Tasks du jour, preparing for M’s birthday sleep-over tonight

1. Replace the leaky toilet valve in M’s toilet.
2. Mop up the water on the floor in M’s bathroom.
3. Pull the leaky tank off our toilet, discover the bolt gaskets are (a) half-perished and (b) integrated with the tank washer, requiring a trip to Home Despot to look for a new washer set.
4. Discover that the years of our leaky toilet tank have rotted out the sub-flooring to the point it’s not falling through into the undercroft mostly by the grace of God and that it really, REALLY needs to be replaced before I do ANYthing else about the toilet.
5. Think about who I know that knows anything about subflooring, and realize there isn’t much of anyone and I’m probably on my own.
6. Make a Waldorf Red Velvet cake while L creates handmade cloth goody bags for M’s sleepover guests.  Allow M to help with some of the things like sifting flour (successful) and cracking an egg (indifferent successful).  Stop in the middle for an impromptu lesson in improper fractions and how you can use them to dirty fewer dishes when you’re cooking.
7. Stop in the middle of making the cake when I discover that my roll of kitchen parchment just ran out, and my backup roll is
1. so brittle that I can’t unroll it without it flying into flinders,
2. stuck together with what feels like old melted wax, all the way through to the core, and
3. more than 25 years old, when I come to think about it, which might explain the other two phenomena.
8. Go to the neighborhood grocery, pick up a roll of parchment, a bag of flour, a bottle of cornstarch (Argo’s gone and changed their packaging, and I do NOT like the new package, it has too big a footprint), and a box of salt.
9. Finish the cake and get it into the oven.
10. Scrub the kitchen floor on hands and knees, ’cos it badly needs scrubbing.
11. Forget to set the oven timer but realize it in time to save the cake from burning.  It might be a bit dry, but it’s going to be served à la mode, which will help counteract the dryness.
12. Finish re-editing the Grateful Dead’s Europe ’72 for rip to CD, since the copy I did have went walkabout.

L had previously suggested I go spend the night someplace else ’cos I probably didn’t want to try to sleep with five giggly eight-year-olds in the next room, and I agreed, so tonight I’m going to San Marcos to visit M’s godparents.

My aunt would bring newspapers up, which we used for toilet paper after looking at the pictures.  Fnord.