thwarted

You ever have one of those days?

Where it seems like everything is not going right?

Today was one of those for me.

We were having some friends over for dinner. I was planning to make spaghetti and meatballs, but needed to go to one store for the meat and another for the pasta. After Tori got home from school, we got on the e-bike to go to both stores. We hadn't even left the neighborhood and my e-bike died. I pushed it back home. I think that a wire rattled loose. After getting back home, I decided I would take my bike. But since buying my e-bike, my bike has sat lonely and was therefore so dirty. Cleaned it off, T and I got on only to discover that both tires were flat. I got the air pump, filled the front tire. But I then discovered the back tire had a hole.

Fine, guess that means we are walking to the store.

The problem is that the two stores are about a block and a half away from each other and our house sits in the middle. But in China where everything is bigger, that block is HUGE. I knew that T was not going to make it walking to the one store, walk to the second, and then walk home without major grumping. I had to decide which was more important: the meat or the pasta?

I decided to walk to Tesco (the store that usually has a selection of pasta) because sometimes they also have ground beef. Not always, but I decided to take a chance. Get to Tesco to discover that they do indeed have ground beef (and we bought the only 2 packages in the whole store), but no spaghetti. In fact the only kind of pasta that they did have was lasagna noodles. Okay fine, no spaghetti we will have lasagna instead. I think this is the first time I have cooked a lasagna in China! In fact, when we sat down to eat Tori asked what it was. When I answered her, she then replied with, "What is lasagna?" And then as she was eating, she exclaimed:

"This tastes really familiar, but it looks really strange."

Yes, that would be my daughter's view on lasagna. The same girl who adores tofu.