My Gift to the World

I was gratified beyond expectation by the personal responses I received to my obsessive advice on toilet paper and dishwasher loading. One new mother told me how she never paid attention to toilet paper loading and when she was up in the middle of the night, feeding her new cutie, she would head into the bathroom in the dark. More than once, a tired husband ended up doing a pee-pee jig in the door, pleading for her to hurry up while she helplessly spun the toilet paper roll around and around in the dark, grasping for the elusive end. After reading my earlier post, she now loads the roll the 'right way', and dear hubbie's painful prancing has come to an end. I daresay I changed their lives!

It is armed with this belief that my annoying attention to tiny details could benefit others that has led me to today's post. I am about to bestow onto the world the greatest knowledge I have to share, the solution to endless frustration and the satisfying creation of a thing of beauty. Today, right here, I will share with you how to fold a fitted sheet.

The first critical piece of advice I have for you is that a fitted sheet can not be folded in the air. Arms outstretched, grasping corners, and bringing them neatly together, while ideal for the neatness of a flat sheet, is a terrible method to try to fold a fitted sheet. The flat and the fitted trick you with their similarities into believing they can be treated the same way. They cannot. The fitted sheet demands a subtle hand, a gentle shaping, an intimate level of attention that the flat sheet gladly does without. The flat sheet is a hussy, while the fitted sheet is a noble dame, demanding appropriate attention and caressing before yielding to your hands.

As such, the fitted sheet, first and foremost, needs a flat surface on which to be shaped. If you have a sheet to fold, then I must presume you also have a bed and recommend using that surface for your folding needs:

With some practice, you can eventually move your skills to the couch while watching your stories, but do not be so bold as to jump right to that advanced folding placement. Start with the bed. Once there, find your four corners:

Once you have embraced and let this method be a part of your soul, you won't need to spread out the entire sheet as shown below, but start here Grasshopper:

This next critical step sadly lacks an effective photo, mostly because I recognize this endeavor to be ridiculous enough not to call Bob in from the other room and ask for help with the photography. What I am trying to show below is inverting one of the corners and inserting your hand like a mitt. (What we actually see below is how far apart my camera hand and my sheet hand can get. We also see, depending on the quality of your monitor, that I only buy sheets on sale and have poorly sewn this ripped seam together):

Take your mitted sheet hand and fit the corner you are holding inside it's opposing corner. Do this on both ends of the sheet so that you have essentially folded the sheet in half, but with the corners tucked into each other:

And here is where the magic can start to happen. The satisfying ease of the flat sheet is the right angles while the frustrating difficulty of the fitted sheet is it's lack of the same. What we are about to do with the fitted sheet is introduce the critical right angles that allow the neat and clean pile we all want to see at the end. To do this, fold the outer edges into the center. You will be folding the puffy, rounded, elasticized and bulky corners into the center, and giving yourself a clean right edge. The sheet I am illustrating with here is a king-size, so size of folds may be different with other size sheets, but the key is to get a right-ish angle where a corner should be:

Repeat with both sides so you are now dealing with a boxy shape:

Depending on the size of your sheet, you can now fold with the ease of corners as you would a flat sheet. With this king-size sheet, I folded it in half longways:

Now don't go running off to your laundry, thinking you've heard all my tricks and the path to the perfect fitted sheet is clear. We have one more important lesson to learn, a misconception from flat sheet folding that we must cast aside to find success with the fitted sheet. With the flat sheet we are used to meeting corners and folding in half. Whether up or down or side-to-side, we just keep folding in half until we have a neat square. I must remind you again - the flat sheet and the fitted are entirely different! We must embrace the concept of thirds with the fitted sheet, and it is this beauty of the triad that will finally allow you to know the peace of a perfectly folded fitted sheet.

What we have done by hiding the difficult rounded corners is create one bulky end and one smooth flat end:

Using the fold-in-half-and-half-again method now would lead you to trying to create a fold in the bulky corner collection and even if successfully folded, would leave you with one cowlicky end that keeps trying to pop up. Enter the tri-fold! Fold the bulky end down a third:

Then fold the smooth, thin end up a third. You have now taken the neatest part of your folded sheet and covered the most troubling, uneven part:

Even Doozer is impressed with how the mess of fabric from the first photo has turned into this shapely pile:

The final, beautiful epilogue to this tale of the fitted sheet: as the rounded corners of the fitted and the sharp corners of the flat sheet are reunited, joined into a "set", destined to stack together in the linen closet until it is time for them, once again, to be unfurled.

