The kid has slept through the night! Twice! Two nights in a row! Asleep from 9:30pm-5:30am. OMG the bliss of it all! I want to order a parade all about sleep! There could be floats made to look like giant mattresses and comfy recliners and fluffy pillows and HOURS OF UTTER RESTFUL OBLIVION.

It may seem like I’m over-reacting. I mean hell, it’s just sleep right? Look at the new mom being all drama like “look at me, I’m sleep deprived, I’m fulfilling a stereotype about newborn baby sleep patterns, blah blah blah”. And if I hadn’t just survived the last three months of my life on catnaps and Red Bull, I would agree.

Anyway, I’m all rested an’ shit now. I have all this energy now, and it’s like the simple act of getting 7 hours of uninterrupted sleep for the first time in three months has brought the world around me into sharper focus. The sun is brighter, the rain more poetic, the breeze sweeter, the food more savoury, the house more … filthy, actually. I was shaving my legs this morning when the mold in my shower tile grout spontaneously formed a new life that sauntered out of the bathroom and was all “Damn girl, you got some dustbunnies”. So this weekend, we clean.

Thank you sleep! You awoke me to the squallor of my home!

Honestly, not much has changed. I don’t sleep much, and the less said about my shower tile grout, the better. But hey, I don’t drink RedBull anymore! Progress!

(this all has very little to do with The Music Man. Apparently my freshly sleep-un-deprived self felt a triumph similar to leading a parade? who knows)

So, I’m a slacker.

Or, more accurately, I’ve been really really active at doing ANYTHING BUT updating my blog. The whole foodblogger thing has kinda been played out, hasn’t it Internet? I mean, everybody and their mother has a food blog these days. And yet here I am. Because ya know what? Food is meant to be shared and recipes shouldn’t be hoarded. I’m on a mission, dammit. A crusade for the happiness of all tummies everywhere!

What sets me apart from other foodbloggers? Not a damn thing. Except maybe the fact that I’m dropping any pretense of a cohesive vision for the recipes I toss up on this site, in favor of ACTUALLY POSTING said recipes.

Time management, man. It’s all about compromise. And about shipping your kids off to your mother’s house for the weekend so you actually have time to manage.

So! Let’s ease back into this, shall we?

Halloween happened not too long ago. This year, The Boy was a ghost. We’re talkin’ old school, with the white bedsheet with eyeholes (and a mouth hole – The Boy insisted). He was a smashing success! Folks really seemed to dig the classic cheap-ass homemade costume. In a neighborhood swarmed by princesses and Jedi and anime characters, he was the only plain ol’ ghost. This prompted people to heap candy upon him by the handful. The Girl, it should be noted, had many costume options but chose to abstain, preferring to supervise the evening from the sanity of her stroller.

Anyway, a week of steady snacking by the whole family later, we still had a massive pile of brightly packaged sugar. So I picked out everything chocolate-based.

Anything involving peanut butter was devoured before November 1st dawned.

I didn’t want these guys to feel unloved. Oh, Milky Way! Just because you’re a poor man’s Snickers, doesn’t mean you’ll be allowed to grow dusty and stale and eventually be negligently thrown in the garbage! That’s a fate we reserve just for the Tootsie Rolls. Because seriously, eff Tootsie Rolls.

So I decided to do for them what I once did for band candy. Turn them into cookies. Honestly, this may be my solution to all of life’s problems.

First! I stripped ‘em all nekkid.

Also a perfectly good solution to all of life's problems.

Note: anything involving caramel should be put in the freezer for about 10 minutes. This will firm up the caramel and minimize cussing as you proceed to through the next steps.

Next, I took a knife to the little darlings and lovingly hacked them to bits. Except the M&Ms. They needed no hacking.

Also, also a solution to all of life's problems. Ya know, for a psychopath.

See what I mean about firming up that caramel? This would be one massive sticky glob of rage-inducing hate-candy if I’d skipped that particular step.

Then I made cookie dough. Too lazy to post the recipe, I shall instead just sort of shrug in the general direction of this link. Click on it, and marvel at a time when I was both dedicated to foodblogging and thorough in my cross-posting.

Cookie dough is cookie dough, y’all. Sugar and butter and flour and omg …

Pictured above: the undoing of self restraint.

… for real, nobody will judge you if some of this ends up in your mouth prior to baking. Particularly the choice bits with the slowly-melting caramel chunks. You’re among friends, here.

