Sunday morning I woke up at 1:30 to the sounds of my daughter crying. I went to check on her and discovered she wanted her star light turned back on. That was all it took to make her happy. As I went back to my bed I set the clock an hour forward as the time change was coming up soon.
It made little difference. I rose from bed at new 6:30 thinking I had an hour to do things until it was time to start getting ready, but then it hit me. That hour was gone. It had faded to dust, no longer in existence. It was time to start getting ready immediately.
One would think that having to be at church by 8:30 would mean getting up at 6:30 would still leave time to do a few things for yourself, but the person that thinks that doesn’t have three children to get ready. The meant it was right to walking the dog, getting kids dressed, getting them breakfast, getting their shoes and coats on, and getting them loaded in the car. Even with our awareness of the situation we still felt like we were running behind.
After church we headed to lunch and then home. From home I had to immediately head back out for a couple work appointments before coming home and starting in on a recipe. It wasn’t a dish that truly required two and a half hours to make but it benefited from it. I was making gumbo bourbon chili for a chili cook-off that evening and decided to make it complex.
I started by smoking a half pound flat iron steak with alder wood, I then salted onions, garlic, shallots, poblano peppers, celery, and hatch green chilis before deglazing that pan with bourbon, in a separate dish I browned the ground beef and some andouille sausage while making a dark roux in our dutch oven, the final step was to bring all the ingredients together and let it simmer for an hour so the flavors could mingle. It wasn’t an easy recipe to make as one can imagine any recipe requiring four different pans and shifts on the stove is, but it was good.
We got the chili done and off to the event where I had to serve the chili instead of eating it and only got one small bowl near the end of the evening. It was all good. My dish went over well and got lots of comments even if it didn’t win, which bothers me far more than it should.
Once those festivities were done it was back home for the kids bed time, but first I had one more work appointment and then it was time to help put the kids to bed. That seamlessly flowed into my own bedtime and the next day which was full of work and personal appointments and a few other incidents like a flat tire that really heightened my sense of having lost an hour.
This morning I woke up refreshed and ready to go. I still mourned the loss of that hour but no longer felt it as much as I had the two previous days. Navigating the day around having a single car was not the simplest thing, but we managed and the end of the day has been reached. The only hope is that tomorrow things start to go the way we want and we can get this week on track.
David Huzzard Writes 