Focaccia Suckage

So, yeah, I bake fairly often. And usually do pretty well at it.

Today it was focaccia for lunch.

After getting the dough right, getting the herbs right, making pesto mostly from stuff in my garden, and assembling four nice focaccia sheets and having them rise perfectly...

and setting the oven to the proscribed temperature...

and the timer for the proscribed minimum length...

It burned.

ARGHGHGHGHGHGHGHGHGH!!!!!!!!!!

How evil is it that I am making myself/kids eat them in order - most burned first?

What does it say about the how hungry my kids must be that they have eaten a sheet and a half? They're almost totally through the burnt stuff and into the good (not burned) stuff.

That or it's actually not that bad after all, which I refuse to believe since I'm doing my part and eating burnt focaccia, too. They have other food here. I'm just perplexed - why aren't the little buggers whining?

I shall now shut up and be happy that the little buggers are not only not whining, but happily eating burnt focaccia.

From the Past

~L~ sent me an email this morning of something she found from nearly 2 years ago:

I was standing in the kitchen in my pajamas at 12:30, holding a naked baby and a dive stick, trying to put cold taco meat into an overheated piece of pita bread to feed the whining 3 year old whacking my butt with a plastic train, when the thought hit me: If I had a camera mounted in my ceiling, I could take a picture now and my little sister would never, ever want kids.

Niki, who is considering installing a camera in the ceiling.

I had posted that on a message board we were both on.

Funny how little changes over two years.

Feeling Broadsided by Finals

I'm still not recovered from the two-week-onsite-adventure.

Allow me to bitch for a few.

I took three finals this afternoon. Pharmacology, Clinical Skills, and Midwifery Care. Our Midwifery Care instructor, as my fellow SMS students know, has a way of throwing obscenely difficult-to-reason-through questions at you. Nevertheless, MWC turned out to be the most predictable test I took this afternoon.

I'm not sure I took the pharmacology class that the final exam was written for. Seriously, I'm not. Like, really, I'm supposed to track down all the state regulations on homeopathy/herbal treatments/physical manipulation and scope of care, and provide references, and this is 3 points on a 24 point test? With a 2 hour time limit? Um, no? OK, slight exaggeration, not every question was that bad. But it was seriously headache inducing. Like looking up regulations isn't difficult enough without the time pressure.

I'm not sure I took the Clinical Skills course that the final was written for either, but at least they didn't ask me to pick out equiptment. I've had enough groping in the dark about that one, thankyouverymuch.

As if the tests themselves weren't bad enough, Toddlerness decided that she'd had enough of napping, and eating popcorn and watching Blue's Clues wouldn't cut it anymore, and started trying to escape - she was after her sibs, who were playing at the neighbors' house. I kept having to run after the little punkage. After 4 of these episodes I finally got wise and piled stuff in front of the door.

She was so frigging cute though, running out the door wearing *my* tie-dyed hemp t-shirt and nothing else, just so happy to be pounding her way down the path, that I couldn't get mad at her. And the time limit on the MWC test (the one I was taking during these episodes) was long this time around and I wasn't feeling any time pressure, so maybe it was actually a good thing I was up and down a bit.

I Wanna Barf In A Bowl

That ("I Wanna Barf In A Bowl") is what Toddlerness was saying when we thought she was just being difficult and incomprehensible. For two hours. Sitting miserably on the couch (in my lap, in Fran's lap, next to Becca, hugging a pillow...). Until she erupted a huge volume of barely-at-all-digested food dating back 12+ hours. And proceeded to barf intermittently over the next couple of hours until she was dry-heaving and bringing up frothy mini-mouthfuls of bile.

She's fast asleep now, on a nest of towels, next to her bowl.

Poor girlie.