Holy Regrettable Cooking Show, Batman!

For our date night tonight, we decided to attend the much hyped cooking show sponsered by our local newspaper.  Maybe that explains why it was so hyped right there – being sponsered by the newspaper = lots of free advertising, and since I read the paper every day, maybe it was drilled into my head that this thing would be fun.  Was I ever wrong.

It began when we arrived only 10 minutes before the show started, and every seat was full.  It was held in the high school gym, which means we now had to find seats in the bleachers and squeeze past everyone else – pregnancy bump and all.  I was so close to turning around and leaving right then and there; the fact that I didn’t was my second mistake after buying the tickets to attend the thing in the first place.  Apparently our local high school has no air conditioning, because the 1500 or so people who were crammed into the gym were all fanning themselves with their free cookbooks.  Which brings me to another reason why I thought this thing would be such great fun.  The tickets were $10 / person, then there were coupons in the paper for $3 off, which brings each ticket to $7.  They advertised a “bag full of samples, goodies, and free cookbooks” to every attendee, along with a chance to win lots of pretty cool door prizes.  The sample bag was alright – no complaints there.  The “choosing which wine with dinner” wheel made a great fan to combat the heat, I must say, and I’m not the only one who thought so – most of the 1500 sardines in attendence were using it as such.  But on the way into the show, apparently that’s when they handed out the doorprize entry blank and the free can of chili sauce, and somehow (maybe it was my panic when I saw the crowd we’d have to conquer to find a seat) I missed getting either handout.  So, here we were, sitting on the bleachers packed in like sardines in 100°+ heat, and I’ve just found a way to cut our chances of winning a doorprize in half.  Even though we were a little on the late side, that actually turned out to be a good thing because by the time we bumped and stumbled into our seats (ie, the square foot of space each person was allowed for their person, legs, knees, pregnancy bumps etc.), the “show” was ready to begin, thank goodness.  Except it became clear that once the show began, it was not going to pick up pace.  It was a woman on a stage making recipes (she was there to do 8 of them she said!) so far away that you couldn’t see anything she was doing.  Her “jokes” were lame, and she barely had a personality.  So now, this was hot, boring, uncomfortable for my aching body, and my chances of winning a cool grill are like 1 in 1500 instead of 2 in 1500?  Forget being polite or wasting money.  Our time is so much more important; especially with 3.5 kids.  We bumped and stumbled our way out of there, same way we got in, mumbled our apologies for stepping on people, and didn’t look back.  We fled the cooking show.

So that brings me to the Batman reference in the title of this post.  When we went to pick up the kids at the babysitter’s after the cooking show debacle, we went in her laundry room to check out the 2-day-old kittens…  all of a sudden, screams erupted.  I’m normally not a screamer, really more of a gasper when I get startled, but the babysitter and her daughter and my daughters were ahead of me in the laundry room and saw a bat.  Their screams made me scream – I’m not afraid of a little Ohio brown bat, I swear, but apparently screaming is contagious.  So both of our husbands come running, and hers goes for a broom.  Mine respects how sensitive I am about animals, so he asked for a bowl and was going to capture it.  So they open the door, only to find the mommy cat had beaten the babysitter’s husband to the murder of the bat.  She devoured it whole, and there was really nothing left for me to be sad about, so I pretended it didn’t happen, took pictures of the really cute kittens, and left.  What a night!

Lisa