Hippity, hoppity.

I was all set to come home from the Stand Up for Your Library! rally at the Cathedral Church of St. Paul and blog about how poorly attended the rally was and how everyone (including me) should do more to a) support one's community, and b) support one's community library, when I walked into the house and saw this: My large Butterprint Pyrex bowl, shattered to pieces! Yes, it was my fault for leaving it to dry on the counter-top last night, thus leaving it at risk to jumping cats, but still. How many times have I left it out without incident? Not only does it break my heart a bit to have this bowl that I scored for $4 at the Rowley Flea Market with Chris and Chris broken into a million little bits, but it gives me a bit of anxiety to think of all the little tiny glass particles that might be in the kitties' paws. There were flakes and specks of glass all over the floor. Not fun to come home to.

And do you know what else isn't fun to come home to? Ants. Black ants. Lots of them. I killed four of the suckers in the span of ten minutes. (I have no problem killing ants, by the way. Or spiders. Part of me wishes I could be one of those kind-hearted people who scoop up the offending insect and let it free outside, but I can't. Just can't.) So now I have to wonder how many ants in our kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, etc., it will take for us to finally call an exterminator. I had heated discussions with Doug about this last spring and summer, many a heated discussion, and I finally got him convinced that it was okay and appropriate to call an exterminator, and then suddenly the ants disappeared (probably had something to do with the fact that it got oppressively hot). Well, I don't want to do the heated discussion thing again, so I'm just going to call an exterminator without the whole democracy angle. I'm making this decision. I want the ants gone.

But lest you think that it's all been bad around here lately, let me share some of our Easter with you. We had a lovely day, to which these two ladies can attest: The sun was out, the temperature was a perfect 65 to 70 degrees, and it was just a beautiful day. The cooks outdid themselves yet again - the homemade pizza gain and manicotti are two definite highlights - and I left my sister's house feeling sick to my stomach. Granted it doesn't take much these days to make me ill, but I really ate more than my fair share. I was ready to burst after the antipasto, but there were still three more courses after that. I did try a piece of my lemon cake, and despite the drama I went through to make it, I think it came out okay. Dry, but good. (In an effort to make a long story short, on Sunday morning I vowed never to bake again due to the saga of the two lemon cakes and my butterscotch bars. I found a recipe for a lemon cake on epicurious that didn't require any special ingredients or crazy baking techniques, so I made the cake on Saturday night. I forgot to add the eggs until I was done mixing everything else together (as I was about to pour the batter into the cake pans I noticed that there was an egg sitting next to my mixing bowl...), and I used 9" cake pans instead of 8". The cakes turned out flat, very flat, so I thought that I if I made another cake the next morning I'd somehow get it to fluff up. It didn't work, of course, since I was using the wrong size cake pan (does this mean I have to have two 8" and two 9" cake pans? Who has room in their kitchen for all of this stuff?), so I ended up with two very flat lemon cakes, which you can see here: That didn't stop me from frosting them both and bringing one to Easter dinner, though, and in a way I'm glad I made two - now we have one for ourselves! And the butterscotch bars - let's just say that it's a good thing I bought a whole bag of butterscotch chips for a recipe that only called for 1/3 cup, because I definitely needed those extra chips. Baking was not my thing this past weekend.)

What bothered me about Easter, though - and I'll share this in the spirit of sharing all bad things happening lately - is that my sister is a bit miserable these days, and this weekend she said to me that she's more miserable than she's ever been. This is all due to her classes. Her schooling, her grades, the amount of studying she has to do, the time away from the kids and her family that she has to take, and her unknown future as a nurse. It's hard to hear my sister say that she's more miserable than she's ever been (because for a Sheridan that means that she's pretty miserable), but all I can do is encourage her. Let her know that she's doing the right thing to finish her degree (just the summer and fall to go!), to get the education, to think about the rest of her life, and to follow through on her plans. She's a great inspiration to her kids. They may not appreciate it now (my sister gets a lot of guilt trips from them for missing certain school or social activities if she's studying or at clinical), but they will appreciate it later in life, this hard-working mother. And if my sister ever feels really miserable, at least she has three of these lovely faces to admire: Some of them may have more teeth than others, but they're all pretty darned cute and inspiring, and certainly capable of pulling anyone out of a miserable funk. I, for one, wish I could see my nieces and nephew, and sister and brother-in-law, more often, so that some of their inspired cuteness could snap me out of some funks, too.