Thursday and Friday T and I attended a Beef 706 course held at a university about 65 miles away. We took the kids to their Neenaw's house Wednesday night to camp out in the living room instead of waking everyone up at 5:30am. So, Thursday we leave just in time to make it to the hotel/meeting place to board the bus that takes us to class. It was awesome. Day 1 included watching the cleaning of 2 steers that we had only observed for the class 30 minutes prior to their end. I did pretty well until I smelled something funny and couldn't retain my composure enough to make it out the doors to the hall. I passed out. Cold. In my vain attempt to be tough and not pass out I waited, gripping T's arm saying I was going to pass out for a little too long. I almost killed myself. Seriously, I happened to do some kind of ballerina type move and caught myself on a cord that was attached to a saw (that was used to cut the carcass) hanging from the ceiling. I was literally swinging on it. The floors were concrete and I was going face first. All the men gasped and the women screamed. I can't believe I was the only one to have a problem with all of it. Anyhow, I don't remember what happened after I suddenly went deaf and took one unsteady step towards the exit door. The rest I was told by T and one of the instructors. So I am very lucky to not be recovering in a hospital right now....or worse, not even being alive.
After that we ate a delicious lunch of beef fajitas, which I gobbled down cause I was starving after the immense bravery and ballerina skills I possessed on the killing floor. We proceeded to get all decked out in butcher's clothes; it was actually closer to a surgeon's attire, except for the chain mail vest we put on. That was in case we happened to slip on the floor and fall on one of the very sharp knives we were given. Man, they really trusted me to not pass out. My group, I could sense, thought "For real? We get 'pass out girl' to work with? Who thinks this is funny?" They were actually pretty nice, only the weird old lady said anything about it, the others acted like nothing had happened. I did very well. Fabricating the carcass... it was just huge-ok, gigantic slabs of meat that I had to cut the fat off of. I do that in my own kitchen, no big deal. This was just on a much larger scale. I stayed conscious. Thank you.
So, I learned all about beef. Selecting the right calves, how to grade them and predict their marbling... It was really a great class. I learned more than I thought I could ever know about beef.
On with this weekend. We picked up the kids around 4 on Friday and came home to a decently mess free house. I tried really hard Wednesday night to pick up a little. Saturday rolled around. It was gross outside. We all stayed in and created more little messes for Mommy to get to on Monday. Sunday was the same thing only I left to get groceries and came back and thought, "I might as well just close my eyes to this and pretend none of it exists". I'm still doing that. It is Monday morning. I started some laundry but how am I supposed to clean if the boys are running around trashing everything I clean? They will not be contained to a single room. Even if that room is their play room that was designed specifically to contain them and their outrageous amount of toys. Something has to change. Soon. I can't keep up with this.
Having a Monday-morning-house-cleaning-anxiety-attack,
Mama
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