Well! We listed our old house for sale, had thirty-five showings plus an open house the realtor described as “slammed,” got seven offers (five of which were above asking price), and accepted one of the offers—all within three-and-a-half days. We are feeling pretty satisfied with our realtor’s “Do nothing to fix it up, underprice it, and sell it fast” plan.

Now we are in the part where it’s too early to celebrate because it could still fall through between now and closing, but we are tentatively feeling good—and if the sale DOES fall through, it’s nice to know there were so many other people interested and we could probably get another offer.

I am a little sad about one offer we didn’t take. It was lower than the offer we accepted, but it was a family with four little kids and two dogs (I snooped them on Facebook), and my fervent wish has been that the house would go to a family with lots of kids, perhaps a family that was priced out of the current housing market but COULD afford our underpriced house and was not too fussed about the cosmetic issues. (That was the very thing that happened when WE bought that house: it was the only way we could afford a house at all.) But they were going to get an FHA loan, and our realtor told us our house would not be approved for that loan unless we fixed it up more, and we really did not want to fix it up more. And then as it turned out the offer we accepted went even higher, widening the gap between the two offers to the point where even “but a FAMILY!!” wouldn’t have made it justifiable. So there is no reason to still be feeling a little regretful, but I am.

On the happy side, the house is going to someone who wants to live there herself, and perhaps she will soon add children and dogs. She specifically mentioned the great backyard in her offer, which seems promising. I’d feared we would only get offers from developers/flippers—not that that would be terrible, especially if it was a GOOD flipper who did nice work, but I was worried the house would be bulldozed. We did get one offer from someone planning to tear it down, but it was a low bid, much lower than asking. Again, nice to know that offer EXISTS, in case inspection shows something impossible that means the house NEEDS to be torn down (this is very unlikely, but that doesn’t stop me from fretting about it, apparently)—but happier to me that it went to someone who plans to live there herself. I hope she is feeling happy and excited right now, rather than wondering what she’s gotten herself into, and I hope she will love the house, and I am fantasizing that she is handy and will gradually go through the house fixing it up, whistling happily and maybe being more decisive/adventurous than I was with paint colors.

One problem with a blog is that it makes it so historically, documentedly, provably clear to others if someone is a person who gets all in a tizz over relatively insignificant things, and then later barely remembers it. The upside is that this does partly help the person in question to think more sensibly about whatever the current tizz is, if only to avoid embarrassment later on.

The current situation: William has three college acceptances. He is able to attend two of the Accepted Student Days, but not the third. The one he can’t go to is, unfortunately, one of the two frontrunners. We have been to the Accepted Student Day for the other frontrunner, and I found it extremely helpful, and it changed my opinion about the schools and how I’d rank them, and William said he was glad we’d gone. I keep getting stuck trying to mentally solve the puzzle of “How can he attend all three?,” when the solution to the puzzle is that he cannot.

The Tizz: THIS AFFECTS HIS ENTIRE FUTURE LIFE. THREE FATES AWAIT HIM, AND TWO WILL GET AN UNFAIR ADVANTAGE. OR POSSIBLY DISADVANTAGE, I DON’T EVEN KNOW!!

The Sensible: Rob didn’t go to ANY Accepted Student Days. He didn’t even visit all the schools in the first place.

The Tizz: AND MAYBE AS A RESULT HE CHOSE THE WRONG SCHOOL!

The Sensible: You just said you don’t know if it’s even BETTER or WORSE to attend an Accepted Student Day.

The Tizz: So it should at least be fairrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!!!

The Sensible: Is it possible you are concentrating all the parental stress of this decision and of Your Baby Going To College into an inflated view of the importance of this one event which is, let’s look it in the face, a sales pitch?

The Tizz: *incoherent wailing*

The Sensible: Do you even really care which of the two frontrunners he attends?

