Burnin’ down the house

by Jillian @ http://blueshelled.com . September 4, 2010 . 7:03PM

It’s never been a huge secret that I don’t know how to cook. Those that have been my friend or family know that I routinely burn things as simple as soup and popcorn. And yes, I stand beside the microwave while the popcorn is popping and count the pops in my head. It still burns. I also kill plants. It’s amazing to me that I’ve been able to keep my animals alive, let alone my child.

So, a couple weeks ago, I was on a frozen pizza kick. I’d been home more frequently than usual and thanks to Netflix and their amazing instant streaming capabilities, I’ve been watching a lot more television than I normally would. I preheated my oven, stuck in the pizza and waited my 11 minutes.

…

…

At which time smoke started rolling from the oven, the smoke detector started bleating like an angry sheep and my dogs started howling like I’d stuck them all with needles. I’m certain the look on my face was not only sheer panic but also an incredible what the heck is happening to me when I realized that there was literally nothing I could do to stop the noise. It was 99 degrees outside so opening the windows meant undoing what the air conditioning had spent all day doing.

So, I did what any normal person would do. I searched for the batteries, which I couldn’t find. Then, I flapped doors in the house like an angry chicken until, 25 minutes later, the unhappy smoke detector quieted its banshee yell. Then I scraped the black off the bottom of the pizza and got down to business.

I mentioned this to the other adult that lives in my house who laughed and didn’t bother to mention that I could stop the angry noise by holding the button down for two seconds.

Fast forward to the next day where, lo and behold, it was pizza for lunch again! I’d made sure that the pizza stone was clean and ready to go. The oven was clean and there was no way the alarm was going to go off again. I was all ready for a good pizza. No black!

The oven hadn’t even hit 375 when the alarm started shrieking. The dogs started howling. I was a deer in headlights.

I ran into the kitchen and the oven was smoking. I have 9-foot ceilings so my 5’10″ self had to stand on a chair to reach the detector. I twisted and twisted the detector to try to find the batteries at which point the detector sparked and fizzled. Apparently, when they are wired into the ceiling they don’t like to be twisted. When I did this, all the lights in the left quadrant of the house went off.

Well…I stopped the smoke detector. Luckily it was just a broken circuit and the smoke detector is replaceable.

And hey, the pizza came out perfectly.

Someday I’ll learn how to cook. Or maybe just stick with the microwave. But not for popcorn.

Summer : A time for rest and reflection

by Jillian @ http://blueshelled.com . August 25, 2010 . 6:41PM

Some of you, and you know who you are, have been complaining that I haven’t been around.

My bad.

There was a time I wrote in my blog every day. This past summer, however, was a time for me to spend discovering who I have become as an adult and if I am satisfied with myself at the present moment or if I am ready to move forward and become more. Part of my job, that has become a part of who I am, is the ability to assess myself and use that assessment for self-reflection and introspection. It’s constant and consuming and can be overwhelming in both the best and the worst of ways.

Part of writing a blog is understanding and knowing the proper balance of how much to share with people and how much to keep sacred. This summer was pretty sacred for me out of requirement, necessity and propriety. The good news in all of this is that I feel like I have a better understanding of who I am and where I am going. One of the first things I learned in my undergraduate psychology Motivation course was that humans are motivated the most by Fear and Love and if you can combine the two there are few things humans won’t do.

It has been the summer of fear and love and confusion and growth.

I am me, which is more than enough, and I am content with the change and growth that are occurring even when it is scary.

It’s good to be back.

Instant Smile: Just add water

by Jillian @ http://blueshelled.com . July 22, 2010 . 10:38PM

Growing up in the mid-80′s, the slip-n-slide was the hot new thing. It really wasn’t much of anything, to be quite honest. It was a small piece of plastic that you put in between your sprinklers. You would run, slide about 4 feet and roll off into the grass while accruing scrapes, cuts, grass burn and the silliest faces and giggles you’d ever seen from your friends. Then you’d jump up and do it again because it. was. awesome.

I wanted one of those little yellow pieces of plastic more than anything.

Luckily, I lived just down the road from my cousins and their parents were much crazier than mine. Or, it’s quite possible they knew that the secret to peace of mind over that particular summer lay in an enlarged water bill and a little piece of yellow plastic. Either way, my cousins got the slip-n-slide and I got to walk the quarter of a mile to their place every day to bust my butt on the plastic and the hard dirt underneath.

Run Run Run Run Sliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiide YES I’M FLYING NO NO NO I’m rollling! OUCH!

And back in line I’d go. And don’t think it was a short line. I wasn’t the only kid who knew about my cousin’s slip-n-slide. We lived in the country and the neighbor kids heard. So did their parents, and their parents weren’t going to pony up for a slip-n-slide or a water bill either. We’d dutifully get in line about ten kids back until we bled enough that it just stung too much to go again that day.

Nowadays, oh how old I feel saying nowadays, nowadays, the slip-n-slide has become so fancy! You can slide into a pool! The piece of plastic is HUGE and there are safeguards for those wimpy kids who care about bleeding. On the 4th of July, I found out exactly how intricate the whole slip-n-slide industry had become.

In Nashville on the 4th, our downtown area is amazing. Truly an amazing sight to behold is the area by the river that just lights up with booths of any kind of food you’d like, booths where you can buy the coolest hats on earth and a whole street dedicated to the littlest cowboys and cowgirls in the city.

As jets flew over the city celebrating our Independence, we walked around with bottled water and looked to see what was happening in our fair land. My little sister marveled at the cute boys. My mom wanted to go see what was going on down by the river. And me? I kept getting pulled towards these huge inflatable bouncy things, as all moms do.

After getting a stamp on his hand that made all the rides FREE, AJ was off. One of the first few rides to catch his eye was a large slip-n-slide. When I say slip-n-slide, I don’t mean one close to the ground. This inflatable wonder was about 4 feet off the ground and looked like a long island. Kids would run and jump UP onto it where sprinklers would shoot down onto them for about 20 feet. The line was short, but the joy was long.

I stood by the end and watched as child after child, including my own, jumped onto it and laughed themselves silly. It’s not been a great summer by any standards, but I couldn’t stop laughing along with them. The thing about joy is that it is utterly contagious. Some would jump up there, realize “OH NO THERE IS WATER UP HERE” and try to get down until mom or dad would take their hand and then lead them through the slide. After which, they would cry to go back on. There was a devilish little thing, who couldn’t have been more than three, who would go through the whole thing, slam his body down to the concrete after he got done, like the hulk, and give devil hands. I’m not kidding. Just like the orange ones to the right. He was totally “rock and roll” about the slide. And AJ? AJ would run, jump, slide, fall on his bottom, laugh and do it over and over again. He probably did it 30 times. I laughed just as hard as he did every time.

Yes, children are amazing and sometimes the smallest things in life are a recipe for joy. Just add water.