Don't Do That Tuesday 11/27/12

Happy Tuesday gentle readers! For it is Tuesday and y'all know what Tuesday means: time to revel in Meg's boneheaded stupidity!

Strangely enough, I don't have much stupidity to offer this week (no comments from the peanut gallery, DYLAN), but I do have two guest Don't Do That posters...and by guest posters I mean I'm about to make fun of various members of my family in a semi-public arena and they have nothing to do with posting this. Luckily I'm super-charming and adorable and thus will suffer no retaliation from this blog (...right...guys?). Also, one of the people I'm about to call out can't talk, so it's open season on him as far as I'm concerned.

Don't do that #1: Hey, y'all, if you have a cathedral ceiling and you are just determined to paint the wall that runs up to it, here's a little story from my mother and sister just to give you an idea of what not to do. So, my mom decided she wanted to paint this really tall wall in their living room and my sister Gracie agreed to help her. Naturally, having some common sense, they went to get the ladder from the yard to set up so they could climb up it and paint said wall. And then, naturally, they abandoned the ladder because it was dirty and icky and, like, some dirt fell in Grace's eye when they were trying to set it up, and there were gross spiders living on it that my mom's pretty sure bit her on the face (okay, I get the point there, spiders are the devil's evil godfathers).

Instead of, you know, taking the ladder back outside and hosing it off, my mom, who is about to have surgery on disks in her neck by the way, decided she would climb on top of the computer desk and then hoist herself up to this ledge that's...oh...12 feet off the hard-as-Hillary-Clinton tile floor or so and paint the wall all squished up on the ledge like the Hunchback of Notre Dame. When I asked her why on earth she would do something so risky, she said, "Well, I'm going to the neurosurgeon on Monday anyway. Might as well give him something else to work with."

They said it went fine though at one point the computer desk was bowing underneath Mom and she had to make a quick leap up to the ledge (I call shoddy workmanship on the part of the desk-maker as my mom weighs about as much as a flea). Nevertheless, I grant points to my mom and sister for successfully painting the wall without killing themselves but I say to you, readers, don't do that!

Don't do that #2: This one comes to you from the creative and occasionally troublesomely offbeat mind of the Boog. Boog has been "exploring his environment" a lot lately. That's a fancy therapy term for ruining and destroying the crap out of all his crap. He's become particularly interested in the area around his window and has torn his mini-blinds to shreds in his exuberance over OMG-I'm-inside-but-I-can-see-the-outside-I-can-see-the-outside-guys-why-does-nobody-else-realize-how-cool-this-is???!!! Sunday, while the rest of us were video chatting with the grandparents, Ry decided that it might be super-fun to take the register off of the a/c vent in his room which is right underneath his awesome window. It has a lot of straight lines, so I understand that part (he loves to look at and touch straight lines). What I don't understand is why he then felt the need to jump down the airhole like a stupid cat (see the Righting the Redneckery series for that reference). It's possible that he slipped and fell in, I don't know. What I do know is that we heard a brief yell of alert (Boog's not one for big displays of, well, anything), and we went in to investigate and found Boog stuck up to his waist in the a/c vent hole with a very sad expression on his face (A/C vent hole, you looked so fun. Why did you betray me?!).

I will forever kick myself that I didn't get a picture before we rescued him. I was going to put him down there (gently) for a reenactment but a. he cut up his leg falling down there the first time and b. putting your kid in a potentially dangerous situation for entertainment purposes is kinda terrible parenting, so Winnie the Pooh is standing in for Ry on this one:

Oh bother.

Don't do that #3: Okay, I did do one pretty boneheaded thing this week. So, I went on this anti-inflammatory diet this week (not the boneheaded thing, although...no sugar and only a couple of glasses of red wine a week...) because I read that it was good for controlling fibromyalgia symptoms and I discovered that I was eating almost no whole grains at all. I wasn't eating any refined grains, either, but I was getting maybe one serving of whole grains in at dinner and that was it for grains...other than the occasional post-wine sneaked bowl of Pippa's cereal. Um, so anyway, you're supposed to eat a buncha whole grains on this diet so I decided to try my hand at slow-cooker steel-cut oats...again...I've never had much luck with them, but surely, this time would be different because they're anti-inflammatory this time!

Um yeah. No.

First of all, if you do plan on making slow-cooker steel-cut oats, dear readers, do not have a "flash of brilliance" and decide to mix a large portion of egg white protein powder into the oats before cooking to up the protein content...unless of course you enjoy eating a breakfast the texture of a broken custard...

Yeah, it tastes pretty much how it looks...

Secondly, and maybe y'all will have better luck, but every g-d time I make this g-d recipe, I spray more pan spray in the cooker and add more water and every g-d time I end up with this:

Look! I made blueberry-flavored cement!

Thus, I say to my readers (but mostly to myself), "Stop trying to make slow-cooker steel-cut oats happen! It ain't happenin', cap'n!"

And there you have it! Paint a tall-ass wall without a ladder? Don't do that! Jump down an air conditioning vent hole for fun? Don't do that (no matter what Pooh bear tells you, it's not fun)! Slow-cooker steel-cut oats with egg white protein powder? Don't do that, either (trust the lady eating a week's worth of eggy wallpaper paste breakfasts)!

Tune in next week to see what kind of half-brained shenanigans I get myself into this week. Happy Tuesday!