Full of that life affirming crap I usually avoid

I've had a bad couple of days. The kids have been fighting, it's been hot, and worst of all: nothing I cook seems to be turning out right.

Yesterday, I tried to make cold oven pound cake cupcakes (you don't pre-heat the oven; that's the cold oven bit). They were an unmitigated disaster. After an hour, they were still raw, they'd over flowed the liners, and they had collapsed in the middle. The pot roast I made was good, except I forgot the carrots until we were supposed to be sitting down, and I forgot to put the rolls out to rise, so they never made it into the oven.

Today, I decided after the failed cupcake attempt yesterday, I'd make lemon almond curd cupcakes to make myself feel better. The cupcakes turned out fine. They were the last thing to cooperate today. The lemon curd wouldn't thicken (fortunately this was fixable by throwing back on the stove, twice, and then into the freezer), and the buttercream dried out while I was trying to get the curd to work. Then the potato salad got made in stages, but I either kept forgetting what I needed to do and would have to put everything on hold while I boiled the eggs, chopped the onion, tried to find pickles, etc. Then the piece de resistance? I singed off my right eyelashes and part of my eyebrow while trying to light the grill to start dinner since Justin was late. I was lucky my hair didn't catch on fire.

So where does the life affirming stuff come in? I was thinking about the Persian rugs my mom used to buy. She told me the rugs would contain imperfections, sometimes put there on purpose by the weavers because only Allah could make something perfect. I used to lay on the rugs, studying them to find the "mistakes" in each one. I found at least one in most of them. They were still beautiful and priceless, despite the imperfections. So there you go, ladies and gentlemen. The past couple of days have just simply been my Persian rug. I'm off to eat a lemon curd cupcake and ponder the universe.