Knife Points and Charmin Rolls

Sitting on a friend's toilet the other day, it hit me that I have two categories of behavior when it comes to believing that there is a certain way things must be done. The first category is activities which I choose to do one way, and firmly believe my way is correct, but will give you the respect and benefit of the doubt of not challenging your way of doing it. The second category is activities which I feel must always be done one way only and for which some OCD insistence tendencies emerge.

An example in the first category is loading the dishwasher. Bob would argue strongly that I put dish placement in the second category of obsessive rigidity, but that's only when it comes to loading our dishwasher. When I am helping to do the dishes in someone else's home, I respect the dishwasher style that they employ. I think glass racks are for glasses only (and any plastic containers or lids, as their instructions always clearly state "top rack only") and bowls are more closely aligned with plates, but if I am helping clean up at your house and you choose to mingle cups and bowls, I will follow your lead. I won't even judge you for it. I also think silverware should be placed with the handle pointing up for reasons of safety, cleanliness, and sanitation. Safety because if the sharp knife point is face-down, you don't risk grazing yourself as you hurry through loading to get to the t.v. in time for tipoff; Cleanliness because a dishwasher spraying from the bottom will hit the food-covered tips with the most force when the functional ends are closest; and Sanitation because you can move the clean silverware from the washer to the drawer by the handles without rubbing your potentially grubby fingers all over the eating ends. All of these clearly elucidated arguments aside, if your silverware has the spoon slopes and fork tines reaching for the sky, I will dangerously place the knife tip in the same direction.

In my own home, I believe that the glass rack only functions at it's highest potential if you don't sacrifice space to a prong-hogging bowl. The bottom rack can be piled and leaning chaos, but the top rack has evenly spaced rows for a reason. I doubt that Bob will ever understand why I care so much, and I doubt I could ever explain it, but nothing in the way we share space can throw me into a fit of "this is never going to work" anger more than when he throws a glass into the middle of the top rack, teetering on a random prong. We have had actual arguments about whether the prongs are there to divide sections for you, making the best option placing the glasses securely between the prongs in even rows (my view) or whether the prongs are there to have a glass balanced upon them (his obviously erroneous view). When it was clear that he would not agree with my logic of the security and efficient space usage with my approach, I turned to pleading and begged him that as this issue clearly matters to me far more than to him, could he just do it my way?

For the most part, he does, and it has become the single biggest indicator of how far our living-together relationship has come in the last year and a half. When the glasses are placed evenly in rows in the dishwasher, not sloppily dangling haphazardly from prongs, I believe that we have found a balance, that he respects the work I do in the kitchen, that our lives can progress together in an organized home. But when I find a dangler, a leaner, or - god forbid it or my head will explode - a glass placed so carelessly that it has fallen completely on it's side, every insecurity about our loving survival rushes to the surface.

I realize it is sounding more and more like I should have been medicated years ago. Don't worry, I am careful to self-medicate daily and I will save you all from the pain I could share here about the chaos wine glasses cause if you are inclined (wrongly, from my point of view) to put them in the dishwasher. Despite Bob's exclusion, for the most part I can respect that other people load their dishwashers differently. What I can't abide, what I don't understand, what my anxious fingers can barely stop themselves from reaching out and fixing, is a toilet paper roll loaded the wrong way.

As these issues of right and wrong seem harder for others to see as clearly as I do, I will let you know that the wrong way to load a roll of toilet paper is with the free end hanging from behind the roll. The right way to load a roll of toilet paper is with the free end hanging on top of the roll, facing the wiper, nose-blower, or mischievous cat. Picture a hotel bathroom that tries to wow you with cleanliness and freshness by folding the tip into a neat triangle (and try to ignore that this shape means the person who was just cleaning the toilet then manhandled the bit of paper that you will soon be touching). Fine hotels and even most shitty motels recognize and illustrate the right way to load a toilet paper roll.

I feel the benefits of the right way are obvious: if the paper is loaded the wrong way, you can't see where the end is hanging. And if you start rolling the tube towards you, you could potentially miss the end as it passes by. When the paper is loaded the wrong way, you could spin the roll around a dozen times and the end wouldn't get any longer. But when the paper is loaded the right way, and you spin it towards you, the end will present itself and get longer and longer as you spin. The end is closer to you, offering itself with friendliness to your service, instead of lurking in the back against the wall or cabinet, hiding from your needs.

