How the Breakfast Went

Baked Eggs in Tomatoes

Of course, it didn't go as smoothly as the recipe made it sound.  It took over an hour to get the eggs to cook.  We also decided that instead of mixing the insides of the tomatoes into the eggs we would just drop a whole egg down into the hollowed tomato, then put some cheese and other things on top of that.  Or put those things down in and then put an egg on top.  That might work out best because then we can judge whether the egg has cooked or not.  The problem with the insides of the tomatoes was they caused the whole thing to be too watery and the eggs didn't appear cooked.  We could save the tomato innards for chilli or pasta sauce.

Living for Me

This weekend, I bought a new refrigerator to go in my bedroom.  It's 3.2 cubic-inches and holds about three times as much food as my previous fridge.  My plan was to feed myself.  I'm quite tired of feeding five lazy people.  I don't mind feeding my parents - they pay almost all of the utilities and the rent and, besides, they fed me.  But every time I go to the grocery store and buy food, it will be eaten within twenty-four hours.  Last weekend my mother bought a pack of twenty Hot Pockets and it was gone by that evening.  I can't afford this any more.  A few weeks ago we came downstairs to breakfast to find my nephew making four subs - two for himself, one for his girlfriend, and one for the kid who slept over the night before.

It's not like we can designate food to people, either.  If my mother buys herself ice cream and tells those people not to eat it because she's treating herself, she better buy a serving she can eat in one sitting because as soon as she goes to bed they are going to eat that ice cream behind her back.  I can't stock up on frozen meals to take to work either because even if I write my name on them in permanent marker they will eat them.  (Or they will microwave them, I will catch them, they will get angry that I'm angry, and they will throw it away saying, "Fine, I won't eat your stupid dinner then.")  Today my father went to get some leftover chilli and when he opened the container someone (read:  my nephew) had decided they didn't want to scoop out a serving into a bowl so they put crackers in the container and then decided they didn't want it anymore, so they just put the lid back on it and walked away.  It was a mushy, disgusting mess and an incredible waste.

I think I've mentioned this before, but I also can't buy food I want to eat because I have to worry about portions that will feed eight people.  I have to buy chicken legs, macaroni and cheese, baked beans, five-pound-packages of hamburger, spaghetti (yuck), white bread, American cheese, tater tots, ground steak patties - this is a weekly list.  We eat those things freaking weekly.  And they must be in constant supply.  I just can't take it.

So tonight, I went to the store and spent way more money than I had intended to fill the new fridge.  But I bought things I want to eat.  I bought bacon-flavored cheese-filled mushrooms, salsa, tortilla chips, gouda cheese, salami, and two kinds of hummus.  I've decided that every paycheck I will buy the ingredients for a recipe, starting with recipes from Martha Stewart's Food Magazine. 

This week's special:  Baked Eggs in Tomatoes.

I will substitute feta cheese for the parmesan, though, because I only like parmesan on pizza, as a substitute for mozzerella (not my favorite).

I'm tired of being so unhappy.  I know they're mad that I've been splurging on myself lately but you know the drill.  Fuck 'em.  They're selfish bastards and they're breeding a selfish bitch in me. 

Ownership

I am so upset right now.  I came home from a crappy day at work to find that my parents, because they couldn't get the internet on my little netbook for a few hours, decided that the problem was the computer needed a complete system restore.  My father - when my mother told him my sister had deleted some games that had been downloaded (without permission), had cleaned and defragmented the hard drive, and nothing had worked - told my mother that he could get the internet back for her.  So, she handed him the machine and he did a system restore. 

He lost everything I had saved on that computer.  He lost files from when I was teaching.  He lost stories I had started.  He lost pictures we had taken of my sister-in-law's mother before she died. 

The worst part?  Remember my post a few weeks back about apologizing?  He's angry at me for getting angry because HE DOES SYSTEM RESTORES ALL THE TIME on his computer and it's fine.  It's how he gets the internet back if it isn't working for a few hours.  EVERY TIME THE INTERNET IS DOWN HE DOES A COMPLETE, BACK-TO-FACTORY-SETTINGS RESTORE. 

He said the computer should have backed up the files automatically.  I said it doesn't do that.  He YELLED at me that he didn't say it did, HE SAID IT SHOULD.  Because his does.  I told him that's because he has Windows 7 and my netbook only has Windows XP.  Did he apologize?  No.  He just kept repeating that he couldn't have known my computer was different than his.  I said he shouldn't have been messing with something that didn't belong to him - especially something that cost as much as that netbook.

I would have been home a few hours later.  Why couldn't they live without the internet for a few hours?  All I needed to do was start the wireless internet service and go to the advanced settings to let Windows reconfigure the wireless signals.  I also pushed my sister for more information on whether she did a defragmentation (which would have taken hours) and she admitted she didn't, because the analysis said she didn't need to.  I said really it had needed it and I had just been planning this morning to do a defragmentation when I got home.  She just shrugged her shoulders. 

