Your house is on fire and your children all gone!
All except one, and that's little Anne,
And she has crept under the frying pan.
My dad called me Anne-pan, perhaps after this rhyme. I loved hearing him say that.
I was always rather annoyed with Anne for being such a twit as to hide under the frying pan where she would most likely expire from heat and smoke, whereas everyone else used their wings (duh) to fly away from the danger! (I would have flown away.)
In America they call them Ladybugs, which is not as pretty, and if you see them fly in slow motion, they actually have massive wings and flap them like birds. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S77SYgOZXfg
I forgot to mention my run yesterday. I forced myself to do the extra lap, and so ran 1.96 miles (3.15km). As I came into the meadow for the first time a huge hawk took off, beautifully, perfectly graceful. I also found an owl pellet, and ran along thinking of the owl who sat in the tree above my path and digested its food. I hope it was a Great Horned Owl. If you look at the pellet, it is a whole mouse reconstituted, a mouse without the goodness, just mouse fur and bones.
But today I just had no time, and the only time I did have, when I had actually planned to run, there was a huge thunderstorm, and so I couldn't. But Molly and I had a long walk this morning.
Why I shouldn't bake
For some weird reason I sometimes volunteer for things about which I have not the slightest idea. Like the secretary of the Beekeepers' Association, which is a two-year appointment! And like today, I had to make brownies for the Seniors' Baccalaureate celebration at the boys' school. I have never made brownies before, but Matthew made them the other day so I thought I would probably manage.
Brownies are basically butter and sugar, with a bit of cocoa and a number of eggs thrown in, then baked so that they stay a bit soft in the middle. Nothing to it! The recipe said that you can just mix it with a wooden spoon, but mine soon became too thick, so I took out our electric mixer which Mary and Jim gave us about 8 years ago to help Tim with his banana-bread.
When I was finished mixing, I pressed the button to release the mixing beaters, which promptly fell right into the mix, vanishing without a trace, so that I had to haul them out and lick them clean immediately, before I could get them across the kitchen to the sink.
I poured the mix into two pans, and then carefully scraped the sides of the bowl with that special scraper thing which I actually brought from South Africa, and, as I was balancing the heavy bowl with one hand to scrape out the remnants with the other, the entire bowl slowly but inevitably slid into one of the pans, like a duck easing itself off a rock into the water. Molly was very interestedly licking the sides of the cupboard and the floor, and now I had to try to get the mixture off the outside of the bowl as well!
Eventually most of the mixture was in the pans, and as I turned to the recipe to check the last steps, my hair flicked to the left and stuck to the outside of the sticky bowl, wrenching me off balance, so that I just stopped myself from falling!
I got the pans into the oven, then turned to the washing of the sticky chocolate-soaked hair. And the cleaning up of the sticky chocolate-soaked counter and floor and part of the kitchen drawers. And Molly's fur on her left shoulder. And the bowl and utensils. I licked the bowl clean, that mixture is delicious, a coronary in chocolate disguise.
But I feel a bit sick after eating about 6 since 1 o'clock this afternoon! And Matthew said that there's nothing like box-mix brownies! "I mean", he said, "that yours are very nice, but they don't really taste like brownies!" Maybe because they are all so used to the synthetic chemical taste of brownie-mix in a box!
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