I was mighty low yesterday, miserable with that wretched cold and starting to worry that I was not going to get well for a long while. From Friday to Saturday, I was not able to sleep all night and spent those long miserable hours in the GREEN chair. Today, as time has passed, I have felt significantly better than when I awoke. Christ be praised, the stabbing pain in my throat has finally been reduced to a more acceptable level of irritation and surely I shall be able to sleep tonight. I believe I should be better—although probably still exhausted—by Wednesday or Thursday ... or perhaps Friday. In any case, I have seen the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel and, thus, my despair has lessened.
It was very hard not to go to the symphony last night. I told my chauffeur early on in the day that I wouldn't be going, but looked rather longingly at the clock at 7:37 PM, wondering if I throw on a sweater and skirt and dash over there. However, I do believe staying in the GREEN chair was a better choice. Sadly, then, I have no report on what I thought of the music.
Amos has been rather discombobulated with my wretched state. Coughing and sneezing are new to him and, as I noted, are triggers for his startle response. Plus, he remains puzzled over the lack of plates to clean and my unwillingness to let him have my used tissues. He, too, is exhausted, having been up with me round the clock for several days now—oft leaping away from me in terror at the sudden noises coming from my person—as this wretched cold worked its way deep within my ears, nose, throat, and chest. Here he is taking a short nap on the laptop last night.
It cracks me up to watch him perch atop one arm of the GREEN chair and either nap on the TV tray on my left side or the antique table on my right. His most favorite chin-resting-surface is the corner of the laptop.
I did learned something with this wretched cold. Perhaps you've already stumbled upon a rather ingenious idea for how to contain your used tissues?? Well, I hadn't. I finished off a box of tissues Thursday day and fetched a new one, but I left the empty one by the GREEN chair. [We will not discuss just how much stuff has accumulated by the GREEN chair.] Trying to keep the tissues away from my puppy dog—a firm believer that all bits of papers of all types are his to shred/consume—was rather exhausting to me until I hit upon the idea of putting them into the empty tissue box. Voilà! The plastic covering the opening on the top of the box kept the used ones safely out of the mouth of my puppy dog and having the box beside me meant that I did not have to keep getting up every half hour or so to throw piles of tissues away. As I have written, I rarely get colds, but I plan to keep my next empty tissue box and tuck it away in the bathroom cabinet just in case.
Thinking that a bit of cooking might be restorative, I decided to try something with the English toffee bits in my cabinet. Since I did not care for the thin, crispy cookies of my last attempt to use English toffee bits, I decided to try them in a blondie recipe. After much Googling, I chose one particular recipe and set to baking. One reason I know I am not a cook is that I cannot figure out why it is that I often end up with wildly different cooking times than a recipe I am trying. I simply do not believe adding English toffee should extend cooking time twenty minutes.
As you can see, the edges were really crispy, or chewy, but the center was very soft. As I noted on my English Toffee Bits Blondies post in my recipe archive, next time I want to try and hold out for a bit longer cooking ... perhaps 40 full minutes. Perhaps, though, the 36 minutes would have been a bit better if I had not checked them at 20 minutes, 25 minutes, 30 minutes, 35 minutes, and then chickened out and pulled them out of the oven at 36 minutes.
There are eight more English toffee bits blondies, should anyone want to risk the germs that might be lingering in my home: three chewy corners, four crispy edges, and one mushy center piece. For the record, I did wash my hands before cutting them up and placing them into the sweets storage container I keep in the freezer. I do think the blondie route is what I would prefer over the cookie, when it comes to English toffee bits, but I would like more cake-like results than what turned out to be one rather large square cookie.
I really do need me a personal chef ... or at least a personal baker.
I am Yours, Lord. Save me!
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