Here is where I would typically include pictures of the little scooped-out balls of dough lined up on the cookie sheet. Or artful shots of the cookies as they sat cooling on the racks, or fresh out of the oven with little random bursts of caramel and nougat making pools of delicious at the edges of some of the cookies. But I won’t, because my phone hates me.

Lemme ‘splain.

I recently got a fancy schmancy Android 2 smartphone. The camera on this phone is better than the camera in my camera. So I’ve been using the phone pretty much exclusively for picture taking lately. In order to get pics from the phone to the computer, I had to email them to myself. One of those emails – the one with the mid-baking pics – arrived SANS PICTURES. Which I didn’ realize until after I had deleted the original pics from my phone.

Shucks and other comments.

And so today, I have only the finished product shots. And they are glorious.

So ... many ... cookies.

The good news – the Halloween candy is gone! The bad news – I now have dozens of cookies in the house. My coworkers had best brace for sugar impact on Monday, is what I’m saying.

INCOMING!

This is becoming a standard response for me. Most folks have Fight or Flight. I have Fight, Flight, or Make Muffins.

Pantry Muffins (cost: minimal, yield: couple-dozen-ish)
4 cups all-purpose flour
2.5 tsps baking soda
2 tsps cinnamon
1 tsp salt

1 cup white sugar
1 cup brown sugar
2/3 cup applesauce
6 whole eggs
2 tsps vanilla
2 cups sweet potato, grated
1 cup zucchini, grated
1 cup walnuts, chopped
1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips

I know, right. Look at those quantities! This is a big damn recipe, but go with me on this. I had all kinds of crap to clear out of my pantry. For instance …

Amusingly-shaped veggies that nobody in my house will eat but me, and refugees from holiday cookie recipes.

We start with the manual labor. Those veggies need prepping. And let me just tell you – peeling a sweet potato is no mean feat. Particularly when the closest thing you have to a vegetable peeler is a paring knife, and your fine motor skills are questonable at best. I didn’t exactly cut myself, but my fingertips held their breath throughout the process. Which is possible.

Anyway, lop the end off the zucchini and peel the taters till they’re nice and naked.

"Naked Potato" will someday be the name of my culinary punk band.

Then whip out your grater and grate them. And grate them. Grate grate grate. I’ve typed that word so many times now, it doesn’t even look like it’s spelled right. It’s lost all meaning. Just like my right tricep lost all feeling by the time I was done grating this mess up.

Seriously, if you have a strapping young houseboy hanging about who needs a task, give him this one. Those sweet potatoes are tough!

Naked Potato's first hit single: "Daffy Broad Forgot To Mention Walnuts"

Roughage prepped, set it all aside. Now, see that ingredient list up there? Take the first four, and sift them all together into a bowl.

This is Naked Potato’s version of the Tony Montana cocaine mountain. Rock n’ roll!

 Set the sifty goodness aside, and consider the other two vagrant loitering ingredients from the pantry.  

Applesauce plays bass. Brown sugar is on the tambourine.

Yes, I could have used oil instead of applesauce in this recipe. Or even butter. But applesauce is healthier and I had just enough left in this monster-sized jar to fit into this recipe. Ditto for the brown sugar. Fate smiled on these muffins.

Have you tried substituting applesauce for oil in your baking recipes? You should. It makes everything so much more healthy, that you can eat twice as many of whatever you’ve baked and not gain a single pound! (untrue)

Throw the applesauce and the two cups of various sugars into a bowl and mix ‘em. It looks a little discouraging at first, but go with it.

Title of our first album: "Ugly Sugar Mix"

Once that’s all combined, start adding the eggs one at a time. Don’t take a picture of this, though. You’ll be too distracted by the fact that one of your eggs had two yolks in it. TWO! YOLKS! 

I was flabbergasted. Truly, I was. There was a mix of awe and curiosity and surprise that was just right to qualify as flabbergastation.

Here, take a look:

The first Naked Potato tabloid scandal - cooking with unborn conjoined twins!

By the way, if you’re a clumsy egg-cracker like me, do yourself a favor and crack your eggs into a handy (somewhat sugar-coated) measuring cup first, and then dump the egg into your mix. Fishing eggshells out of muffin batter is no fun. And if you skip this step, you don’t get to take freaky dual-yolk pictures.

