Sadly, he did not.  He informed me that molten sulphur actually isn’t that interesting and that it probably would have been more dangerous to be driving alongside a tanker carrying boiling water.  I wasn’t entirely convinced and asked him to confirm that we weren’t, in fact, RISKING OUR VERY LIVES on the expressway earlier that day, and he sighed and said in a patient if slightly exasperated tone, “You know, Lauren, not all science is the EXPLODEY kind.”

This is not particularly relevant to anything at all, except I am departing tomorrow for vacation and wanted to leave you with something to read in case I don’t have much in the way of internet access/the inclination to blog, and I figured what better reading material to provide than an answer to the burning question that’s on everyone’s minds (i.e. Why is Lauren a writer, not a scientist?).  Stay tuned for the next time I go away, when we’ll tackle the related topic of why I’m not an economist.

It was a very good day.   It’s been a good seven years.

I should note at this particular juncture that the parents we know tend to respond unfavourably to this comparison, but I can assure you it is all in jest, since both Mike and I are very much aware that recent studies have shown that there are a number of crucial differences between babies and dogs.  I was reminded of this fact on the weekend, when I was told a story of a parent assuming their child could swim and everyone in the vicinity discovering in fairly short order that the aforementioned child could NOT, in fact, swim, as she jumped in the pool and had a lot of trouble resurfacing.  Thankfully, the person whose pool was being used for this experiment acted quickly and heroically and the story did not end tragically, but it’s safe to say, I think, that swimming is not something that necessarily comes naturally to babies or even older children for that matter.  This is why many parents shell out their hard-earned money to send their kids on a weekly basis to spend a half hour with Kimberly or Austen at the local rec centre, learning how to tread water and do an inefficient and slightly awkward front crawl and grab miscellaneous items from the bottom of the pool.

Not so with dogs!  It was very warm and humid on Sunday afternoon, so I got it into my head that we should take Daisy out to Snyder’s Flats, which is a little swimmin’ hole on the edge of the Grand River that is unofficially a dog beach (and also unofficially a beach where teenagers drink beer, I think).  This is where I discovered one of those key differences between dogs and babies:  somehow dogs intuitively know how to swim!  (It is true.  It must be in their genetic code somewhere.)  They will glare balefully at you as they paddle around the water, trying desperately to find a rock to stand on and put an end to the indignity, and they will smell pretty bad for a while after, but if you wade into a swimmin’ hole and pull your dog in with you, no heroic actions are required, unless you consider remembering to bring a towel for the back seat of the car to be heroic, in which case heroic acts were indeed required but not performed on Sunday afternoon.

Figuring out what to do with your stuff while you go running in the winter is easy, because a) you have pockets, sometimes many of them, or b) you can use the treadmill in the basement, so you don’t need to figure out what to do with your keys or your water bottle, or c) you can just not go running at all, because it’s winter, the weather is much more conducive to drinking hot chocolate and huddling together to keep warm, what are you some kind of crazy person.  Figuring out what to do with your stuff while you go running in the summer is much more problematic.  At least, it has proven to be problematic for me, since I don’t have a lot of Official Running Gear Used By Serious Runners, like fuel belts and armbands and water bottles that will store your key for you.  I just have yoga pants, a t-shirt, running shoes, a water bottle, my iPhone and, when I go for a run at the park, a giant car key I usually have no idea what to do with.  I have nowhere on my person that is good to store these items, so I tend to clutch them awkwardly and shuffle them back and forth between my hands and wish fanny packs hadn’t gone out of style 20 years ago.

I went for a run at the park last night, and I had what I thought was a genius idea.  (Spoiler alert:  it wasn’t.)  I tied my car key into the drawstring of my pants and jogged up and down to see if it was secure.  (Spoiler alert:  it wasn’t.)  I then headed out on my run, feeling strong and energetic enough in spite of the humidity to add another running interval onto the end, feeling perhaps disproportionately proud of the fact that I passed the same little old Mennonite lady not once but twice, feeling good enough to run up the two small hills almost at the end of the trail, feeling good enough to run up the one major hill at the very end of the trail … feeling at my waistband as I wheezed my way past the very top of the hill to make sure my key was still there.  (Spoiler alert:  it wasn’t.)