Here my obsessiveness reaches out of my own home. If I know you well and think you will love me anyway or if you are someone I know so little I don't care what you think of me, I will correct your toilet paper roll. If it is clear the roll was changed right before me and the homeowner likely doesn't know yet which way it is facing or if it was changed by a guest, I will fix it. Even though I hate those stupid spring-loaded contraptions and know I am risking encountering the faulty one where the spring pops out and the holder scatters in parts across the floor, I will still feel the strongest need to correct your roll's direction. I know it's invasive and rude and slightly crazy, but I guess I approach it like my plea to Bob to just do it my way because I clearly care more. If you care so little about your toilet paper access that you load it the wrong way, than you clearly can't care enough about it to mind if I turn it around. I find it hard to believe that anyone strongly feels it must be loaded backwards and prefers it that way. I assume anyone whose paper is loaded the wrong way is a victim of lazy chance.

And I now arrive at my second product endorsement of this blog: please explore the new world of toilet paper holders. The one single item that makes me the happiest in the entirety of our remodeled bathroom is the spring-less toilet paper holder. Instead of that squeezed plastic tube between two cruddy porcelain ends, our paper holder is a U-shaped curved bar. You simply slide the roll on and off the open end. The whole process can be done with one hand, an amazing revolution in toilet paper holder technology. I find this advancement so critical that I once gave the 21st-Century holder as a birthday gift to a friend mired in bathroom renovations. I daresay it was one of the most beautifully functional gifts I have ever wrapped.

I think it's clear that it's approaching medication time and thankfully a bottle of Chianti is already open. I am sorry to those of you who have been unsuspecting victims of my invasive toilet paper handling. I'm just trying to make the world a better place.

The Perplexities of Naked Chicken

I called my mom tonight, as I sometimes do in the throes of a chaotic cooking attempt. She knows the basics of how to cook most anything in that instinctual way that someone who has spent thirty years feeding a family develops. I still look everything up - how long, what temperature, how do I know it's ripe? There's no way I could pick out a cantaloupe at the store, but she does it by smell. She knows how much meat to buy for ten people, whereas I have to step away from the meat counter and overthink a calculation that often ends up in way too much or slightly too little. I glance at a recipe a dozen times to check temperatures and cook times, but with my mom, everytime my dad answers her that whatever he just put on the grill will take "about ten minutes", she knows which meats will really show up at the table in fifteen. Along with my own mom, it is probably an unsung trait of mothers everywhere that she is the one person in the house that everyone goes to to ask "How long should I heat this in the microwave?".

I think I took her off guard with the intro to my question tonight, when I told her "I'm always perplexed by the naked chicken." But I am. Tonight was the third time I worked with a whole chicken and couldn't for the life of me figure out which end goes up. I've looked it up in the past, and was reminded again tonight that my Betty Crocker cookbook is disappointing in it's lack of an anatomical poultry illustration. There's one for beef - each part of the cow carved into little steaks with the label of what cut they are. Apparently no one needs this detailed guide for the chicken, other than me.

Having to ask for help on the phone, I described the chicken to my mother the way you would give directions: "If you're on the street, looking at the entrance to the mall, Old Navy is to the left". I described the chicken as if the poor bird wasn't currently beheaded and featherless on my counter: "So if the chicken is walking around like a chicken, with his little legs under him and his wings on his sides, is the breast the part that's on his back, or what's under him facing the ground?" My mom lovingly ignored the ridiculousness of my question and answered with the respect all reference librarians give to finding the correct answer, and let me know that the breast was what I was describing as the chicken's back. She tried to help me further by getting me to picture the Thanksgiving turkey, but I lamely had to admit that while the turkey seems obvious, this little roaster chicken's proportions didn't make a top and bottom obvious to me. It's not surprising I couldn't figure out top and bottom, since I mixed up front and back as well when I grabbed onto the neck bone and tugged, thinking I was pulling on the giblets that were actually stuffed in the other end.

I thanked my mom for her help, knowing she was going to get off the phone and turn to her husband to share something along the lines of "Our brilliant daughter just called because she can't figure out which side of the chicken goes up", inviting my dad to join her in disbelief of how I couldn't know that. Chicken anatomy aside, I felt pretty confident about my recipe endeavor tonight. Knowing now, at least, not to try to stuff the neck bone, I filled the chicken with lemon, garlic, rosemary and thyme, mentally thanking Bob's old chef roommate for planting all of these great herbs. The chicken went in a pot on top of some Dutch potatoes, a sliced onion (a rarity for me, being an onion hater), and a carrot.