The Tizz: BUT HE CAN’T GO TO BOTH ACCEPTED STUDENT DAYS AND THREE PATHS OF FATE DIVERGING AND WHAT IF IT MAKES A DIFFERENCE AND HE CHOOSES THE WRONG SCHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL

The Sensible: You like all three schools and so does he, and there is literally no way to see the future and know which is the best decision, so what does this even matter?

The Tizz: *tries again to make it possible to be simultaneously in two places at once*

I am finally watching Schitt’s Creek. I was glad I’d heard that the first season was a little patchy, quality-wise; I’d also heard just the right amount of hype about the rest of it: enough to motivate me to watch, but not enough to be impossible for it to live up to. I have finished the first season and like it enough to make me enthusiastic to watch more. I loved Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara already, and now I also love Daniel Levy and Emily Hampshire and Annie Murphy and a whole bunch of other people.

William has gotten back acceptances/rejections from all but one of the colleges he applied to, so we are nearly in the stage where we have to look the finalists over and make a decision. He seems very cranky and tense lately, and I don’t know how much of it is about this, and how much of it is about being 18 and staying up too late and then oversleeping and having to rush around in the morning in a huge panic and then blaming his younger siblings for being in his way by existing. He sure seems a lot more comfortable swearing in front of parents than I was as a high school student. Or even than I am now.

Do you remember last year, my desperate quest to find Brach’s Marshmallow Eggs? I still have more than a full bag of those left from last year; it turns out I wanted to eat about three eggs total and then I was done, possibly permanently. However, during that quest I impulsively acquired a bag of Brach’s Jellybean Nougats, and those were a much bigger success: I ate them all and looked forward to getting more this year. (I’m not saying they’re not kind of gross, I am only saying I ate them all and looked forward to getting more.) AND THEN I COULD NOT FIND THEM. I went to the same Walgreens where I found them last year, and they did not have them. I used the product finder on the Brach’s site, and it said they were not available anywhere near me. (I did find them on Amazon, but with very mixed reviews.) But then my friend Morgan, who has a knack for finding things other people are looking for, found them at a different Walgreens, so I am going over there today to buy half a dozen bags—or maybe in light of the Marshmallow Egg Situation it would be more sensible to buy one bag and see how it goes.

I bought these wee little flower spoons and I love them:

(image from Amazon.com)

They are VERY SMALL. I knew from the reviews that they would be small, and I’d looked at a ruler to make sure I knew how small, but if I had not done both of those things I think I would have been quite surprised by how small. They are the right size for putting like half a teaspoon of sugar into a teacup, but they are pretty short if you wanted to stir sugar into a coffee mug—and they are kind of shallow for transporting even a small amount of sugar without spilling. Really they are not at all practical. Here is one of the wee little flower spoons in a line-up with a measuring teaspoon, a toddler spoon, a regular flatware spoon, and a flatware soup spoon:

I use them every day, because one of the kids needs a daily dose of a medicine that gets stirred into a small cup of juice; he loves these spoons, and is picky about whether the medicine is fully stirred-in or not, so I leave the spoon in the cup for him to appreciate and use.

I woke up this morning and hopped cheerfully out of bed, in a really good mood already because of the good thing / good news. By the time I was getting into the shower, it was getting perplexing that I couldn’t remember exactly/specifically what the good thing/news was, or even what category of thing it was (something fun happening today? someone getting married or having a baby? the satisfying resolution of something stressful? did William get good college news? am I leaving on a road trip? is there cake?), but I knew it would come to me soon, and then I’d feel so silly for temporarily forgetting! Now that I am up and I’ve had my coffee, it seems as if the good thing/news must have been part of a dream.

But I was so SURE, when I woke up, that there was something happy and energizing going on! It didn’t FEEL like part of a dream; it felt like “Oh good, I’m awake, and now there is the happy thing to contend with!” And I was so relieved and glad to be waking up happy, because the last few days have been enormously stressful and sad: we finally listed our old house, and I am not coping well, and there is a fair amount of crying by someone, and I am wishing that I could go somewhere that would put me in a medically-induced sleep until it was over, and every morning I have woken up and been immediately slammed with adrenaline and stress as soon as I remember. So THIS morning was such a nice break! Except now I am more concerned about the state of my mind! Because that was really strange! There was nothing good to leap out of bed for, but I hallucinated something!

