Weird Wednesday

If Tuesday saw me cranky to start the day then I went nuclear on Wednesday. I’m still baffled. The start of today was such an unmitigated disaster that I can only look back and laugh about how outrageous it was. You can call it getting out of bed on the wrong side, or being in a bad mood, whatever you’re into. I started in a bad place and things only got worse from there. I started my breakfast sandwich process like every other day. If you’re a regular reader you know full well that I have made these before. That I’ve been making them almost daily for a year. There was one change today, that I’m sure I’ve made before that seemed to be a factor. You can see at 5:08 of the instructional video what that step is. I feel like the egg was pressurized or something. As soon as I tapped it on the side of the egg cup it exploded and half the egg missed the target. As near as I can tell a large portion of the shell vapourized or blended into the egg and disappeared. I tried to scoop the egg with the spatula but it was a sloppy mess still and just made more of a mess for me. I waited a few seconds and it started to cook and firm up on the cooktop and I was able to get a shocking amount into the cup. No such incident occurred for the other side. I started hot, in a bad mood and generally frustrated and angry with the world. You can imagine how I felt with this mishap.

Now that you have a flavour for how my day was going and have jumped over the photo of that incident, let me assure you, it didn’t get better. I’m not sure of the cause of the other half of the breakfast samidge debacle but I do suspect that maybe the extra time added to the process while I was trying to clean up the exploded egg let the cheese get to a more liquid state than is suggested. Let me break it down for you. So the time went on as expected and when the beeping started after five minutes I set about opening the machine and harvesting my yum-yums. The process is that you open the cooktop. Then you slide out the section between the top and bottom cups. This all went great. Next you open the top cup, usually having to push down on the english muffin top to ensure it isn’t attached. The top half of the samidge is sitting on the bottom half at this point. Next you lift the bottom ring up and you have a complete sandwich sitting on the cooling cooking surface. Except, this time that didn’t happen. The cheese had leaked out enough and cooked on the troublesome left side and as such had secured the bottom bun to the bottom ring. When I lifted the bottom ring this time, the bottom slid out with it and the top half of the sandwich ended up on the cooking surface. I’m not sure how this could happen so perfectly and on the day of he exploding egg no less. Cheese got everywhere, the photo doesn’t do it justice. It was just hanging there. Not to be outdone, you can see in the below photo that the right side also fell apart. After my rage blackout and curse word laden rant, I was able to nab the hanging half and re-construct things. Keep in mind that everything is fully molten at this point. I managed not burn my hands. First bite I’m pretty sure I discovered the missing shell as I gulped a solid chunk down the hatch. At that point I was beyond caring, seething at a rapid boil.

That’s the energy I took into work. Helpless frustration and the resultant rage. There was a call that I listened into but didn’t really participate in to start the day. I worked through emails and issues before the big call started. Day one of our Licensing Quarterly meeting. It was slated from ten until half five. Before it started I figued I’d better take a pee so I’d be ready for hours of engagement. I won’t get into details but by the end of it, there was piss everywhere but in the toilet. I set about cleaning it up with some paper towel and cleaner. I managed to slip and smash my elblow on the edge of the toilet bowl in the process, the good times continued. Then, in the first hour of the meeting, I got four phone calls. I’ve gone weeks without getting a call from most of these folks, maybe months. Then they all call on the same day. Oddly enough, none of them were follow-ups from my bout of calls on the previous day. I had to send most of them to voicemail with an accompanying text message to let thme know I wasn’t available. Some were a copy paste. It never fails, it’s like they know when I’m not able to answer the phone. Since the meeting was run by our Calgary office it was all on mountain time, which usually means late lunch. The were good enough to put a half hour break around noon my time though and then only a half hour for the actual lunch break. That allowed me to gobble down a bowl of Campbell’s Chunky Chicken Noodle soup. Because the Leafs are playing Calgary again and I decided to eat my Leaf can, for good luck. I supplemented the meal with a Stouffer’s Bistro Crustini, Mozzerella and Meatball panini. I needed a break with some comfort food to get a break. I did things deliberately in the preparation to avoid any kind of injury or futher calamity.

Thankfully, as the meeting went on I settled down. The team was chipper and there was some good natured ribbing throughout the afternoon. Something that I’ve missed in the last year or so. Slowly but surely the rage slipped away. By the time the meeting wrapped for the day I was just tired. I again went off script from the meal plan and made a cardboard pizza with some extra cheese and hot sauce on it. It looked gross and tasted weird. Not sure what the issue was. I pointed my compass skyward and went upstairs rather than down after dinner. I had some research to do. I mentioned to some high school chums that I wouldn’t mind watching a session of their regular Dungeons & Dragons game that they’ve been doing for a few years. I wanted to see what all the hoopla was about without committing to anything. In order to do so, I had to sign up for roll20.net and provide my email to the dungeon master. Theodore Complete was very excited about this and wanted me to create a character in advance. I suspect he enjoys that process. I told him I had something in mind, from a short story I was working on a few years back. That mental picture and background of the character were the basis we used to create a character. He was pretty insistent that we have a call and go through options. That was not an expected outcome of the day based on the start. They aren’t playing during the week this week because one guy is working nights but I’m scheduled to sit in on their next session. They suspect they’ll pull me in immediately, hence wanting to have a character ready. For any nerds out there I’m a Gith Fighter. When this was over I did a bit more reading on what we’d just done and then retired with some YouTube videos, which I’m well behind on.