I make a damn good chili in the crock pot. It takes about 8-10 hours. Typically I make it for football on Sundays. For a short period I was living at home with the folks after college, and decided to make chili one weekend for the game.
Of course I was just out of college and it was Saturday. This, as many of you know, means I’d been drinking quite heavily. Since it took 8+ hours it needed to be made early in the morning to be ready for a midday kickoff.
I get home from the bars around 4 AM. Fired up the chili. Added the ingredients. Set the crock pot, and went to bed. My mom woke me at about 11 AM saying the chili smelled a little funny. I went and checked it, looked at the empty spice containers and noticed that I’d added a full shaker of nutmeg instead of chili powder.
Once in the dim dark days, I was a bank teller. The Head office branch I was at was one of only two branches in the state which had a central cash system. Cash coming in over the counter went into a strong box in a pillar located behind the teller, trash went into bin on our right hand side. One day, I’m tallying up and I’m $400 short. I had to go through the day’s trash for a 24 storey building to find the deposit I had thrown in the wrong slot…
I locked my keys in my car once while the car was running. (I heard something funny from the engine, popped the hood and went out to investigate, but when I shut the door I locked it. The great thing was, I was on a date at the time. You all know where this is going…yes, she married me.
Oh man, I am crying from laughing so hard. I can definitely relate, so many times I catch myself doing the oddest things.
3 days ago I got up, went into the bathroom and squirted shaving gel onto my toothbrush, thank god I realized it before it went in my mouth. I did have to throw out that toothbrush though.
I’m glad I’m not the only one that rip the tops off of sugar packets and then throw the packets away.
I’ve also poured the sugar packets into my travel mug and then filled it with Coke from the fountain drink machine instead of coffee.
The number of coffee-related incidents mentioned leads me to believe that we coffee-drinkers are caught in a perpetual Catch-22: We need the coffee so we can wake up, but we’re obviously not awake when we’re trying to make it, but we need it before we make it so we can be awake and do it right. Right?
Speaking of coffee…I have often left mugs of it inside the hallway closet on the shelf, because I had them with me when looking for a towel or a videotape. I find them much later or even the next day.
I have found my empty coffee mugs in the oddest places. The bathroom cupboard, the linen closest, halfway under the bed, in my laundry hamper (?), in the trunk of my car, etc. And I can’t count how many times I’ve brewed myself a lovely french press full of steaming hot… water. How asleep must I have been to not notice that, right after pouring the hot water into where the coffee grounds should have been, the water was CLEAR?!
What with all the coffee-related mishaps I have to ask: Don’t they make automatic coffee machines any more? You know, set it up while you’re awake, set the timer, go to bed and wake up to fresh coffee?
I figured out a long time ago how to remind myself to do something: I leave notes in my shoes. Sounds dumb, I know but I never leave the house without shoes (thank you Texas Fire Ants.)
Last summer I had to write a check as a deposit on a dorm room. I got out my checkbook, filled in the date and then wrote in the amount: $5000. Then I wrote the amount in words: Five Thousand Dollars. Then I signed it.
And then a voice in the back of my head said, “Five thousand dollars? That’s a lot of money…”
:eek:
Five Hundred dollars, not thousand. So I ripped up the first check and then wrote a second, signed it … and then noticed that it was in the amount of $5000. :smack: I did get the third one right, though.
I once lifted a wine cooler to my lips after it had been left unattended for a few minutes. The yellow jacket got me just on the inside of my upper lip. I looked like a duck.
Sadly, an automatic coffee maker wouldn’t have helped me with my most memorable one. I made some coffee, got a bowl of cereal, grabbed a clean mug to put the coffee in, pulled the milk out of the fridge to pour onto the cereal and into the coffee - and then proceeded to pour my coffee onto the cereal instead of into my mug.
ExTank, I’m 22 with nary a gray hair in sight. I sometimes believe it’s my role in life to comfort people who think their absentmindedness is due to age, as I always have a story to top them.
For my parents’ first date, they went to a dance. After the dance, they went outside and found that my dad’s car wouldn’t go. It would start, and it would go in reverse, but it wouldn’t go forward.
He didn’t live very far away, so he ran home, borrowed his brother’s car, drove it back to the dance and picked up my mother.
Why wouldn’t the car move? He had the parking brake on.
What’s even worse? He had apparently discovered that the car would go in reverse but not forward with the brake on earlier that day and had reported it to his brother–the one who loaned him the car.