I’m glad to be getting coffee with a friend later this morning, because that is a good way to hit the mental reset button. And this particular friend is a sensible, confident person, married to a man who is more like me, fretful and anxious, so she is accustomed to dealing with little spin-outs. Plus, sitting in a coffee/pastry shop for a couple of hours makes me smell DELICIOUS.

I recently took two fun road trips, one to pick up Rob from college for spring break, and one to return him to college afterward. It’s the perfect length for a drive: about 8 hours each way including stops. That’s far enough to justify staying in a motel in between, and I love staying in motels.

Except this time I did not. I felt weird and paranoid and unsettled, starting during dinner and lasting throughout the evening, and when I was supposed to be sleeping I was instead having distressing irrational thoughts such as “What if William slipped and fell on his way home from work, and Paul went to bed early without noticing that he never came home, and he’s out in the dark freezing to death right now???” Fortunately I have a prescription to use for things like this, so I took half a tablet as prescribed, and it did nothing. I took the other half, and it did nothing. For a couple of hours I tried various things to avoid lying in the dark imagining how I’d get everyone out of the house if there were a fire: I put the TV on a soothing channel; I turned the room fan to various temperatures/settings; I put on soothing music; I played Candy Crush while lying down; I counted backwards from 10,000 by threes. Finally I did fall asleep, but it was so disappointing to have wasted a motel room like that.

Because of a complication that is too boring to explain, I also stayed in a motel the next night. This time I was prepared, and took Benadryl awhile before bedtime (Benadryl always knocks me out), and was careful not to eat too many snacks too late in the evening, and I thought it would help that I’d slept poorly the night before—but I STILL had the weird/paranoid/irrational thing happen, and had a lot of trouble sleeping.

I wonder if it’s that I have plenty of time on my own now. When I used to fantasize about motel rooms, it was at least in part because I had children with me ALL THE TIME: the constant noise! the constant touching! the constant needs! the constant mess! A motel room seemed like an oasis of quiet and clean and alone. But now everyone’s in school during the day and I have large daily doses of alone time. That may have shifted the whole motel thing around, so that now being alone/quiet doesn’t feel so exhilarating. Maybe now what I need is a party cruise or something.

When I brought Rob back at the end of the week, I asked Elizabeth if she wanted to go with us, and she did. That changed the WHOLE DYNAMIC. After we dropped Rob off, she and I went to Target to get more Pringles for the drive home (we were perilously low), and then we went out to dinner. We got back to the motel room at about 6:30, decided it was too early to be back at the motel, and went out to a couple of stores where we bought a mouse-shaped planter (Elizabeth), a pretty green cocktail glass (me), and more junk food (both). We returned to the hotel between 8:00 and 8:30, changed into our pjs, and each made a nest of snacks and phones and pillows on our respective queen-sized beds. We watched Trading Spaces, which I hadn’t seen in years and Elizabeth had never seen (Elizabeth: “That is a BAD PLAN.” “WHY WOULD THEY DO THAT.” “Who ARE these people??”) and then we were channel-flipping and found the 2016 Ghostbusters movie and watched the middle section of that while playing games on our phones and eating snacks.

We had a great time. Plus, this meant I had someone to play “Pop Song or CHRISTIAN Pop Song?” with in the car on the way there AND on the way back: I can play that game alone, but I’m so good at it and prefer to have someone along to be impressed. At home I have all my radio stations pre-set so I never end up accidentally listening to a Christian station, but road trips are FULL of such misunderstandings. “Whenever I am in doubt…” the singer sings, and I say “It’s Christian,” and the child says, “What? Why?,” and I shrug humbly. I know I am right, before we even get to the part where they sing something more obvious like “…the glory of your kingdom…” or “…give my heart to you, O Lord,” or make some reference to pastures/shepherds/sacrifices/sins/purifying.

