I have a friend who has been known to say, "Some days are just a waste of makeup."

Well, I could have said that about yesterday afternoon but I wasn't wearing makeup. (The different schedule - no classes yesterday - meant I forgot to put it on; I was kind of dressing in a hurry, thinking about getting over to work on research).

The first cake I tried - a date-nut cake that is quite elegant and is one of my favorites - totally failed. I think, in retrospect, it's because it's a recipe that doesn't double well - it's kind of a heavy cake, and I think the pan I put it in was too small. (It's an old recipe with relatively few guidelines.) It rose up high, foamed over the edge of the pan in the oven (which meant burning goo dripped on the oven floor before I could get a cookie sheet in there under the cake). The edges burned but the center never cooked.

I should back up and observe that I did this "last" thing - I probably should have done it "first" thing, but I wanted to get a good start on cleaning house and then leave the kitchen to be cleaned while the cake cooked. (And now my inner demon is yelling at me: you put YOUR priorities above other people's, because you wanted to clean before you baked the cake for your meeting. You deserved to have the cake fail. Which of course is not true, but when it's 6 pm and you're already tired and you're staring at a half-burned, half-raw cake, it's easy to think that.)

So I regrouped. Went out to the store (I had to; I was out of flour and could think of no dessert I could compose from what I had on hand). This time, I decided to make that simple Hershey's cocoa cake that I've given the recipe for on here before.

That one worked. (Which was a relief, because I was wondering after the first cake, if my oven was broken). Of course, I had to scrape the burned goo out of the oven first. But at least I had success by 8 pm when I pulled the finished cake out.

(I am going home at lunch and making a mint-flavored green icing. For St. Patrick's Day. If I can't have my "elegant" date nut cake, I'm just going to be goofy and have a cake with green frosting. So there. And if anyone doesn't like it, they can go without.)

And, of course, I now have a grimy oven. And a once-again grimy kitchen floor. (I HATE cleaning the kitchen floor because it seems every time I do it, something comes up within an hour of my cleaning it and it gets stuff spilled on it, or I happen to walk through in wet shoes, or something. If I could have one futuristic thing? Forget flying cars - I want a self-cleaning kitchen.)

I've got a pan of vinegar sitting in the oven - supposedly if you put a pan of vinegar in a cold oven over night and let the fumes work, it makes it easier to clean the grease off (I don't like using the commercial oven cleansers; I'm sensitive to the chemicals in them).

I managed to get the "public" rooms clean (well, except the kitchen isn't perfect now, with the crumbs of burned goo on the floor I need to mop back up). My bedroom is half-cleaned. And the guest room is still a nightmare but at least I found all the tax stuff I have - I think I'm going to do my taxes this weekend. I don't expect a refund so there's no point in doing them super-early. (Though perhaps this year I have enough capital losses to actually generate a small one).

But, gah. I had hoped to be done with stuff by maybe 5:30 or 6 and have a nice relaxing evening. What's the old saying? Man proposes, and God disposes? Though I kind of doubt God had anything to do with the failure of that darn cake.