I make a great paprika chicken in the slow cooker. Basically what you do is put about ten chicken thighs in the slow cooker and top them with a sliced onion. Then you put a few tablespoons of chicken stock into a small bowl and stir two or three tablespoons of paprika into it. You pour this mixture over the chicken and set the timer to eight or ten hours on low. The sauce is made with the grease left from the chicken.
I served me and my husband with the paprika chicken on fresh bismati rice. I eat the rice first, with a little sauce. He eats the chicken first.
He had this really peculiar expression on his face, and turned to ask me, “Is this paprika bad? How much did you use?”
A little hurt, I said, “The regular amount.”
“Where did you get it?”
A little more hurt now, I said, “You know, we bought that huge container of paprika at GFS the other day. I used that. It can’t be bad, it’s really fresh.”
“We didn’t buy paprika at GFS.”
“Huh? Of course we did!”
Turns out we didn’t. We had bought the ingredients for his spice rub, one of which is paprika but we didn’t buy paprika. We had bought big things of garlic powder and cayenne.
The cayenne chicken was good though. A little spicy, but good.
There was the time I put the lettuce in the freezer and the ice cream in the fridge. (Fortunately, my mom was visiting and discovered the ice cream before it melted all over the fridge – but the lettuce was a goner. Extra-crispy doesn’t work so well for lettuce.)
I’ve made coffee so many times with coffee in the coffeemaker and no water, it’s not even funny. And I routinely have to tear the house apart to find the book I’m reading that I just put down somewhere five minutes ago. I actually went out recently and ended up buying a hardcover copy of a paperback that I couldn’t locate because I was so tired of looking for it. Of course, the paperback turned up almost immediately thereafter.
My most recent good one was putting a half dozen eggs on to boil so I could have hard-boiled eggs on a pasta salad. Then I went and lay down for a nap. I was awakened an hour later by loud cracking noises. Turns out that when the pan boils dry and the eggshells hit the hot metal, they first turn brown and then start breaking quite spectacularly.
And it only took me an hour to scrub the gunk off the pan. (It was one of my best saucepans so I wasn’t about to throw it out, no matter how tempting it was!)
I don’t think it has anything to do with age. It just has to do with paying attention to what you’re doing. Which apparently is not something I’m prone to doing.
I have done similar things many times, and the part that makes me question my sanity is that midway into the action, I will realize what I’m doing, but am unable to stop my hand from throwing it into the garbage.
Case in point, I have unwrapped a block of cheddar cheese, and then instead of throwing the wrapper in the trash I have thrown the cheese in the trash. As I step on the pedal-thingy to open the trash can, my brain realizes what is going on and screams silently to itself, “What the hell are you doing! That’s the cheese! You’re throwing away the cheese!” My hand will then drop the cheese into the can, as I shout at myself. “AAAhhhrrgg!” The entire episode occurs in about 3 seconds. Much swearing ensues.
I’ve spent the past several weeks packing for my move next weekend. A few days ago I realized that I couldn’t find my cell phone charger. I found it just a few minutes ago in the box with my DVDs.
The sad thing is that I vaguely remember putting it there for safekeeping so that it wouldn’t get lost.
I’ve locked myself out of my house three times in the last two and a half years. Naturally, on two of those occasions I didn’t have my cell phone on me.
I once dropped a letter into an eyeglasses drop box. It looked like a mailbox, except it was green. Hello, dumbass. (Someone thoughtfully mailed the letter, fortunately.)
I once dropped my rent check into the FedEx drop box instead of the mailbox. (The FedEx guy put it in the US mail for me, again fortunately.)
The worst absentminded thing I did was about a year ago, I was cooking something and I turned the stove off slowly. The fire went out before I had completely shut off the gas, and my apartment began to fill with gas. It was so slow that I didn’t even notice it until it started raining, so I had to go outside to bring my bike in. After a minute of smelling clean air, the gas smell in my apartment was suddenly intense, and I turned off the gas and opened the back door. Now I double check to make sure I’ve turned off the burner all the way every time I cook. Eek!
My dad is just as absentminded, if not more. When I was a kid, the hidden extra key went missing. My dad blamed me for weeks and weeks, and I started to doubt my own sanity - until dad found the key in his robe pocket. And once he put the remote control in the laundry basket. We spent a frustrated week of having to get up to change the channel, if you can imagine the horror, until I folded the clean laundry and found the remote.
My mom forgets stuff too, but in her case, I’m pretty sure it’s a matter of only remembering events the way she wants to.