What Pisses Me Off: Mason jars, MKR and electricity!

I remember mason jars – I used them a lot when my boys were small. That was 30-odd years ago and I had them everywhere: in the kitchen, the laundry, the boys’ playroom. I kept bits of everything in them: tiny Lego pieces, colour pencils, crayons, paperclips, safety pins. I even remember stabbing holes in the lids for when the boys caught a grasshopper or some other bug in the garden and they would want to take it to school for show and tell. When their fish died, I remember I grabbed a jar, made a little bed inside for that damn fish, then we had a burial in the back yard.

I also had a bit of a market business filling mason jars with everything from pickled people to pickled bums to pickled punk rockers.

How times have changed, because now it is super trendy for the yuppy-type cafes to serve their yuppy-type patrons their triple choc iced chocolates and their seaweed enhanced super drinks in mason jars. This practice tickles my funny bone. When I see people drinking from these, I always think some staff should be trained and ready to do the Heimlich manoeuvre: I am expecting them to choke on a bit of Lego or a bug of some description…it pisses me off!

The cooking show MKR also pisses me off – they use some very fancy descriptions for the food the contestants cook up. “This dish needs to be celebrated” and ‘This is a very brave dish” or even “This dish is dancing on my palate”! When Paleo Pete bats his eyelashes and says “The lamb is the hero of this dish, and it is overcooked”, Mum says “Gawd Almighty is Pete blind? That meat isn’t overcooked! It’s not cooked at all. Look at the blood, it’s still mooing”. Most times the food is served on a gigantic plate and what they classify as the meal is the tiny tower right in the middle of the plate. They pile everything on top of the other and then put a smear of whatever on the side, and a tablespoon of sauce in a little tiny jug. Mum gets pretty pissed off with all the new ideas and trends, so I thought I would have a bit of fun. Last night I cooked her dinner – I made a carrot corral and put her peas inside it, a piece of chicken on the side with mash on top of the chicken, and a smear of gravy on the side with her cuppa in a vegemite jar on the side of her tray. After she finished laughing, she scored me a ‘- 2’ and she said she was going to report me for parental abuse.

Do you know what else pisses me off? The price of electricity. I am seriously considering selling one of my kidneys on the black market to pay the latest bill. It’s just wrong. Allowances should be made for the aged, the disabled and the hot people, not people that are hot as in good looking. I mean people like me that feel the heat. Maybe it’s the new way to save on cremations: cook the old people in their own homes because a lot of oldies will sit marinating in their own sweat, rather put the air-con on because they are terrified of the bill. I say to Mum, “stuff the bill, turn it on”! I don’t know why I said that because now I have to pay the bloody bill.

Do you share Christine’s pain?