Once all the eggs are mixed in, dump in your prepped veggies. Beg your stand mixer’s forgiveness, for you are about to test its limits sorely. See, once the veggies are in …

Thusly

… then you’ll be turning that mixer (or your poor tired arm) on low and adding the flour mixture a little bit at a time.

This is a lengthy process that requires both hands, unless you’re way more coordinated than I am (which is likely, considering my natural rhino-like grace), so there’s not a lot of pictures. Suffice it to say, you don’t want to over-mix it. Just enough to get the flour stuff mostly combined.

It’ll be ugly, and lumpy, and have worrisome dry spots. Learn to love them, for this is how you get fluffy muffines.

(insert Naked Potato joke here)

Pre-heat das oven to 350 and grab a coupla muffin tins. I’d like to say that I was prepared and had muffin paper thingies with which to line the tins, but that would be a lie. A lie easily disproven by my own photos, in which you can clearly see that I hosed the tins down with non-stick cooking spray instead.

I like my muffin tins like I like my men - greasy and hard to scrub clean.

Also, filled the cups right up to the top. Why? Because I like fluffy muffintops.

On my muffins, that is. Not on my hips.

So a good 20-25 minutes at 350 degrees, and your muffins will be golden and ready for devouring. Stick a toothpick in to see if they’re done, but recall that there are chocolate chips in there, so your done-ness test may be fouled by chocolatey wonderfulness. Not that chocolatey wonderfulness can ever really foul anything.

The finished product ain’t pretty. But is sure is tasty, and bursting with veggies and chocolate and nuts and yum.

And my pantry has more space in it now. Mission accomplished!

FRIEND: when is it? (I’m gay remember?)

ME: omg live the stereotype down. this Sunday

FRIEND:  This sunday? Whoa… sorry…I have plans…cause this sunday…THE ROAD TO WRESTLEMANIA BEGINS AT THE ROYAL RUMBLE!!!!! OH YEAH BROTHER!

ME:  wait what? WWE has a PPV on Superbowl Sunday?

FRIEND:  isnt that crazy? i had no idea the superbowl was this sunday

ME:  that’s such a redneck Sophie’s Choice

(update: I totally had the wrong date for the Superbowl.)

So. To Santa, or not to Santa.

When I was a kid, Santa was the real deal. I’d go to bed on Christmas Eve, having opened my traditional one present (side note – one year, that present was an empty damn box. Mom maintains that she had gotten into a wrapping frenzy and accidentally wrapped an empty box and I just so happened to select that one for my Christmas Eve present, but that’s an awful lot of coincidence if you ask me. Ultimately, I was allowed to select another present to open, but for one long horrible moment I’d been thoroughly Grinched) (and apparently am still a bit traumatized by this experience) (what the hell was I saying? oh right …) I’d go to bed on Christmas Eve, and wake up the next morning to a full stocking and a few extra gifts from Santa. The bulk of the presents, though, were under the tree and clearly from real people, not jolly old elves. This, I feel is the way to go. A friend recently told me that his girlfriend makes every single present that her daughter receives “from Santa”. Wow, really? Mommy and Daddy got you nothing, but the anonymous elderly fat man who breaks into your house annually, that guy showers you with toys. Weird.

I don’t remember when I stopped believing in Santa. There’s no great shock involved, there. Yet another friend (I’ve consulted far and wide on this issue, as you can see) tells me that she was devastated when she found out The Truth About Santa. The capitalization is clear in her tone when she says it. Discovering that her family had been lying to her for years was a great betrayal in her child-like eyes. This seems a bit excessive to me, but what if my son feels the same way? What if we start perpetuating this charming tale of yearly B&E, only to have his dreams dashed in a firestorm of hurt and betrayal years down the line? The Husband is all for the Santa idea, thinks I’m being silly, but how can I risk such a thing??

You know what’ll help me decide? Cookies. I’ll get The Boy to help me make them. And then if it just happens naturally that a small plate of said cookies gets left by the fireplace with a glass of milk, well …

In an attempt to revive my blogginess, I logged into my old Myspace account and started re-reading old blog entries from back in The Day. Some of them are quite entertaining (in my very modest opinion) and I shall share them here.

First up: a post made on 2/14/2008 about a dream I’d had the night before. Note the lack of any mention of Valentine’s Day.

*****

FRIEND: LOOK AT HER BUTT.