The best ones are when we really can’t tell, and then it takes a twist that would be horrifying in a pop song and so it is abruptly and startlingly clear it is a Christian song. Like, the song goes “No one has ever loved me like you do,” and that’s nice, and then it goes “You have all my love,” and that’s nice and you hope this nice couple will have a happy life together, and then it goes to “I am washed clean in your blood” and !!!!! And the children have not grown up with this kind of talk as I did, so it sounds even more thrillingly shocking to them.

I have told this story to three family members so far, and all three of them found it boring. But the situation was so temporarily MYSTIFYING, I cannot suppress the desire to continue to tell the story.

First you need backstory about my socks. (Hang in there.) In winter, I wear a pair of regular socks, and then a pair of thin wool socks over the regular socks. Then shoes. I put them on in this order: one regular sock, one wool sock, one shoe; other regular sock, other wool sock, other shoe. (“I like to take care of one foot at a time!”)

Because the wool socks aren’t against my skin, and because I have only two pairs of them, I usually re-wear them several times before putting them in the laundry, changing only the regular socks. I don’t usually wear the wool socks at night, though I occasionally do. When I take the wool socks off, I put them into the bin of shoes at the foot of my bed. (I am sorry that the foot of a bed is involved in this story; it seems unnecessarily confusing with all the other foot/feet references.)

Also, you should know that my regular socks are mostly different. That is, I have a pair of purple socks, a pair of brown-and-cream-striped socks, a pair of navy blue socks, a pair of grey socks with yellow toes and a yellow stripe, etc. There are some duplicates (I really like the grey ones with yellow toes/stripe so I bought another pair the next time I was at the store; the brown-and-cream-stripe ones were on a good clearance so I bought a couple of pairs), but mostly it’s a variety. I pick whatever pair looks best with that day’s shirt/sweater.

Okay, you did a good job listening to all that. Here is what happened: Yesterday I put on a regular sock, a wool sock, a shoe; then I put on the second regular sock, reached for the second wool sock—and found a regular sock that matched the other two regular socks.

First I assumed I must have put two wool socks on the first foot. But I checked, and no: I had one regular sock and one wool sock. Then I thought I must have put a wool sock on my second foot instead of a regular sock. But I checked, and no: I had a regular sock on. I looked again at the spare regular sock. Really, it felt to me like the beginning of a movie where there is some sort of glitch in reality. Like next the time travelers would come bursting through a wall.

This is the part where Paul said I had built up enough mystification and I could get to the part where I told him the solution, but I declined to skip anything, just as I decline to skip anything now. Because there was MORE CHECKING, and I feel that is relevant to the story. I checked my first foot again, in case I had had a mental lapse and not seen the socks correctly, but no: regular sock plus wool sock. I checked my second foot again: regular sock. I checked the remaining sock again: regular sock. I PINCHED each sock with my fingers to MAKE SURE each one was the material I thought it was. It COULD NOT BE that I had three regular socks and one wool sock, and yet that was what I had.

I thought perhaps I had somehow ended up with a third regular sock but ALSO had two wool socks. If I found the second wool sock, I could believe a reality where I had a third regular sock: perhaps it fell out of the laundry basket while I was doing laundry, for example. I checked the shoe bin: no wool sock. I checked the bed around me: no wool sock. I stood up to check under where I was sitting: no wool sock. I checked the floor all around the foot of the bed and shoe bin: no wool sock.

The part of this story that remains interesting to ME is how thoroughly derailing this was. I couldn’t think of a solution to this mystery, and it made me feel like something was wrong with my brain. Reality was clearly broken in some way, either externally or internally. It’s not that the socks were so important (it isn’t as if I woke up in a house I didn’t recognize, or discovered I was married to a different person), but a wool sock apparently turning into a regular sock still seemed QUITE IMPORTANT.

