
to carry us forward or hold us back?
To destroy or support us?
The hugest irony of existence is that
everything is continuously changing:
movement to stillness and back.
Once stopped, will we ever be cognizant of this again?
Ever able to carry our wisdom forward from life to life?
This wind that blows us forward
also holds us back.
Which is the truth, which the contradiction?
These thoughts move
through our minds like the currents through the air,
bringing us to whatever truth we make of them.
This is the truth I find: Each thing contains its opposite.
To read posts from others responding to this prompt, go HERE. To read the prompt at the dVerse Poets site, go HERE.
Click on photos to enlarge and view captions. A poem follows.
Meditations from My Room
I share different company in my isolation.
Dogs litter my studio floor,
and my backyard is
an in-between place for birds
passing as though at a freeway interchange,
this way and that.
A constant flutter of butterflies
stirs air around the orange and yellow thunbergia,
lush in this season that mixes sun and rain.
They soar down to the empty lot
and back again,
as though no creature can resist
collecting here in my domain.
Nature follows no rules of man.
It cannot learn obeisance or heed human leverage.
Our world, professional and polished—
how easily by nature now turned inward upon itself.
Our burnished world can hold no sway,
for nature heeds no golden cow.
Her empathy extended toward the broader view,
nature must change the things she can.
She has been patient with us long enough. The time is now.
Prompt words today are empathy, leverage, patient, burnish and professional.