I wandered back down the trails, feeling exhausted and sweaty and kind of like a big giant idiot, worried that I wouldn’t find my key and I’d have to walk all the way home, then sad as the Mennonite lady then passed ME as I plodded along, and then subsequently worried that the Mennonite lady had picked up my key somewhere and was in the process of stealing my car.  Thankfully I didn’t have to redo my entire route, because the key was lying in plain sight at the bottom of the three hills, so I picked them up and headed back in the direction of my car.

However.  As I arrived at the base of the very big hill, Eye of the Tiger started playing on my earbuds, and I wasn’t exactly about to take that kind of thing lying down, so I had what I thought was another very good idea:  to run up the very big hill for the second time in ten minutes.  (Yeah, it really really wasn’t.)  I had to sit in the car for five minutes before I felt alert and hydrated enough to drive home without endangering myself and other motorists, thinking as I sat there, there are just SO MANY reasons why I will never be an athlete.

I enjoyed the books a lot, because they’re funny and clever and witty in that dry, British way.  There’s also something bittersweet about discovering a style of writing you really love long after the author has died, because you can’t truly enjoy it because you’re always aware in the back of your mind that after these books are over, that’s it, there aren’t any more (at least until someone comes along who is arrogant enough to write a new book to go along with what is already a beloved series of books, and that arrogant person somehow gets the blessing of the writer’s estate … but I suppose that’s a whole other issue for a whole other blog post) but you also feel like you really should savour it, for exactly the same reason.

One of the bits I loved most in one of the Hitchhiker books was the character of Wonko The Sane, who decides at one point (after seeing instructions on a package of toothpicks that outline how to USE the toothpicks) that every single other person on the planet has gone completely insane, and proceeds to build an insane asylum for all the crazy people.  The gag is that the INSIDE of the “asylum” as it were is everything OUTSIDE his house in California, where he lives with his wife and which he refers to as The Outside of the Asylum.  It’s a little bit complicated, spatially, but I think he’s a great character because who doesn’t have days where they feel like poor old Wonko, where you feel like nobody else is making any sense WHATSOEVER.

I’ll admit to having one of those days today.  I certainly don’t claim to have it all figured out in my own life, but every once in a while there is a period of a few hours where it seems perfectly clear what is wrong in everybody ELSE’S life, and I become convinced that not only is everyone just plain doing it wrong, if only they would listen to ME, their situations would improve immensely and they’d be so overjoyed they’d bake me a cake and throw me a parade, but more like a parade FOR me, rather than one FEATURING me, because the idea of being featured in a parade makes me clammy with terror.  I don’t know where this feeling comes from (the certainty that everyone else is crazy, not the clamminess) and it never lasts long enough for me to quite get around to setting up my five cent psychiatric consultation service a la Lucy from Charlie Brown, but I swear during these moments that if I had beach-front property in California (or anywhere in the world, for that matter) I’m not sure I’d be able to resist the urge to wash my hands of the world and retreat to my sanctuary away from all the crazy people.

My parents came to visit this weekend, which means that, like every child in the last thousand years who has had their mother come to visit, regardless of whether the aforementioned mother is the type to wander around the house and make comments about the piles of dog here and kitchen that still kind of smells like rice pudding (I should make it very clear that my mother is NOT, thankfully, one of THOSE types of mothers) I freaked out and tried to clean everything in the house.  But I couldn’t clean everything early in the week because it would just get dirty again (I’m not sure why this happens, but I’ve been led to believe it has something to do with the second law of thermodynamics) so I spent the first part of the week fretting a little bit, and the second part of the week sweeping the cobwebs off the front steps and asking Mike to change lightbulbs and standing at the sink with a soapy rag in my hands, realizing that in all of my almost 29 years, I have never even once thought to myself, “Wow, that is one DIRTY FAUCET!” unless I was standing in my own kitchen, at my own sink, right before my mother came to visit.

Numb3rs (I almost couldn’t do it — seriously, the letter e exists for a reason, people) was cancelled a year or two ago, which is fine with us because as of a few months ago we were still a couple of seasons behind.  The summer is a good time to catch up on shows you’re behind on, which is what we’ve been doing gradually over the spring and at this point we’re about halfway through the last season.  The last season is a little odd, and it seems like they knew ahead of time they were going to be cancelled and just said “to heck with normal camera shots, we’re going to do a little something we like to call GUN CAM!” and “I’m not sure exactly how, but I don’t see why we couldn’t work in a heavyhanded reference to Survivor at some point in this episode” and “I keep hearing the baristas at Starbucks talk about this Twitter thing — maybe we should try to work it awkwardly into the show somehow?”