Well, I will tell you the solution now, because of course there was one. This was one of those situations where there were TWO things that went wrong, which is why it was so hard to solve—like when the checkbook won’t balance and it’s because there’s a missing item AND you accidentally wrote $101.34 instead of $101.43, so the two errors combine to make something almost impossible to figure out with the usual little checkbook-balancing tricks such as looking for an amount that matches (or doubles, or halves) the difference between the two end amounts. Anyway: (1) I’d worn the wool socks to bed the night before, which was unusual. (2) AND that morning I coincidentally chose a pair of regular socks that was a duplicate of the regular socks I’d worn the previous day, which was unlikely.

When I got out of bed, I intended to take off my doubled socks and put the regular ones in the laundry and the wool ones in my shoe bin; instead I put one regular sock and one wool sock into the laundry, and one regular sock and one wool sock into my shoe bin. Then I took a shower. Then, when I was getting dressed, I chose a pair of regular socks that were the same as the previous day’s socks. And I took the two socks out of my shoe bin without looking at them carefully. So then I had (1) one regular sock from the previous day, (2) one wool sock from the previous day, (3) two regular socks from the current day, which coincidentally matched the regular sock from the previous day. If I’d chosen a DIFFERENT pair of socks, and so had had two brown regular socks and one purple regular sock, I think I would have figured things out sooner. OR if my wool socks weren’t a brown similar to the regular socks, I might have noticed when I took the two socks out of the shoe bin.

Until this morning, I had not shaved my legs in over three months. Closer to four months. This was the first time I’d ever stopped shaving my legs: I started shaving at around age 12, the day a cute boy swam underwater at the pool and grabbed my ankle, and there have been only brief pauses since. Like, I would go a week, sure. But I never Stopped Shaving until around November of last year when the stresses involved in moving from one house to another, combined with feeling as if I could not handle even one more unnecessary chore, combined with spending the last few years being particularly pissed about the patriarchy, combined with resenting my own personal white male husband for feeling free to make this move despite my misery, combined with being freezing all the time in the new house—all of these things led to a shaving cessation that was at first accidental and then became increasingly deliberate.

Like, at first I just had skipped shaving for a few days because I was busy and stressed. Then it had been a couple of weeks because I was feeling sad and was looking for all the small ways to Do Less. I’m not sure when it switched to being more of a stance/experiment/THING. There was a longish prickly stage, but at a certain point all the leg hair had grown out, and it was surprising to me how soft/unnoticeable it was in FEEL. I could certainly SEE it, and my legs looked unfamiliar to me, and I didn’t like the look—but the hair was very soft and fairly straight, and my legs didn’t FEEL hairy or coarse like guys’ legs do. And I did think it might actually make me warmer, since that is what body hair is FOR.

And also: I was feeling a fair amount of rage on the topic of MEN AND THEIR OPINIONS ABOUT WOMEN’S BODIES, so that was motivating. I should say here that Paul has never said a single word about women’s body hair, nor has he indicated with so much as a glance that he even HAS an opinion, nor did he comment on the leg hair experiment and I’m not sure he even noticed. BUT MEN IN GENERAL.

Then it got to the point where I felt almost like I couldn’t start shaving again, even if I wanted to: it was like when you grow your head-hair long and then you get tired of it and/or remember all the reasons you don’t wear your hair long, but now it feels like you can’t cut it or you’ll lose all that time/progress. Or like when you grow out bangs: there’s a hurdle to get over, and once you’ve suffered through that hurdle, it feels wrong to reset the situation. On the other hand, I didn’t like the way my legs looked, and I DID want to start shaving again before warmer weather, so it was only a matter of choosing WHEN. I picked up a razor now and then, but each time put it back down.