An hour and a half later, the chicken was gorgeous. I sent a cell phone photo with pride to family members, shouting "Roast Chicken!!", exuberantly and unabashedly typing two exclamation points in the text portion of the message. I picked up a sharp knife, cut into the golden roasted skin, and my heart sank. It was pink. I got a little further and was dismayed that it wasn't just pink, it was brown. I had a disgusting, rotten, undercooked chicken.

And then I realized I had cooked the damn thing upside down.

What I was cutting into was not the white expanse of breastmeat, but the multi-hued dark meat of the thigh. I sighed and flipped the bird over, rolling the beautiful buttery-golden and crispy skin into the collected liquid on the platter and exposing the flacid, soggy, pale-as-if-raw skin hanging over the breast. Before I cut into this unseasoned sheet of disappointment, I made Bob come in and look at the chicken's beautiful backside, sent back into the darkness in the name of traditional carvery.

One would think this gaffe means I will definitely get it right next time, with such a vivid picture of the wrong way, but I turned the wrong way down the same street dozens of times before figuring out how to get to the taco place where we eat at least once a month. I fear that "chicken anatomy" may permenantly sit next to "sense of direction" on the list of my weaknesses.

It was, however, a deliciously tasty bird.

A little bit about poop

I have a weird new obsession; I hoarde quality poop bags. When Diesel and I go for walks on the trails around the nearby lake, I fill my pockets with the greatest poop bag ever: the Mutt Mitt. After so many depressing trudges with thin, flimsy, holey grocery store bags, I now walk longer, further, faster because I have the Mutt Mitt! No poop will touch me!

What's so great about the Mutt Mitt is implied in it's name - the key is the mitt action. The Mutt Mitt is like a bag-shaped glove, no finger holes or anything, but when you put your hand inside, the bottom stretches open. You grab the load and then simply remove the bag from your hand in reverse, like sanitary procedure with a surgical glove.

Beyond the awesomely functional shape, the thickness of the plastic is what makes the whole mitt action bearable. Even a double-ply grocery bag leaves too much texture to be felt, too much of an 'omigod I'm touching poop, I'm touching poop!' feeling. Anyone with dog poop removal experience is well aware of the magical range of textures the product can come in - I will refrain from discussing them here except to pull out the tired claim that the Inuit people have a gazillion words for snow based on each kind's unique characteristics. We all know dog poop could also benefit from a range of descriptive names, but I think I would need a cocktail in hand to engage in that level of creativity. I'm sure a quick Google - which I do not recommend - would provide some other fecal-focused mind's vocabulary list on this topic.

Anyway, the delight of the Mutt Mitt is the solid, defending, i'm-here-for-you-honey layer of plastic between your hand and his gift. The 'mitt' portion of the bag is doubly thick and black - so there are few visual reminders of the bag's contents once the flip and seal is complete. And if I may take one tiny step too far into the true experience of picking up poop, the double layer of black protects you from the temperature of the cargo, avoiding the little lurch of the belly when you have to admit you are not only picking up poop, but picking up steaming, body-temperature poop freshly escaped from your furry friend.

I have purposely avoided researching the Mutt Mitt's claim of degradability, knowing deep down that when I look it up the standards of biodegradability that I should be considering as I throw plastic into the trash are unlikely to be met. But I Love This Poop Bag. And so I will accept 'degradable' as a wonderful thing and allow my naivety to keep my guilt at bay.

The rambling length of the paragraphs above should show my love for these poop bags. But now I'm spoiled. I struggle with issues of right-and-wrong as I stare at the freshly stocked dispensers at the park and long to grab and go. I glance furtively around to see if anyone is watching as I grab one, two, three...never more than that! Well, never more than that in one passing. For a while I had only a few precious Mutt Mitts in my possession and carefully doled them out using the forthcoming Inuit guide to dog poop textures, judging the necessity of a mitt based both on quality of dropping and distance to trash can.

