The frenetic
energy of the first week or two of basement construction has mellowed as we’ve
entered the final stages of this project.
And with the pace of construction
slowing, I’ve had bit of a respite from my frenzied baking. A day
or two break from the oven gave me all the more energy to bake for my painter
bee Thursday. While she was covering
the basement with paper and plastic
and tape, I was upstairs mixing and baking
that day’s construction cookie – cream cheese cookies. Since
I had cream cheese in the fridge I thought I should use it. But I didn’t have a tried and true cookie
recipe using cream cheese. Actually I
had no cookie recipe in my stash requiring cream cheese. So I googled for recipes. What a mistake that was. Do NOT bake these cookies. I repeat.
Do not bake them. I wish I never
had. They are cookie meth. Especially warm. The soft chewy center and seductive tang of cream cheese ... I need to burn that recipe. Burn it now! But I can’t. It's on the web. It's going to be there foreeeeeeeever. Taunting. Teasing. Daring me to bake them just one more time.....
The next day my bees arrived with paint in hand and I pulled myself together long enough to bake Friday’s construction cookie – Chocolate Oatmeal
Crunchies.
Even though my bees taped plastic over the stairs to try and contain the fumes, as they sprayed paint, my head filled with headache-producing vapors, although it seemed to have no effect on Sophie who intently contemplated the springiness of her very own trampoline.
I don’t know how they stood it down there in what must have been a white haze of paint particles. No wonder they wanted to leave the cookies up on the ledge rather than taking them downstairs with them.
It took them all day, but my bees got everything painted and THEY took their garbage with them
and left the basement nice and tidy. All that’s left is for Dean and I to lay the flooring, have the bees come back to install the baseboards and the electrical odds and ends, have carpet put on the stairs ... and then ... we’ll be finished!!
At the end of the day, as I handed my paint bees a baggie of the last of the cookies, they told me that we “were the nicest people they’d worked for” and we were “not the norm.” Gosh.........I knew all that cookie baking was going to pay off.....unless it was just the paint fumes talking ...◦
2 comments:
I can't wait to see the floors!
Are you sure the headache-producing vapors weren't just the headache that often follows a sugar high? Oh, I forgot. You don't eat any of the cookies yourself. And you don't see any correlation between the amount of cookies the bees have eaten and the project slowing down? Hmmm!!! I wonder. Do you remember things slowing at BLM when you brought cookies/lemon bars/cakes to the office? It's called cause and effect, Cathy. Dean's a scientist. As him about cause and effect. Like licking rocks makes you taciturn?
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