The last week or so I’ve been feeling more as if the only thing stopping me was the feeling of Investment: I didn’t want the leg hair anymore, and wasn’t having fun with the experiment anymore. I gave it time (we still have more winter to shiver through) but this morning I’d had enough and I picked up the razor and I’m back to patriarchy legs. They really do feel chillier.

Do you remember long ago, when I posted a venting post about the Crazy Cake that is so beloved in Paul’s family? It is a Depression Era cake, and so it contains no eggs, no butter, and only one tablespoon of baking cocoa per entire layer of “chocolate” cake. (Those quotation marks are just as bitchy as you imagine.)

Trust me that I know and understand that a Beloved Family Recipe can taste DELICIOUS to a person, even if it has no butter and no eggs and features a Depression-Era skimp on cocoa. (And of course it is LOVELY to have a cake option like this if you are looking for a dairy/egg-free cake for allergy reasons, though I’d advise DRAMATICALLY INCREASING the cocoa.) We have similar recipes in my own family, including a cherished delight that has come down through the generations and is nothing more than pork sausage seasoned with salt and pepper and baked into rolls of white bread dough, then dipped into ketchup; this is our HUGE SPECIAL OCCASION meal. We also have a green Jell-o salad that has cottage cheese in it, so please don’t think I don’t understand sentimental family recipes.

But I also understand that my sentimental family recipes are not OBJECTIVELY good to people who didn’t grow up with them and so have neither the “family” nor the “sentimental” elements. I expect Paul to eat the white-bread-wrapped sausage rolls on my family’s special occasions, but I don’t expect him to talk about how AMAZING and EXCEPTIONAL the recipe is, which is what his family does about this cake. It’s so MOIST! It’s so DELICIOUS! It’s the BEST CAKE EVER! Not like those inferior “BOX” mixes! (They say their quotes all bitchy-like, too.)

So if this cake is cherished to you because of you grew up with it and your grandma baked it whenever you visited or whatever, and your family always brings it out on special occasions, I DO get where you are coming from. But I think in order to discuss the cake further, we need to remember and agree that it is a DEPRESSION ERA cake. It was meant to substitute for the real thing when essential ingredients were not available. It’s like a diet recipe that uses fat-free “cream” and artificial sweetener and cottage cheese and applesauce to simulate a dessert. It is a MAKE-DO dessert, a SURVIVAL dessert. We now have ACCESS to the butter and eggs and cream and sugar and cocoa, so GOD KNOWS why we would continue to make do with the survival cake. On the other hand, I now have the option to eat filet mignon on Christmas Eve but I would greatly prefer my salt/pepper sausage wrapped in white bread and dipped in ketchup, and I would resent any attempts to tell me the filet mignon was “better,” so I DO get it. (But if our recipe had been made from inferior ingredients during the Depression, like suet and tongue-end mixed with stale bread crumbs to simulate meat, you can bet I’d substitute the better ingredients now that we had them, rather than preserving The Original Recipe.)

In short, I have feelings and opinions about this cake, and yet I am committed to making this cake for Paul every year on his birthday, and I am committed to doing it with as good an attitude as I can muster: I will tell YOU how frustrating I find it, but I will not vent to HIM. (Much.) (Anymore.) And also, I have a certain percentage of self-identity invested in my baking, and food/gifts are my love language, and so I want it to be as good as possible: I take no pleasure (very little pleasure) in having it come out terrible. I have re-copied his mother’s recipe onto my own index card in my own handwriting, to reduce the resentment I feel and hopefully improve the results by not making me feel as if her grating, critical, bossy voice is in my ear. I have committed to NOT trying to substitute butter/eggs/etc. to make it taste “better,” remembering that I would not want Paul to substitute any ingredients in one of my cherished family recipes, if he ever made one of my cherished family recipes for me.