Now that I've started hoarding them, I have them stowed everywhere. In my purse, in my rain coat pocket, in my winter coat pocket, under my car seat, in my cup holder. I treat them like the precious gifts I believe them to be - when I remove each one I carefully fold it into a neat rectangular shape and slide it flat into my pocket. I feel a stab of anger and confusion when I see the Mutt Mitts that come out of my boyfriend's pockets - stretched and wrinkled and crumpled as if they were just another bag from the RiteAid. I secretly go behind him and smooth out the plastic, triaging and trying to give my little bag friend the dignity he deserves for the heroic service he offers.

I dream of one day splurging at the snooty pet store and buying my own case of Mutt Mitts, an endless stream of mitts with no hoarding and no fear of sharing. But c'mon - they're poop bags. Who can afford to spend their money on that?

UPDATE 2012: I have owned my own supply of Mutt Mitts for over a year. Last Christmas I bought in bulk and every dog owner I meet under the Christmas tree received a travel pack. I'll never go back.

Grocery Store Assholes

I am my father's daughter when it comes to people avoidance: ATMs, pay-at-the-pump, online registrations, scan-it-yourself express lines...all cater to those of us who would prefer to get most of our business done without the necessity of interaction with strangers. When I was scouting out furniture stores looking at new sofa possibilities, I tried and tried but always failed to get in the door and past the scrum of waiting salespeople without the obligatory (hoping for your commission) introductory attack:
"Are you looking for anything particular today?"
Just looking, thanks.
"Well we're having a big sale right now, blah diddy blah blah..."
Okay, thanks.
"I'll let you walk around for a bit and will check in with you later. Let me know if you need anything, I'm Phil."
Thanks, Phil.
and then, sigh, obligatory handshake. Not only forced chatter with strangers but forced touching with strangers.

My boyfriend anticipated these uncomfortable conversations much more savvily than I, choosing to don a ratty concert t-shirt with some sort of skull graphic along with not-the-freshest of pants. I made the mistake of showering and automatically became the target for every Phil's best-sale-ever diatribes.

So I'm not the sort of person who looks for conversational openings with strangers, who chucks a "wow, long line" to others queing, who queries "wonder when it will stop raining" of unknowns. I keep my head down, always avoid eye contact, and couldn't be any more in love with the scan-it-yourself line at the grocery store (although this love also speaks to my childhood fascination with playing 'store').

I'll engage in the necessary pleasantries with an appropriate smile to well-meaning strangers, but I was taken aback at the grocery store this weekend when smug-middle-aged-guy commented on my outfit. Apparantly he was offended, or just-jokingly-offended, by my sartorial expression of fandom. On the day that UNC was playing in the Elite Eight, while I was in the home state of UNC, while I was twenty miles from UNC, while I continued to be a UNC graduate, I dared wear a UNC t-shirt. To the grocery store!

Now, the twenty mile distance I live from Chapel Hill happens to place me in Raleigh, home to NC State University. I can only assume smug-middle-aged-guy-loitering-around-the-bread was a State fan, and a Carolina hater, as he stared at me and said "It takes a loyal fan to wear a shirt like that in these parts".

As we all know, in situations like this the witty and scathing and brilliant comebacks occur to you long after the exchange is over. If I had it to do all over again I would have said something along the lines of "Oh, is State playing today?" or "Did State make the NCAA tournament?" or, most harshly "Huh, I didn't think State even made the NIT". But, I'm not a hater. I don't have anything against State. When UNC plays them, I want the Tarheels to win, but that is the extent of my feelings for or against the Wolfpack.

So I was, as I said, taken aback that this random stranger who is a fan of a team whose season has ended and is not in the tournament would openly attack me for support of a team with a number one seed in the tournament, playing that day. Like by cheering for my alma mater, located just down the road, I was spitting in the face of Raleigh State fans. And as jokingly as he may have believed he meant it, his words, as written above, are nothing short of a threat. Like I could get my ass kicked for such an offense? And really, "in these parts"? Like we're in some dangerous wild west where offending the local gang could get me killed?

Not having the benefit of witty timing in this situation, I responded to his - I'm gonna go ahead and call it a threat - I responded to his threat with a friendly smile and "You gotta represent." To which he derisively sneered "You sure are with that shirt" as if my outfit was some insane glorification of fandom, and not a simple blue t-shirt with "Carolina" written on it.

All I wanted was some fucking bread, dude. I didn't come to the grocery store to have an ACC battle of fan loyalties while my rosemary olive oil loaf was being sliced. Not to mention the raging bachelorette party hangover I was pushing my way through to pick up some gametime snacks. So fuck off. That's what I should have said - skipped right past the State jibes, looked him in the face, and just said Fuck Off Asshole.

