thelittlezoo.com

Hannah and I went into the kitchen tonight to make a big pile of mini-cupcakes for Grandma’s 85th birthday celebration tomorrow evening. As we were mixing the batter up, she carried on a running commentary about how we had to make the cupcakes. It reminded me of a “cookbook” that my brother’s teacher in elementary school (Kindergarten? Possibly First grade) put together for all the parents. She had each student dictate to her how to prepare their favorite dish and it was hilarious. Because we’re going to be homeschooling, Hannah won’t be a part of a classroom doing that project, so I decided to do it myself.

How to make cupcakes, according to Hannah, soon to be 5 years old

Ok, you use 3 eggs. One, two, three. And 2 cups of oil. And 1 cup and 3 cups and 2 cups of water. And… what was the next part again? Oh, yeah. And then you go around and around with the thing zhzhzhzhzhz (whirring sounds) and spin the bowl.

Then you put ‘em in the oven and put them in a pan so they can’t fall down. AND set a timer for a half of a minute. Then take ‘em out and let ‘em cool down. I can’t remember what comes after that.

A couple hours ago the power went out and right back on again. Normally it wouldn’t bother me one bit, because my computer is on a battery back-up surge protector. In fact, it’s triple surge protected. The battery back-up is plugged into a grounded/surge protecting wall plug, and the computer itself is plugged into a surge protector that’s plugged into the battery back-up.

So when the computer actually shut down in the momentary power outage (literally off and back on again), I kind of flipped out. See, Saturday we had lightning hit right outside the house, shutting off the power for a second, and it even shook the house. I thought a car ran into the house or the transformer outside, it was so big. I had to push the power button on the battery back-up after that, and it’s been working fine ever since. So why did it go off suddenly when the power went off today?

I got down on the floor to turn the battery back-up back on, pushed the power button and waited. It flickered on, beeped, shut itself off and started a long steady beep. Yikes! Fiddled with it some more, still no luck.

Long story short, I ended up calling our upline in our business, who happens to be a computer tech type guy, and he looked up my battery back-up model online and told me where to find the reset button, which I hadn’t noticed because it’s small, flush against the side of the unit, and it was in shadow when I looked the first time.  That finally worked and got things working again, thank goodness. I suppose I could have plugged directly into the wall, but I like having that battery back-up in case of power outages.

My Grandpa Shaver was a terrible tease. My Dad is a terrible tease. Charlie’s Grandpa was a tease, too. All of them to the point of being pestiferous. So I guess it shouldn’t come as a surprise, coming down from both genetic trees, to find that Hannah is a pestiferous tease, too.  She’s always teasing about something - keeping a toy out of Sarah’s reach, etc.

I’m in the middle of counting last week’s Church offering. Yes, I had to stop mid-count and blog this. I had a handful of one dollar bills and was silently counting them as I transferred them one at a time from one hand to the other.

Suddenly, Hannah says from behind me “87, 16, 9, 11, 18…”.

I turned and looked and she’s standing there looking at me with a mischievous smirk on her face. That little stinker knew exactly what she was doing!

And yes, I had to start over.

We just finished watching a Tom & Jerry cartoon.  When it ended, Hannah started sniffling and wiped away an imaginary tear.

“I just love happy endings.”