But here is the thing: for at least the last half-dozen years, and possibly longer, the cake has come out IMPOSSIBLY BADLY. It NEVER came out of the pan easily, but it used to come out in no more than two to three pieces per layer, and I could paste those together with frosting and resentment—but the last half-dozen years, it has had to be SPOONED out of the pan in chunks. I am not exaggerating when I say I have cried and screamed, literally cried and screamed, after carefully carefully carefully applying Crisco and flour to the cake pans, carefully following the recipe, and still getting oily pale-brown chunks that can’t be formed into a cake. Paul has had to spend more than one Birthday Eve reassuring me that it’s okay and it doesn’t matter and that he’ll have something else as his birthday dessert, and no one should have to do that on their Birthday Eve and/or on the topic of their once-per-year special sentimental dessert. THIS CANNOT CONTINUE.

Here is where you come in, I HOPE: If you make this recipe as a Cherished Family Cake and you like it, can you tell me anything you do that HAS to be done to make it come out right? Maybe I copied it wrong from my mother-in-law’s stupid picky bossy recipe card. Or maybe it literally requires two tablespoons of actual vanilla extract (that’s the same as the amount of cocoa), at the current non-Depression-Era price of roughly six dollars, and maybe everything is going wrong because I substituted imitation vanilla or because I made the assumption that 2 T. was a transcription error and it should have been 2 t. Maybe my attempt to add more cocoa is the problem, though I have tried going back to the original two tablespoons, with no improvement. Maybe there was an instruction about removal-from-the-pans that I thought I could do without. Or maybe when I rolled my eyes at instructions such as “Beat exactly two minutes BY THE CLOCK!!!!,” I was rolling my eyes at actual essential elements of the magic spell. I may have worked in a bakery, but that doesn’t mean I understand MAGICAL SPELLS. I will accept the magical spell from YOUR family’s recipe, even as I resisted it from Paul’s family recipe. I will accept YOUR gentle guidance even though I rejected Paul’s mother’s bossy fist. (Gah, that woman was the WORST with recipes. All of them were either “Oh, I don’t really use measurements or instructions” with a merry little laugh, or else SUPER DUPER EXCESSIVELY PICKY AND DETAILED WITH LOTS OF ALL-CAPS.)

And I’m not above some fussy prissiness in a recipe. When I was on Weight Watchers, if you had told me I needed to whip a mixture for two full minutes, or use the fat-free sugar-free version of an item, or use ground oatmeal instead of flour, I would absolutely have done it without blinking or flinching. And now that I’m on keto, if you told me to use a particular kind of meat, or use more butter, or use a specific weird expensive sugar substitute, I would be similarly all-in. “Doing it the right way” is not a problem as long as it is not my mother-in-law telling me what is right. (And if you’ve never had a single problem and it’s the easiest/best cake in the world and you don’t know what I could be talking about, you know that’s not helpful and you can keep it.)

Follow-up: After writing this post, I impulsively decided to make the cake in a no-birthday-pressure environment, just to see what happened, and maybe to get some good photos of it sticking to the pan. And instead it came out beautifully, and did not fall apart into any chunks. Here are the things I did that may or may not have been important:

• A wet-ingredients bowl and a dry-ingredients bowl, and not combining until the last minute. Which I have done before, because see also: I like to bake and have worked in a bakery.

• Then mixing them for EXACTLY TWO MINUTES BY THE CLOCK (with one pause to scrape the bowl), which I have done before, because see also: really trying to get this right, even if it means allowing end results to take priority over irritations and resentments.

• Letting the cakes cool for 15 minutes, then using a soft spatula to go around the edges before de-panning, which I have done before, because see also: I like to bake and have worked in a bakery.

• I did, however, QUADRUPLE the cocoa powder, because 1 T. per cake layer is nothing more than FOOD COLORING. Even a QUADRUPLE amount is not really enough, but I don’t want to ruin Paul’s childhood memories. But I have increased the cocoa before without him noticing/minding.