ME: I need to start calling more people Rump-a-smooth-skin

FRIEND: Speaking of butts, I watched a documentary last night.

FRIEND: Directed by Method Man from Wu Tang Clan.

FRIEND: They went to 5 different cities and went to strip clubs.

FRIEND: Oh, and they interviewed some girls too.

FRIEND: But mostly it was boobie footage.

ME: what was the point of this documentary?

ME: other than boobs

FRIEND: I’m….not sure.

FRIEND: At the very end, Method Man got all serious and talked for about 45 seconds about how these women are just doing their job, performing a service, showing up on time and clocking hours just like the rest of us. So we shouldn’t judge.

FRIEND: And then there was a butt montage.

FRIEND: I can’t say I was surprised.

ME: hahahahaha

FRIEND: I’m not even sure why we watched it! We were scrolling thru Hulu, and I just wanted to see the first 5 minutes to see what a train wreck it would be.

FRIEND: We ended up watching the whole thing! An hour’s worth of boobs!

ME: aw, thanks Hulu!

ME: just what you always wanted

The point is, I had lobster ravioli.

When eating at restaurants, I try to order food that I would never make for myself. Normally this ends up being a salad because I hate making salads because UGH ALL THE CHOPPING. But this time it was rich, decadent lobster filling packed into these huge fresh raviolis. There was creamy sauce. And extra lobster meat sprinkled on top. I could not finish it. There was one lone ravioli left on my plate that nobody was going to eat. The Husband loathes seafood, and no way was I going to stick that single pasta pocket in our car to sit in the hot night and ferment whilst we watched a movie so I could come back to the car and sit in overheated aged seafood stink for the whole ride home. It would only ruin the memory of the original meal, which had been a heavenly delight. And we couldn’t have that, now could we? No we could NOT.

What was I saying? Oh right, gas.

I don’t eat terribly rich food often. And even less frequently does that rich food involve succulent shellfish. My digestive system has been … rather cross with me ever since. I’ve been scouring the internet to find some kind of cubicle device, like maybe hazardous warning signs, or POLICE-LINE-DO-NOT-CROSS tape that I can string up across the entrance to my cube. My poor coworkers. They deserve to be warned. Until further notice, it’s really best to just instant message me. Or call me. Or holler from across the room. Whatever you do, don’t come into my tootmosphere.

It’s been days, though! Shouldn’t the infernal bubblings cease? I suppose it doesn’t help that I’m sipping a carbonated beverage at this very moment.

Gosh I’m smart. And gassy. Stay over there.

Let’s get re-acquainted, shall we? I’m Skwishface. Not really, but it’ll do for internet purposes. Wife of one, mother of two, keeper of entirely too many pets. Cook a lot, snark a lot, avoid posting on my blog a lot (lately). But let’s not dwell on the unpleasant past. Instead, let us look to the future.

The bright, shining future. Full of jam.

Oh yes, jam. Bright jars of homemade jewel-colored deliciousness. It’s an intimidating prospect, right up until you realize how ridiculously easy it is. There are about a bajillion steps, though, so get comfy. This is gonna be a long one.

Pineapple-Jalapeno Jam (cost: about $6, yields: 10 8oz. jars)
5 cups crushed fresh pineapple, and juices
1 large jalapeno, seeded and chopped fine (or two small)
1 49g package of fruit pectin
7 cups sugar
1 tablespoon butter (optional)

Firstly, we must prepare the jars. The jam will be hot once it’s cooked, and you can’t put hot jam into cold jars, lest you get cracked and shattered jars. Unless you’re into that sort of thing.

Sterlize your jars and lids by running them through a cycle in the dishwasher with  no soap. Or hand-washing them. Or baking them in the oven at 200 degrees for about 10 minutes. Up to you. The world of jar sterilization is your oyster.

Once that’s done, find the biggest, deepest pot you’ve got, carefully drop in the jars, and fill it up with water.

This takes approximately nine years.

Set that pot on the stove to simmer. It’ll keep your jars nice and warm. You should also put the lids and bands for the jars in another, smaller pot to simmer. Don’t take a picture of this, though.

A word on jars. I’ve been using Kerr 8-oz quilted jars, and I digs ‘em. You can order them online, or you can poke around in your local Wal-Mart or any grocery store, and they’ll be hidden away somewhere. Whatever kind you get, be sure to make a note of the mouth size. Sounds vaguely dirty, but it’s an important detail – the size of the opening at the top of the jar dictates the size of the lid. Since lids are only good for one use, but jars can be used over and over til kingdom come, you’ll likely have to buy new lids at some point. These jars are “regular mouth”. Tee hee!

