I've always been the sort that tends towards massive overkill. So when my wife made up the grocery list for the next week and we had need of half a pound of cooked chicken for one of the recipes, I thought the most sensible thing to do would be to buy a whole chicken. Early Sunday afternoon, I had dropped the chicken in the slow cooker on high. By six-thirty the meat was so tender that it was dripping off of the bones. I picked the skin off, deboned the flesh, cut off enough meat to drop into my currying potatoes that had been simmering for two hours, set aside enough for the recipe to come, set aside still more for the girls to eat at lunchtime and put the skin and bones back into the Crock Pot™ with a couple quarts of water to make chicken stock.
After a few lazy hours of various games, Homeless Lass took youngest daughter down to the park and eldest daughter took off to a friend's house to spend the night. Shortly afterwards, Upstairs Girl1 and her husband stopped by. They'd arrived back in town from a three week trip to Moldova the night before. And like good friends, they came bearing gifts. For my wife and I they brought back brandy and merlot. They brought back some hand made flutes for our girls and some slippers for Homeless Lass. They ended up staying for dinner and partaking of my chicken curry.
After dinner and ice cream, our friends left and Homeless Lass, my wife and I watched Primer. It was a very deliberately paced movie and difficult to follow. It gets high marks from me for being one of the few movies that deals with changing the past without changing the future. If I understood the movie correctly, they followed the theory where time forks into multiple futures. The acting was good. The writing less so. While they had some of the best depictions of engineers and scientists that I've seen in a film, it was hard to care about the protagonists and difficult to follow the plot.
After my wife gave up trying to follow rudimentary time travel theory on how to make multiple sets of the same individuals through time travel, she went to bed. I tried out the Moldovan brandy which did wonders for my back. My back doesn't precisely hurt, but it is stiff. Eventually I clocked out of IRC and flopped into bed.
Eventually morning came by on a leisurely stroll and I met the brightness of the sun with a spring in my step. A touch of leftover chicken curry for breakfast, then youngest daughter and I made up a Watering Can of Death to pour onto the weeds growing out of our driveway. If I weren't so lazy, I'd take pictures of the results: dried out, wilting weeds just a few hours later. After my wife woke up, youngest daughter and I walked the half mile to the grocery store for peanut butter, oatmeal, baking powder, sugar and apples.
And then we made chocolate chip cookies. And they were good.
1Not to be confused with MillMan's Upstairs Girl who is a completely different animal. I believe that my use of `Upstairs Girl' as a moniker precedes MillMan's , but I'm not altogether certain. I think my usage dates to when Upstairs Girl first started renting an upstairs spare bedroom in the house we lived in prior to buying the duplex we currently live in where Upstairs Girl and her husband rent out the upstairs apartment. But it could be the case that I've ungratefully stolen the moniker from MillMan. I may very well be misremembering that I've ever referred to the young woman that rents upstairs from my wife and I as Upstairs Girl before being exposed to MillMan's usage of said term.
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