09 February 2025
Story #1130
R. Linda:
The day started out calmly enough. I was sitting at the kitchen counter sipping coffee with Mam, listening to the lovely sound of O'Hare shovelling the back deck of snow. Nice that it was his young self instead of me. Previously, he complained about shovelling, accusing me of not having a proper shovel. The one I had, you have to put your back into it, and well, according to him, he has this problem where he favours one side of his body to the other, and doctor says (so he tells me) he has one hip muscle up and the other down, which causes back pain. OK. I have the beginnings of sciatica, and when I shovel, I don't come in like a broken wreck, and I am way older than he is. Anyway, he bought a $30 shovel for himself, and he was out there shovelling 18" of the white stuff so I "wouldn't have to."
Secretly, he was getting a certain satisfaction at having his very own shovel he purchased himself. But who am I kidding?
I sat there enjoying the sounds of someone else labouring instead of meself. Meanwhile, Mam's kitten, which isn't a kitten anymore and thinks it's a dog, was being a pest, begging for treats at our feet. It comes running if you call it (something my experience with cats just never happens), it rolls over like a dog, it begs on its hind feet like a dog, and I be sure it thinks it is a dog. It loves catnip-flavoured Temptations Cat Treats. If one dares go in the kitchen, he expects a treat because Mam spoils his smug self. I was about to throw a few down to El Gato when O'Hare came in, stamping snow off his boots.
"Oh, I see Maruu is begging for treats. Those things are sweet-tasting." He came in for the gloves he had left on the countertop and then went out.
Mam looked at me, and I looked at her. At the same time, we said, "How does he know that?"
When he came in, we asked him how he knew what the cat treats tasted like. His face reddened as he realised what he had said and now had to explain himself.
"Uhhh, I got a handful of the Valentine's heart candies. The cat heard me and came running, so I got the cat treats in the other hand. I was tired and didn't realise I threw the hearts down for the cat and popped the cat treats in my mouth. As I went up the stairs, I realised they tasted different and had a different texture. I spit the mess out and saw I had popped the cat treats in my mouth. That's how I know."
He looked sheepish. I'm sorry, but we burst into gales of laughter, and he had a sloppy smile on his face, knowing full well how outlandish that was.
"I taught onlee yer fatha did tings like dat," Mam gawfawed. "Rememba dose banana dog treats, Gabriel?"
The smile was wiped off me face at that. Of course I did.
"Mus run in da fambly." She said, satisfied she knew the cause of the youngin's faux pax.
Well, look at it this way: now two of us will never live down the fact that we prefer dog and cat treats to human food.
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| Can you tell the difference? |
The day didn't get better; it was really worse for moi. I had a dental appointment that day. I had chipped a tooth (no, it wasn't from biting into a dog treat) and wanted it fixed. Because it was the tooth next to me insisors, I felt like I looked the hillbilly. The appointment could not come soon enough.
Because of the snowy roads, it took an hour to get to the dentist both ways when it should have been 30 minutes. I arrived in one piece (the roads were terrible) to find that the dental assistant hadn't made it in, so Doctor pulled in his hygienist to help. She hasn't assisted since the 1980s, so it was a trip. We both learned about updated dental procedures together. Doctor painstakingly explained everything he was doing and showed us both how to bond a tooth and everything that goes with that procedure. The result: tooth fixed, and two of us are a lot smarter than before. She has information she can use, and me, with information useless to me unless I decide to enter the dental profession.
Because Mam and Tonya took the kiddos to the sledding hill (a place where the town gathers to sled down hills and dales on a farm that has set aside a piece of its property for such an activity), I volunteered to make dinner. I know what a good husband I be. The kiddos enjoyed the day off, and Tonya and Mam sipped hot chocolate while watching them. Meanwhile . . .
When I got home, I found I didn't have the ingredients for meatloaf, so I made meatballs - lots of them. I figured I'd make a dessert because I was craving sweets; dentist visits always do that to me. I thought I had everything I needed, only to find halfway through the recipe I did not. So I switched to something else, thinking I had everything I needed again, only to find out, NOPE! So I made a disaster cake. I made my own yellow cake mix, which was reduced to using tasteless lard that masquerades as margarine. It seems the butter was used for breakfast by the O'Sullivan army of kiddos. So, God knows what my concoction would taste like.
To top it off, I thought I had spaghetti sauce, only to find the Gober I married had bought 4 jars of pizza sauce! And I would have made my own sauce, but I don't have the f-- ing ingredients for that. I rang Tonya and told her I needed SAUCE, Spaghetti sauce! And in the background, I hear Mam saying pizza sauce is the same as spaghetti sauce, which then led to a back-and-forth argument between her and I that it wasn't and, yes, it was. To make a long stupid argy-bargy short, Tonya picked up a jar of spaghetti sauce, and all was right with Gabe. Me Mam, not so much. I was so tempted to put pizza sauce on her spaghetti, but that would only keep the excitement going. So I refrained, tempting as it was.
Well, turns out the dessert was a keeper. Who knew? I threw all kinds of ingredients in a bowl, blended it, made a cream cheesey topping, and Bob's your uncle dessert ala Gabe. It actually was delicious. They all told me to write the recipe down, but damn, I just threw stuff in so I don't know.
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| Gabe's Disater Cake - yum, yum, tasty, and who knows what's in it! |
Gabe
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