Rainy Days are Boring, Like My Life

One of the reasons I dislike Fall is that it rains. A lot. At least here in Maryland it does. Yesterday and today were no exception.

Yesterday was one of those typical rainy school days: Get up, trudge through schoolwork that seems endless because of a looming three-day-weekend, go home, do whatever. So I managed (barely) to get through school. Then I got in my car with a girl and her sister and took them home (which took twice as long as it should have because of the rain.) Then I ran out to the grocery store to buy cake mix and cake accessories for my friend's birthday. I picked up a box that said the cake recipe called for oil, so I called home to make sure we had oil. Then I picked up another box without thinking and put it in the basket. I continued on my way. I bought some candles that said "Happy Birthday" and some chocolate frosting and some blue icing. When I got to the checkout, I found the little impulse-buy refrigerator, and it had a new soda that I just had to try. It was Diet Sierra Mist with cranberry flavoring in it! And it was good!

So I went home to make the cake and get on my way. I took the box of mix out of the grocery bag and read the back. To my horror, I had picked up a box of Butter Recipe cake mix. As you can probably guess, this recipe calls for butter, not oil. I looked in the refrigerator, and to my horror, we only had half a stick of butter. And it was very hard butter indeed. I looked around some more. We had a margarine spread. I used that as a substitute, and stuck it and the half-stick of butter into the microwave to make them soft... not realizing, of course, that the spread would melt. As much as I hated that, it made the mix easier to stir and therefore easier to make. So the rest of the cake-making goes well, until I look around and find that we do not seem to own a cake transporter that is intact. In fact, the one we have is broken and takes rectangular cakes. My cake, naturally, was round, because round is a fun shape for cake. My mother suggested that I take the cakes on two separate plates and finish assembling the cake upon arrival. This plan seemed to work well, so I packed up the cake, threw some clothes in a bag, and headed off.

Traffic, of course, was the horrible kind that comes with rainy rush-hour. So I took the back way to my friend's house (An important note: she lives two hours away). At this point, it is about six-thirty PM as I leave, and it is rainy, so it gets dark very quickly. So I have many tasks at this point: operate the car effectively and safely, read the directions, avoid getting lost, and make sure the cakes aren't sliding around on the back seat. The only tricky part was avoiding getting lost, but that was merely because I couldn't read the road signs very well in the dark rain. (Also, some of the numbers are missing off the signs. How do I know this? Because exits do not jump from number 69 to number 8. That just does not happen.) So I arrive safely, eat dinner, hang out with my friend, and go to bed.

The sleeping arrangements last night were a bit askew due to the fact that my friend's sister just moved to a college in Ohio and doesn't live at home anymore. This leaves her rather large room to just sit and be a haven for the family cats (of which there are twelve). The sister's bed is still in the room: a nice queensized bed. My friend decided that she wanted us to sleep in the same room, and that since her room barely fits what's in there, we should sleep in her sister's room (which is completely allowed.) So we go upstairs, and my friend tells me that I will be sleeping on the [rather defective] inflatable mattress. As much as I hate the inflatable matress, I go along with that because it's her birthday the next day. We inflated the mattress. She forgot to close the air plug thing. We put more air in the mattress, but apparently not enough, because at around 1 in the morning, I woke up and definitely felt the floor through the mattress. I dealt with it, though, because I was tired as crap.





I'm extremely tired. So I'm going to put part II of this saga up tomorrow.



Peace, love, and raincoats.