Acronyms

So I recently came across this acronym: SAHM (Stay at Home Mom). Why do people need to have a special acronym to describe their home/life activities? Anyway, I've decided the acronym for my life right now is SAHL (Stay at Home Loser).

Yesterday, while feeling bummed out about the whole job thing, I went downstairs to make dinner. First of all, I've never been good at cooking (nor do I even like cooking), but as a SAHL I feel it's the least I can do to contribute. We decided on stir fry for dinner - easy enough. But when I went to pour some rice into our automatic rice cooker - it looked a little strange to me. However, I thought, 'I'm just feeling funky and there's nothing wrong with it' and so I continued to pour the water in.

A few seconds later after the water came oozing out the bottom through all the electrical circuits, I realized what I'd done. Sitting over on the dish rack was the insert that goes inside the rice cooker to cook the rice and prevent such a catastrophe. Arghhhh! Thinking I could fix it, I tried to get all the rice and water out and go through with using the cooker (my husband Gene was upstairs and I figured if I could get it all out he would never know what a stupid thing I did).

After much shaking, I felt I'd gotten most of the rice out. I also opened up the bottom and dried out the electrical items as much as I could. Then I started it cooking. Even with my efforts, with the amount of rice I'd poured into the machine (two cups), it was inevitable that there was still some rice inside So, as the cooker heated up, the hot plates, etc. began cooking the rice from the inside out, causing a steady stream of smoke to pour out of the top.

I turned on the stove fan and the kitchen fan and opened all the windows hoping, at this point, to at least salvage dinner out of the disaster. While fanning the smoke, I watched and waited for the rice to finish cooking and for the switch to flip up from "Cook Rice" to "Keep Warm," but it never did. Finally, I realized there was a tiny piece of rice stuck in the flipper mechanism preventing it from popping up. Meanwhile, the rice had continued to cook past well-done, creating even more smoke.

In the end I was able to salvage a small amount of rice for our dinner. Clearing out the smoke from the kitchen as best I could, I called Gene down to eat. The first thing he did when he entered the room was squint his eyes, cough and look over at my stir fry veggies (which were also a bit overcooked by this point).

"Well, I f*&$-ed up," I said.

He continued to stare at my brownish vegetables. "I messed up the rice," I said.

"What'd you do, pour it straight into the machine?"

"Yeah - how'd you know?"

"You did? I was kidding! That's about the only way I could think of to screw up cooking rice with a rice cooker..."

Luckily he was very nice about the whole thing and only beat me once. j/k Anyway, just had to throw that bit of idiocy out there and see if anyone wanted a bite of it to help take away the sting (and have a little laugh at my silly SAHL self).

Did I mention I also broke the Crock Pot awhile back?