Moving on! Allow me to introduce you to the star of the show.

Star, you. You, star.

Pineapples are delicious. Juicy. Bright. And kind of a pain to chop up.

Start by lopping of your pineapple’s feet and spikey hair. Giggle because this makes you feel like a medieval produce torturer.

Confess to heresy, tropical fruit!

Then stand it up on end and cut it into fourths.

Confess, I say!

Then take each fourth, and slice out the center core. It is tough and chewy and unpleasant to eat. I know people like that. *rimshot!*

You shall be excommunicated from the Kingdom of The Refrigerator! Confess!

And then take each fourth in your chubby pink fingers and slice off the armor plating.

Ah, I believe the accused wishes to confess ....

Trim away all the annoying little round spikey brown bits that remain, and soon you’ll have four lovely planks of pineapple.

FREEEEEEEEDOOOOOOOOM!

Truth be told, my pineapples were a bit on the small side, so it took about a pineapple and a half for this recipe.

Hack up the planks into chunks, and toss them in your friendly neighborhood food processor.

Don't worry. It won't feel a thing.

Then whir it around till you get the consistency you want. I went with semi-chunky.

Which is a valid culinary term.

Set the pineapple aside to think about what it’s done, and move on to the jalapeno.

Where my pineapples were small, my pepper was not. So I only used one in this batch of jam. You can use more if you like. Follow your heart.

The key here is to chop up your pepper fine, so that the chunks of spicy are about the same size as the chunks of fruity. It would be awesome to leave the pineapple in big chunks and have whole rings of jalapeno floating around in there. Hmm .. next time!

And now, jalapeno cutting montage!

Looks sweet and innocent, no?

Lies! All lies! The white bits are made of PAIN! Omit as desired.

Choppy choppy choppy into teeny tiny pieces.

Then dump the pineapple chunks, juices and all, into your other biggest pot along with the jalapeno. Gaze upon the happy bright deliciousness.

Resist the urge to add some chopped onion and cilantro and eat it like salsa.

Now, how does a pot full of fruity mush turn into firm, gelatinous jam? What kitchen magic can we work to bring about this amazing transformation? At what price do we obtain this miracle?

About 50 cents, as it turns out.

 Before putting the pot full of fruit in the stove, dump in one packet of fruit pectin. This weird, white powdery stuff is basically the starchy business that gives fruits their firmness and texture. The more ripe a fruit is, the more its natural pectin has broken down, and therefore the more mushy it is. Pectin is the thickening agent that turns fruit juice into fruit gel.

See how it sounds like I’m all smart and knowledgeable? Mostly I just read the box.

In case your train of thought got derailed by that little tangent (mine did. had to scroll up), here’s the next steps.

Add pectin to cold fruit.

Stir in pectin, breaking up any chunks of white powdery weirdness.

Place the pot on the stove, high-ish heat, and cook till bubbly. This takes minutes.

Then add every grain of sugar ever made in the world ever. About 7 cups.

Attempt to stir the sugar in. Despair that it will never dissolve. Marvel when it does.

Adding in the sugar will more than double the volume of your mixture. So be sure to use a nice, big pot. I can only imagine that discovering your pot is too small at this stage would lead to tears.

Now we get to heat this up to boiling. Violent, bubbling, roiling kind of boiling. That’s pretty damn hot. And because it’s full of sugar, this stuff is both hot AND sticky. So if you get any on your skin, it’ll just sit there and buuuuurrrn. Not that I’m speaking from experience.

Ahem.

One fun side effect of this bubbling pot of chemistry is the foam.

Frothy McFoam, of the clan McFoam.

As it cooks, your jam will develop a layer of foam on top. This is obnoxious, because you can’t put foamy jam in a jar. Bubbles will eventually pop and contents will settle, leaving you with half-empty jars.

One way to minimize this is, and I’m not even kidding …

A single pat of butter.

If you want to keep your jam strictly dairy-free, simply omit the butter and resign yourself to scraping a lot of foam later.

