Some Lessons You Just Have to Learn the Hard Way

As most of you know, my hubby and I are homeschooling our two little girlies. We also homeschooled our two grown children way back in the day.

In addition to scholastic knowledge, we have also striven to teach our children life skills like managing money, making wise purchases, how to care for a home and how to cook. Unfortunately, it appears that some of these lessons didn't "take", if you know what I mean. This is because adult children stubbornly insist on learning things the hard way.

Take Funsocksgirl, for instance. She managed to learn to do a bit of baking, but most of the rest of our cooking lessons seemed to...............well, here. See for yourself.

Here's a slightly edited portion of an email she just sent me:

My brother-in-law and wife gave us some of the venison from their freezer (he got two deer last year) so on a day i can't remember in the not-so-distant past i decided to make some of it up and we had dad over for dinner (mom is in colorado with her sister). i learned some new things about meat which grossed me out and shocked me greatly. for instance, thawed venison is bloody. oh my gosh, i almost threw up...it was gross, sitting there in its own bloody pool and i hadn't even unwrapped or touched it yet. with plastic baggies on my hands i freed it from the paper it was wrapped in, only gagging twice as i threw the dripping bloody paper in a bag. then i had to cut it up some, which i did carefully while looking in another direction. the cuts were sloppy, but i still have all my fingers. i would just like to say again how gross and unnecessary all that blood was. how dare it bleed so profusely! it had been dead and frozen for a long time, which in my mind meant that all of the blood should have magically disappeared.

then i used the broiler. first off i didn't know we had a broiler and i surely didn't know what it was. secondly it took me a while to figure out which pan we had was actually a 'broiler pan'. (that betty crocker cookbook is sooo handy at explaining things) so finally i slabbed some gross chunks of raw venison on the broiler pan and broiled away. this led to another shocking discovery: meat shrinks when you cook it. what?! i've somehow missed that completely during other cooking ventures and was quite disappointed. i mean, i thought i had enough meat in the first place, but now it was all shrunk down and looked like not nearly enough...but it was. we chowed on mr. deer with lemon/green onion/parsely/pepper butter like betty crocker told me to make and it was surprisingly (for me) quite tasty and not a disaster.

It was her first big meat adventure and I'm so proud of her for pulling it off with edible results. Sometimes the school of life really pays off! :-D

Rrrrrrr Reminds Me of...

Silly-Head: You know, whenever I hear about Rhode Island I think of that witch.

Groovy Mom: Huh? Which witch?

Silly-Head: That one in Narnia.

Groovy Mom: Ok...um, and why is that?

Silly-Head: Because she says, "This is the R-r-r-r-r-ruined city" and Rhode Island and Ruined City both start with R.

Groovy Mom: Of course.

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Well, I never did get to assemble the file cabinet (though I'll go on and let Angry think I did assemble the fridge). I have this habit of starting things and not finishing them right off. So I laid out all the pieces and started putting the sides together and...well...got distracted.

Distraction Happens.

Fortunately, I am married to Let's-get-this-DONE Mulletman. Yesterday I went downstairs to put some recycling in the bins and found him sitting on the floor pushing the finished drawers into the completed cabinet.

Three cheers for Mulletman!

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I STILL love my fridge. However, Mulletman is not as crazy about it. This is because he is tall and cannot see what is on any of the shelves.

Apparently the food items have opinions too. There's plenty of room for everyone inside to have their space; You'd think they'd be satisfied, but No-oo.

Yesterday there was blood. It seems the dill pickles and the maraschino cherries had a squabble when I wasn't looking. Suddenly there were rivulets of disgusting, red, stickiness oozing under the door of the fridge and pooling on the floor. The cherries lost, a fact attested to by the shards of broken glass on the new shelf.



We will now observe a moment of silence in honor of our dear, departed cherries.



The pickles tried to look innocent, but I know better. They're a bunch of sour pusses and can't be expected to behave properly. I punished them by placing them on the bottom door shelf next to the plastic bottles where they can't hurt anyone else.

I spent the rest of the morning mopping up cherry blood!

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Well, my asthma has been particularly bad the past few days. This is a reminder to me to remind you to DONATE TO MY AND/OR MULLETMAN'S TREK ACROSS MAINE FUND FOR THE ALAME. (See my sidebar!)

Thank you!