Tomorrow morning is (fingers crossed) the final surgery and I am cancer free.
Tonight though real life is being lived. I am a mom, a wife and my family needs dinner. I began by throwing some chicken pieces in a shallow roasting pan and setting the convection oven to slow cook those bird bits to perfection.
I then snuck off and flopped onto my bed. I snuggled into my pile blankets, called my dogs to join and then began to browse the internet. I will need stuff to keep me occupied this week while I recover and this seemed like a good time to get some ideas.
Typical end the weekend stuff.
Only not so much.
The wife came in and belly flopped beside me. I love her but she has some serious bull in a china shop mannerisms. She landed sticking her chin directly into a rib. She says she heard a noise, I just felt the pain. I ignored her for the most part and continued to browse, pretending not to notice her or the now sharp pain in my upper abdominal area.
She grew bored and demanded attention again … about 10 minutes later. This time she tries to pull me away from my browsing with a little story.
She says that before she came in she “smelled something burning” checked the upper oven, nothing in there, checked the bottom. Just then “a poof of smoke came out” at her but since she “didn’t see fire” she thought it was fine.
She thought it was fine.
I looked away from my phone for the first time with terror in my eyes. I envisioned my oven engulfed in flames and my kitchen filled with thick smoke which would certainly kill us all.
She didn’t even move.
I started to flail, throwing blankets and attempting without much sucess to get up from the canine restrictions currently imposed on my legs.
I got to the door and the smell was clearly something burning, but it was much more than that. Think self cleaning oven. It was obnoxious. I was sure that chicken had tipped or something and we would be having PB&J for dinner tonight.
By tonight I really mean maybe forever because fancy 2 oven ranges are expensive and I am, as I mentioned, a mom aka cash poor.
While I’m running worst case scenarios in my head she had beat me to the kitchen. She opened the lower oven to show me there was no fire …. to prove somehow she had been fine to ignore the initial smoke and smell of burnt cheese on the oven floor.
*I assume the last batch of pizzas spilled over in there, not that I would know it was burnt cheese since nobody mentioned it.
So by now I see the chicken looks fine, perfectly placed and roasting casually. No need to fight over who gets the last of the good jelly or who has to have the butt end of the bread.
Crisis averted.
The house smells weird and I still have surgery tomorrow but it could be worse.
It could be way worse.
I could be dying. I could be a cancer victim and not a survivor.
I am grateful for stinky smells, family dinners and if my family is in a good mood, even for the last of the good jelly.
It’s good to be a mom.
It’s good to be a wife.
It’s good to be alive.
My Idiotic Bliss 