This after another day where I was the bad person for getting frustrated when my boss interrupted me at work.  Often, she starts talking to me as soon as I walk in the door.  I can't even put my purse down, or take off my jacket in cold weather.  Today she followed me to the back room and started talking at me about what we were going to do for the day, and I started a sentence and she interrupted me.  I listened to what she said, waited for her to be done talking, waited a beat, started my sentence again, and she interrupted me again.  This time I showed frustration, I think by pursing my lips, and she saw my face and asked if I was mad that she interrupted me.  Instead of answering I just, for a third time, said what I was trying to say and when I was done she just kind of said, "Oh," and walked away and wouldn't talk to me for a while.  I know she's going to say something about how I need to remember our talk about showing patience because interrupting is now a common behavior and I need to understand that I look egotistical when I "can't stand it" that someone has interrupted me.  Except I think it's awfully convenient for her that she gets to excuse her rude behavior and I'm going to be held accountable for feeling frustrated.  She has said that because she doesn't mean to interrupt me, that because she just thinks of something she wants to say and doesn't want to forget it, that that's different than interrupting someone maliciously.  It's not.  Why is her thought that needs to be expressed more important than the other person's thought that needs to be expressed?  That's how she makes me feel - like I'm less important than she is.  The whole day I made a point - a clear point - of not speaking when she was speaking, of looking her straight in the eye and nodding in the appropriate places.  I doubt she'll pick up on the message, though.

So now, when I thought I was going to get home from work a little early and get to relax a little longer, instead I've already been yelled at and I've already spent forty minutes typing this stupid post.  I'll probably end up just crawling into bed.

Random Spewing

A)  My sister no longer has a job.  She injured her foot falling down the basement steps and now needs surgery.  Her workplace will not permit her a leave of absence and will not promise to hold her job for when she returns in, tentatively, two months.  Fine, she can't help any of that.  It isn't her fault she fell down those stairs (I've done it twice).  But it has been a week-and-a-half since she went to work and she has complained about having to do things around the house for those of us who do have jobs.  Right now I work five days a week - all long shifts.  The only other person who has a job is my nephew's girlfriend.  Out of eight people, my parents get retirement checks but don't have to be anywhere, neither of my nephews have school because one is online-schooled and one is twenty-five, and the other girlfriend just graduated from school and for the past year only had to be at school for two hours a day.  And you know what happened today?  My mother told me to make sure I always washed my own dishes because my sister said she wasn't going to wash my dishes.  Fuck her.  She isn't in so much pain she can't do things - she's just fine when she has to go to the tobacco store to get cigarettes rolled or when she goes to spend her $400 support check on junk at Wal-Mart.  I do my own laundry, take care of the phone/cable/internet bill, handle the repairs on the car and put in most of the gas, and buy food that gets eaten within twenty-four hours.  Why can't she wash my, maybe, five dishes I dirty a day?  I usually only eat breakfast and only two or three days a week any other meal, so it's often not even five dishes.  And we have a dishwasher which I normally put my own dishes in.  Why does she get to lay around doing nothing, and her children get to lay around doing nothing, leeching off of my paycheck but refusing to do anything for me?  FUCK.

B)  I'm reading The Beekeeper's Apprentice.  I hope it gets better because I want to slap the narrator, Mary Russell, upside the head.  She's egotistical and pretentious.  I know it's because in the beginning she's a fifteen-year-old girl but that doesn't excuse her tone of voice because a fifteen-year-old girl is not narrating this story.  An adult looking back is narrating.  I'm hoping I'll love the book and her once it becomes more of a mystery, once the Sherlock Holmes inspiration kicks in a little.  But once again, I'm disappointed in a book I've looked forward to for a long time. 

C)  I've made a decision based on this:  now that I have to support said sister above even more than I did before, I won't have very much extra money and so I'm going to have to just rely on random books from the library.  I used to go to the library with all my lists of books and try to find specific books but that's beginning to prove more frustrating because I often end up hating the books I was previously excited by.  So I think I'll try random books again.  I've said before, I think, that I used to pull five random books in a row (well, technically I would pull five random authors in a row) from the shelf and out of those, it would be an even bet that one would be awful, three would be mediocre, and one would be excellent.  That's how I stumbled upon The Descent - a book that is so much more intelligent than that horrible movie supposedly based on it - and The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye.  It's how I found Memoirs of a Geisha before it became a reknowned movie and it's how I read Tom Arnold's autobiography, which is surprisingly funny and interesting.  The thing about it is that if I'm disappointed I won't have wasted money.  It sounds to me like a lot of people are rediscovering the beauty of libraries for various reasons, and this is mine.