Classes start again

Note: when rising at 4:30 am to work out, do not try to calculate how many hours before you'll be done for the day, especially on a lab day and one where you have an evening meeting.

(If I am LUCKY, I will be "done" for the day - in terms of commitments - by 7:30 or 8 pm. So, a fifteen or fifteen and a half hour day. Ugh. Not fun the first day back).

I had a "Henrietta Lowell" moment last night (That is now how I am going to think of making silly clumsy mistakes). Tonight is the CWF salad supper (our last meeting until September, thank goodness) and I figured with a lab running to 5:30 and the meeting being at 6:30, I should do as much toward making the salad as possible last night. So I made the dressing and toasted the almonds and washed and de-stemmed the spinach.

I normally don't de-stem spinach when it's just for me; for one thing it doesn't feel worth it, and for another, if any of the leaves have a particularly large or coarse stem I can just cut it off with my fork at the table. But since the salad is for others to share, I thought it would be nice to de-stem the spinach. It is truly an idiot's delight - I found I had to always use my left hand to pull off the stem and my right hand to put the leaf in the bowl, or else I'd get confused and put the stem in the bowl and the leaf in the "garbage bowl."

And the Henrietta Lowell moment? As I was washing and spinning dry the spinach, I forgot to hit the brake on the salad spinner (I have one of the big Oxo models, it has a push button that "brakes" the spin) but lifted off the lid. (I just wasn't thinking).

In case you were wondering what happens if you remove the lid of a salad spinner while it is still spinning: the salad leaves fly EVERYWHERE. All over the sink, all over the counter, flung out by centripetal force, I guess.

I looked at it for a moment, surprised (my mind was on other things and I totally forgot about the brake). Then I burst out laughing. Because it really did look pretty funny, all that spinach flying everywhere. (And what else could I do? I could get angry but I'd only be able to get angry at myself for being inattentive). And it was easily enough fixed; I picked up the spinach and rinsed it again before de-stemming it.

(Then again - if I had been rushing to do that this afternoon, and that had happened, I probably would have gotten angry/upset instead of laughing; I have found my ability to laugh at the dumb things that happen in life is inversely proportional to how stressed for time I feel.)