Shoot and Chutes

It's been an odd sort of day chez Mouse. We decided to keep Scooter home because of the weather--more the fear that we would make it up to campus but then find it difficult to get home. I also told myself that I would get a head start on several of the posts I promised yesterday. Best laid plans and all that.

Our fridge had been acting up--the just-out-of-warranty, top-of-the-line fridge. It's not cooling evenly or dispensing water. We finally got someone out to look at it. He narrowed it down to two possibilities. The downside? It requires shutting the fridge down overnight to manually defrost part of the freezer, something it's supposed to do on its own but hasn't. That has meant emptying as much as possible. We're using the cold weather to our advantage and storing some of the freezer items out on the balcony. (Plus side, which I keep reminding myself--the expense is not ours since we're renting.)

But we've been trying to find creative uses for the items that shouldn't be frozen. For dinner--leek and bacon omelets with parmesan. Now I'm making carrot bread (to use up butter and eggs). To go with that will be yet another decaf latte to catch up on the milk.

So my mind's a bit preoccupied with the very mundane.

But I'll leave you with a funny moment from our evening. For Christmas, Scooter received Chutes and Ladders. We've been trying to get him to play. He understands turn-taking and the counting, but prefers not to play by the rules. His piece runs around the board, taking the slides at a fast pace, hopefully running into another piece. Now even as Scooter is playing his own way, Trillian is maintaining the structure of the game and we're both keeping track of where Scooter's piece should be. As all our pieces start to get to the top, Scooter announces, "I'll be right back," and runs off to his room. Trillian and I continue to play. She continues to move his piece, and of course he's winning in absentia. At one point, he's one space away and the spinner lands between 1 and 6 (one must spin the exact number in the game to win). Despite my view that it was slightly more on 1, Trillian announces it's a 6 and the game will continue. So yes, Trillian and I are both competitive enough that we played out a children's game that our son had grown tired of. We're those people.