So! Cook your jam at a crazy, violent, alarming boil for about a solid minute and a half. Then cut the heat and walk away for a bit. Get distracted by your children, who have been tempting both fate and your patience for the past half-hour. Don’t come back to your jam for about 15 minutes. Realize that this is awesome, because it made the foam solidify enough to be scraped easily right off the top.

Fun fact: this foam is delicious. Set it aside for noshing later. It's also a great way to taste-test your jam.

Once you have a big pot of foam-free jam, it’s time to fill your jars. Carefully extract one piping-hot jar, lid, and band from the simmering water. There are special tools that you can buy for this. Jar lifters and nifty wands with magnets on the end for pulling out the lids. While I’m sure I would delight in such devices, I’ve found that my plain old rubber-tipped tongs work just fine.

One canning device you WILL need is a wide-mouth funnel. Which is red and therefore my camera hates it.

Shake the excess water off your jar pieces, pop the funnel in the top, and scoop in your jam. I like to stir the goop for a bit, just to make sure I’m getting an equal amount of chunks and gel.

Hear that hissing sound? That's my camera, hating the red.

You want to stop about half an inch from the top lip of the jar. Hardcore canners call this “headspace”. I do, too, because I can’t think of a better word, but I mutter it under my breath while pretending to cough. It just sounds so burnt-out-hippie to me.

That done, be sure to run a clean, damp paper towel around the top of the jar. Clean threads make for a solid seal when you get to the canning part.

Meaty, chubby, purple thumb - optional.

Next you place the lid right on top …

Lid! Top!

… and then you twist on the band.

Band! Twisted!

Again, hardcore canners have their own word to describe how tightly to twist the band on. They call it “finger tight”. I can’t say this without giggling. My inner twelve-year-old is mighty.

Basically, just twist it on until it just tightens. Do not try to tighten it all the way! That can wait.

Now just repeat the jar-filling process about nine more times until  you have your own little battalion of happy yellow jars.

And they shall be mighty!

Jars are filled, we’re done! Right?

Wrong! If we want these jars to last for any length of time outside of a refrigerator, we needs must can them. There are lots of methods for canning, but many of them require equipment that I just don’t have. For these lovely highly-acidic beauties, a hot water bath will do the trick. Luckily, I have all the tools I need.

Cheap, heat-resistant plastic basket and a pot of hot water.

Once again, there are specialized canning tools that you can buy. Big ol’ pots with nifty baskets for the cans that fit right in. But I’m cheap. And my kitchen is tiny. So I just use the big pot that I simmered my jars in, crank it up to boiling, and load my jars into the $5 plastic canning basket I splurged on.

Me big spender.

Boil the heck outta those jars for about 10-15 minutes. Then haul them out and load the next jars in. Repeat until all of your jars are heckless by boiling.

Once they’re all out, set them aside and let them ponder their existence. You’ll be treated to a lovely chorus of popping sounds as the jar lids seal into place. After about an hour or so, go back and test each jar lid’s seal by pressing down on the center.

Welcome to the bane of my existence. Hard water, coating everything in its grossness.

If there’s any bounce or give to the lid, the seal didn’t set. Just pop that jar in the fridge and eat it first. The rest of them can be stored in a cool, dry, dark place for up to a year. Just be sure to twist the bands all the way tight first.

What to do with the finished product? Well, so far I’ve found it’s delicious when spread on a chicken quesadilla. And when it’s mixed with cream cheese, you could spread it on the dog and it’d still be yummy. Also, you can occasionally put it on your windowsill and admire its beauty.

*happy sigh*

This jam is sweet, tangy, slightly spicy, with a sneaky hint of jalapeno flavor that gives the whole thing an almost savory edge.

It’s safe to say I’m in love. Hope you enjoy it, too!

ME: NOW I NEED CHEESE
ME: wth, my body?
FRIEND: I already ate my cheezits.  Yer outta luck
ME: well shit
ME: you don’t just have a block of cheese lying around?
ME: carve me off a chunk?
FRIEND: um, no
ME: well then what good are you?
FRIEND: lots!
ME: *doubt*
FRIEND: *pout*
ME: *tout*
FRIEND: *scout*
ME: *flout*
FRIEND: *dash about*
FRIEND: (cheating!)
ME: disqualified!
ME: flag on the play!
FRIEND:  c’mon ref!
ME: *you’re out!*
FRIEND: *spout*
ME: ew

Yep. Whole minutes in the middle of my work day. Right there. I win at productivity.