Wow, that would have been awesome.

Covered in Flour

I had a moment today when I was so pleased with the image I had of myself; I was delighted to see that I had become the sort of person who decided to whip up a loaf of bread as if it was no big deal.

While patting myself on the back for being this sort of handy, crafty, homey creator, I neglected to acknowledge the other images of myself that I have seen over and over again: that I am the sort of person who realizes halfway through mixing that she's out of an ingredient, that I am the sort of person who misses a step in the ingredients, and chiefly, that I am the sort of person that hates the feel of flour.

I decided to try to put aside my uneasiness and discomfort with the grainy feel of that white magnetic powder because my kitchen looked so pretty with my cookbook perched in a book holder, opened to the photo and recipe for "simple white bread". I glanced in my flour cannister and confidently guesstimated that I could provide the requested 4 1/2 cups for the dough. It was only when I fell slightly short of the last half cup that I realized I was supposed to have an additional half a cup to fold in while kneading the bread, and additionally needed the amount necessary to flour my surface for multiple kneadings, along with my rolling pin and dough-encased hands.

I "kneaded" anyway, without the extra flour additions. I reference kneading here in quotes because what I did was much closer to molestation. Without extra flour to stop the dough from sticking, I just squished and squashed the mass between my hands. The recipe instructed me to knead until the dough was smooth and elastic, and not sticking to my hands. I tried to ignore the final detail and scraped the globs from between my now-webbed fingers, with no idea what smooth and elastic dough should look like.

My original bread baking inspiration and pride in myself was based on my decision that I needn't drive to the store to pick up bread to have with dinner - I could just bake a homemade loaf! Shocking confidence, really, given the fact that I had previously only baked one brick of heavy dough where far more ended in the compost than in our bellies. Having decided it would be easier, and I guess more fun, to bake a loaf at home than go to the store, I had to stop my three-hour process of bread-making to drive the four minutes to the grocery store down the road and buy a bag of flour.

My intention was to enjoy fresh bread with last night's reheated leftovers, a worthy goal that I would have realized wasn't feasible if I had read the recipe more carefully and calculated the second hour of rising - putting bread readiness around 9:15pm.

It has, at least, turned out to be a pretty tasty dessert.

Little Brats

Last week I had the great pleasure to spend some time with my 3 1/2-year old niece - and, as I love her and she's mine, she's of course not in any way associated with "little brats". OTHER people's kids are little brats. And it was interacting with them that made me realize I automatically assume as such.

Kara and I enjoyed some time in the sunshine at the park. While Kara climbed on the playground apparatus, I sat on the retaining wall around the edge. At one point, a 5-year-oldish-looking boy walked along the wall right up to me, I think even stubbing me with his feet, and said "Uh oh!". The boy had apparently decided he was a train, and from his ramble it appears he believed he was some sort of 'ghost train', and here I was sitting on the track he was traveling around. I think the boy assumed with his "uh oh", standing right on top of me, and the explanation of the ghost train's needs, I would of course get off the track and let him proceed.

It struck me later what it says about me that I didn't get up. It would have taken a modicum of effort to stand up, lift my purse and Kara's sweatshirt from the wall next to me, and let this little boy pass. But still, I held my ground, listened to the boy's incomprehensible story, and waited for him to give up. I don't know if I would have stood up for Kara - probably. I would have thought her using the wall as a train track was incredibly cute and likely would have been recording the whole thing.

Somehow my refusal to stand and the extended interaction it caused between us led this kid to believe I was playing with him. When I crossed paths with him later, checking on a 'whooops' trip that caused Kara to cry and need a hug but of course not to stop playing, the little boy stopped me by physically grabbing my hand and proceeded to regale me for five minutes with tales of Power Rangers and something that sounded like Tai Chi. If this had been a guy in a bar, I would have used my best "I have no desire to talk to you" stare of disinterest, but as it was a 5-year old, I felt obligated to "um hmm" and "oh, really?" and fake my way through understanding and caring what he had to say.

He was a decent kid and probably thinking of him as a little brat is a bit harsh, but that he had the gall to assume I would move for HIM? And that I should listen to HIM babble? It's not the sort of behavior I enjoy in adults and I think I apply the same standards to little kids (except for my darling, precious, never wrong Kara). Or I'm just a jerk, which is sort of how I felt when I thought back to my refusal to get out of the ghost train's way.