Everything I said last time except the opposite.

It's kinda sweet how I naively think I've figured out a few things in life. 

I mean, I have learned to wear proper shoes when shoveling so that I don't bruise my arches, how to light the furnace so that I don't blow my face off and how to hive a colony of bees so that they don't swarm the neighborhood.

These things I know how to do. 

And I KNOW that I know how to do them because I've done them wrong a bunch of times (or one tragic time) and then right a bunch of times (or a few triumphant times), so I feel confident when I say that YES, I know how to, like, do that kind of shit.

But the funny thing that I haven't yet learned how to do is how to NOT say I know how to do something until I've first done it successfully once and then repeated the thing successfully again.

That's what I should do.

But instead, I just go declaring victory when victory hasn't yet even been proven a single time.

I'd make a terrible scientist. All declaring YAY! I've found the cure for cancer! after just making Kool-Aid in a flask or something.

Anyway, today's lessons in Finny Doesn't Know Shit About Shit are as follows:

Dr. Fischoeder's Cleaning Lady, Consuela, doesn't clean a damn thing.

In fact, she makes more of a mess than Dr. Fischoeder and it's pissing me off.

Is that Consuela I see growing on the treasure chest? Why yes it is.

It would seem that Consuela is colonizing the fish bowl. Edging Dr. Fischoeder out perhaps or perhaps just making herself at home and commandeering items that she deems to be her own.

I take.

So all of that nonsense about the moss ball being "like a cleaning lady for the fish bowl" was complete crap. 

Not that I really announced to the world that it was The Truth And Nothing Else, but I did repeat what I'd been told by the dude at the aquarium store and that was a mistake. 

Don't always trust the stoned freak working at the aquarium store. Noted.

And then there are the paperwhites.

Damnitall if I didn't think I'd finally won the battle of These Things Fall All Over The Fucking Place just a little too close to the paperwhites so that they heard me and then rebelled.

WE WIN. AGAIN. STILL.

Yeah. If these flowers weren't so fucking beautiful and didn't smell like heaven and weren't being so hilarious, I probably would have ripped them out of their vases just for mocking me and making me a liar, but they are and they do and so I haven't.

Can't fall over in a vase this tall you say? IS THAT A FACT?

And while this has nothing to do with me being wrong, but more the seasons being off or our tree being absurd, our tree thinks it's fall.

January, November - what's the diff?

I mean, who couldn't use a little fall in their winter?

Even Jada's confused by this tree.

Yeah. Nice try out there, awesomely beautiful but crazy tree.

And then, because I I was feeling bakey, I made the best chocolate cake of my entire life last night.

Also the cutest napkins ever, courtesy of my delightful sister who knows me very well. 

Yeah, if you're looking for a chocolate cake recipe and none of your good-for-nothing cookbooks that claim to have all the recipes in the world in them (Hi. Joy of Cooking. Not as thorough as expected.) have a recipe for just plain chocolate cake, go to Cook's Illustrated and be free.

Thankfully, Bubba had the bright idea for me to scan all of my Cook's Illustrateds into my tablet and then start using that for my recipes, so I just had to search my tablet for "chocolate cake" instead of leafing through a thousand pages of magazine to find it.

He's a smart one, that guy. Which is why I let him eat cake straight from the pan with his hands like a fucking animal.

I used this recipe for chocolate cupcakes, but made a sheet cake because I'm a sunuvabitch like that.