:: Sunday, March 4, 2001 ::

 

12:20 a.m. They used to make peanut-butter jars with straight sides and I haven't checked all the jars on the shelf recently, but this jar is trouble. For some reason, this particular rainy Sunday morning, things just seemed more frustrating than usual.

I would say that my entire life has been feeling this way lately. I'm going to blame it on late winter, hardly yet spring blues and kvetching, but lots of things have been feeling like this lately.

The spoon is too short. You'd need a curved-handled spatula of some sort to get at the stuff in the shoulder of the jar. If you spent a lot of time with said spatula, you might get enough for one more sandwich. Maybe. But you have to give it a try.

It's just wrong to throw this much peanut butter away, and yet the process of scraping it up is messy and time-consuming. Each and every credit card we have charges a late fee of at least $29 if you so much as miss the deadline by a day.

Calling credit-card companies and waiting on hold and negotiating with them, even with a canceled check in hand, takes up a lot of valuable time and what can you do with that extra $29 anyway? Pay a portion of the heating bill? Buy five more big jars of peanut butter?

And then there's the hot water involved in rinsing off the peanut-butter-covered spoon, knives, and the occasional spatula. Igor pretends that he doesn't know the dishwasher doesn't get it clean and so I keep pulling them out and rubbing the peanut butter off under scalding hot water before I start up a cycle and then I forget about it until I see another spoonful and then it's too late -- by then, Igor has left the building.

Some mornings are made for Pamprin. This has been one of them.