All of this is a rather indirect way of getting to my actual POINT, which is the fact that there is a character on the show named Ian Edgerton.  Ian Edgerton is a very successful, very enigmatic FBI sniper slash fugitive hunter.  Ian Edgerton is played by Lou Diamond Phillips.  I knew that name, but I wasn’t sure what else I’d seen him in, so I switched from Angry Birds to Wikipedia and after sifting through a lot of really uninteresting biographical information (including the fact that he was married to Kelly Preston, but not the same Kelly Preston who is now married to John Travolta) I was rewarded for my persistence with the fact that very soon Lou will be celebrating the release of his autobiography, which is called (and I swear I am not making this up) A Diamond Phillips In The Rough.  I offer this to you for your enjoyment without further commentary, except to say that I really would have liked to be a fly on the wall in the brainstorming meeting where that title was deemed the best they could come up with.

Me:  I made rice pudding but my pudding science was off and it tasted like scorched milk and death.  I am sad.

Mike:  That is very sad.  Pudding science is tricky business.

Me:  I probably should have just eaten some of the pudding we already had.

Mike:  We have pudding?

That last bit is only funny if you’re aware of the fact (and I probably should have led with this bit, but oh well) that we have something like 36 pudding cups in a closet in our basement because I went shopping to the United States with Pam a couple of weekends ago and we went to Kroger and in a fit of bargain-induced madness we each bought 10 packages of pudding cups for the low, low price of $10.  (I KNOW!)  I really have no idea what happened, except that I like pudding and consider it to be a not-terrible-for-me sort of treat (according to what sort of nutritional math I’m not entirely sure, maybe when compared to mainlining a whole carton of Haagen Dazs?) (not that I would do such a thing) (I prefer Ben & Jerry’s anyway) and sometimes I get it into my head that in case of nuclear warfare or zombie apocolpyse, it would be nice to know I have some portable snacks to eat while huddled fearfully in my basement or toss in my backpack before I head out on the run through the desolate streets of a once beautiful city.  It’s the same thing that happened when I bought all of those animal crackers, but at least in that case I didn’t then turn around a week later and make the problem worse by trying to bake MORE animal crackers because I accidentally bought too much flour or something.

All of this is to say that when going to the grocery store, proper planning = Very Important.

Anyway, I forgot to print off the recipe and while standing in the dairy aisle at Price Chopper, Mike said he thought the recipe called for a little bit of cream and a lot of whole milk.  That’s what we bought, but it turns out the recipe ACTUALLY called for a lot of cream and a little bit of whole milk, and since I am not regularly preparing bottles for a toddler or making lattes a la Starbucks circa 2005, I have had a giant red carton of useless milk in our fridge for several days now.  This morning, two of the blogs I read every day mentioned something about rice pudding, and the idea lightbulb went on above my head with a little “PING!” sound like it does in cartoons because a) I love rice pudding, b) rice pudding recipes always call for whole milk, and c) I thought maybe I could freeze most of it to eat at a later date.  The recipe I dug up called for whole grain rice, which we don’t have, but we did have arborio rice, and I thought to myself, “If arborio rice can make delicious, creamy risotto, SURELY it can make RICE PUDDING!”  Then I read the recipe creator’s comment that changing the kind of rice will likely affect the quantities of liquid you need and that she couldn’t guarantee the recipe would turn out very well if it was messed with in any way, and like Icarus flying too close to the sun I did some quick pudding science in my brain and thought to myself, “Arborio rice is STICKIER and STARCHIER than regular rice, so if anything this rice pudding will be EVEN MORE AWESOME!”

I’m sure you can see where this is going.  I have been getting up every five minutes for OVER AN HOUR to go stir the gelatinous mess bubbling away on our stovetop, and I’m not sure I’m any closer to anything resembling rice pudding than I was when the idea first occurred to me, except now every corner of our house smells strongly of hubris and burned milk.