Second follow-up: Wait. Wait wait wait. THE OVEN. Our oven was gradually failing for a number of years, then we recently replaced it, but then we moved so I never tried the cake in the new oven. The new house has an oven that we have noticed is very good: some things that were troublesome to bake before are now non-troublesome. And “oven” is the only answer I can think of that explains why I USED to be able to make the cake come out right, but then couldn’t anymore.

The existence of snow is enough to defeat me this year. On a day when it does NOT snow, and when the previous snow has been handled/melted/dried to the point that the roads/driveways are clear and dry, I can just barely make myself do the absolutely required tasks of my life: I can shower and dress, I can go for groceries, I can take the children to their appointments, I can keep us in clean laundry. I can’t unpack any more boxes, but that genuinely can wait, and also I tell myself that with every week that goes by without needing the contents of those boxes, I am another week closer to knowing if I can get rid of that stuff entirely. (This does not work when, for example, I buy another box of envelopes because I can’t face digging out the stationery/office box. But it works for SOME things.)

But the snow! It’s a giant mess that just DROPS on us! Just drops EVERYWHERE! And we have to go outside and CLEAN IT ALL UP. And we CAN’T really clean it all up, so then we have dirty slush everywhere, and we track it everywhere, and it falls off the bottom of our cars into our nice clean garages, and our terrible children walk across our nice clean floors without taking their shoes off and then say “Oh whoops” like it’s not the end of the world!

And when it snows, it makes a mess of SCHEDULES, too. Appointments that are now difficult and dangerous to get to! Errands that need to be delayed until we can shovel out! Driveways that MUST be shoveled by 8:00 a.m. because someone is coming to clean/deliver! Trips to the grocery store that have to be done earlier than planned (along with half the town) or else later (when the milk/eggs/bread/cheese situation is getting dire, and slush gets tracked inside with every load).

Moving during winter was a terrible idea. We have this new giant steep depressing driveway that I already hated before shoveling was a factor, plus we have to keep going over to the old house to shovel THAT driveway TOO. And we discovered something new for me to resent about the new house: the roof is set up so that it dumps snow directly in front of the two doors. The last time it snowed, I carefully shoveled that whole entire area (walking a distance with each shovelful, because there’s nowhere to PUT the snow)—and a couple of hours later, it was as if I hadn’t been out there at all: over a foot of snow, blocking the doors, with a nice clear clean roof shining in the sun. We shoveled it again, and soon there was an ice slick there instead: the dripping from the roof made what was basically an icicle puddle. There were ice stalagmites that explain why the threshold of one doorway is chipped weirdly so that it lets in drafts: the ice forms in lumps so that the door won’t open, so then you have to hack at it with a shovel, and damage occurs. And that area gets no sun, so even with salt and sand and time, there is still a nice little welcome mat of ice to menace anyone who comes to the house.

Paul says helpfully that there are “things that can be done,” but it is not clear to me that that is the case. There’s already something built into the roof over each door, something that looks as if it’s supposed to divert snow/rain, but does not manage to do that at all: when it rains, rain pours down off the roof directly where you’re standing as you struggle to unlock the door; when snow is melting, it drips right in front of the door to make ice RIGHT THERE. Paul said something vague about a canopy, but I don’t know; the problem seems bigger than that to me. It’s a Total Design issue: the driveway was built to go right up to the house, and to go all along one side of the house, and the snow from the roof is GOING to fall off right there; if it doesn’t fall directly in front of the door, it will fall directly to the left of the door and still need to be shoveled, and we’ll still have to walk a distance to find a place to put each shovelful. It’s a bad design, and now it’s our responsibility.

I try to be optimistic: spring is coming! Just because the daffodil stems I bought at the grocery store earlier this week dried up without opening, that’s not an omen! There can only be so much more snow, and tomorrow is March! MARCH! But winter will come back next year, and the year after that, and the year after that, and the year after that. “And this is just our lives now,” said Elizabeth while helping me shovel an area we had shoveled earlier, capturing my exact sentiment. At this point I have to think bigger picture: Just think what a relief it will be when we move out of this house someday in the distant future!