Savannah Lee

I accidentally dropped my kid's clean clothes into the wash and, 15 minutes before she had to leave for school, she had nothing to wear.

While she was running around trying to find something anyhow, I turned my attention to getting dinner into the slow cooker. (Dumping the wrong armful of clothes into the laundry had put me behind schedule, you see.)

So I took the lid off the slow-cooker, unwrapped the meat, picked it up, and...saw that the tip of it had gone bad and I was going to have to cut it off. This being a bit problematic because I hadn't gotten out a cutting board or anything, had no other place to put the meat, and did not want to just shift it to one hand and use my other raw-meat-imprinted one to open the cabinet and reach in for the board.

But there was no one to help me, my husband being outside trying to fix the windshield wipers on his car. Which, he had discovered ten minutes earlier, were broken.

What did I have to work with? Well, I had the meat tray, which was flapping bloody plastic wrap and broken in one place. Okay, better than nothing. I retrieved it from the garbage and slid it gingerly onto the counter not quite far enough for the bloody plastic wrap to touch anything. Set the roast in, grabbed our good knife (the one that's actually sharp) and...no. Could not cut the tip off.

This rattled me. It should have been easy. But there was gristle everywhere and the knife couldn't seem to get through it.

My husband stuck his head in the door. "I'm not done with the windshield. You have to take [child] to school."

Argh! No! Now I had no more time! Now I had to grab my keys and get her in my car in the next two minutes or we'd be late.

Even more rattled than before, I got stupider. The question "What am I going to do?" took on the sinister invincibility of the military-industrial complex.

But look! There's that big microwave bowl, sitting on the counter! I can stuff the roast in there and kind of get its end down flat and THEN I can hack off the tip totally immediately and run for the car.

Yeah, no. Gristle everywhere, and the knife kept glancing off it instead of slicing through it.

Maturely and with Zenlike calm, I expressed my cosmic acceptance of this turn of events by flinging the uncooperative roast right in the trash. That'll teach it to not let me cut it in a bowl!

(Folks, remember that I'm a professional. Do not attempt this level of self-indulgence at home.)

Husband again, in the doorway. "When you get back, we have to go to the auto-repair shop."

Daughter: "MOM!! I don't have any socks EITHER!!"

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It went on from there, you know. One of us cried. One of us fell on the ice. One of us, seven minutes before a freelance interview, discovered that her headset was missing.

And there's going to be snow. Did you know that? We don't need more, in case you were wondering. But we're going to get it.

I gotta go buy some dinner for tonight. See you later.