Saturday morning’s wake-up call consisted of me trying to make cinnamon rolls, complaining that the oven wasn’t heating up, E checking the pilot light, and a giant ball of flaming gas whooshing out of the oven at him.

I had just turned my back to walk out of the kitchen. I saw a flash of light and heard a loud noise, and E ran past me into the bathroom and jumped into the shower. I didn’t even know what happened and was rooted to the floor like a dummy until he yelled “I’m on fire!” in between expletives. I couldn’t even see him in the dark bathroom, but there were no flames. Nothing in the kitchen was alight, thank god, and the stove was still in one piece.

This is the gross part. I will not include photos.

My poor boyfriend was a mess. His whole right arm was bright red and all of the hair had been singed off his arm, hand and chest. Blisters were forming on his knuckles. The burn went up onto his chest where he had another massive blister, already open. And his face… he had a blister forming over one eye and bright red streaks across both cheeks and up his forehead. He was going into shock when he got out of the cold shower – I had opened all the windows and doors to air out his apartment, and all the cool air was making him shiver. His hands were clammy and his heart rate was weak but going crazy, but he wouldn’t even lay down and let me get a good look at him until I yelled a few expletives of my own.

Like a boy, he refused to go to the hospital. Thank god his moron brother just happened to call, and he came over to watch E while I went to Walgreens and bought every burn dressing and ointment and topical pain relief concoction they had on the shelves. E’s brother was rinsing washcloths with cool water and laying them across his whole upper body by the time I got back. E was still complaining of being hot and wouldn’t even let me lay a cloth on his nose because it held his breath on his face and it was too hot to bear. He was still shivering and we wrapped every part of him that wasn’t burned in all the blankets we could find.

“I don’t wanna go to the hospital,” he chattered and I smoothed some lidocaine lotion on his arm.

“You HAVE to go,” I countered. “Baby, you have first- and second-degree burns and symptoms of stage 2 shock. If your pulse doesn’t steady in five minutes, or if that swelling above your eye begins to look any worse, we are going if I have to drag you by your toes.”

I put a cooling moisture pad on the open blister on his chest and he sighed. “That’s better.” Then, “How awful do I look?”

“Pretty shitty,” his brother volunteered.

“Do something useful and go re-wet these washcloths,” I snapped as I flung a few at him, then turned back to E. “Your arm really doesn’t look too awful and you still have your eyebrows.”

“I was pulling out clumps of hair in the shower,” he said, reaching up to feel his hairline. “How much did I lose?”

I felt around his scalp gently and found some singed ends where the clumps might have come from, but no patches that were burned clean. “I think the hair is safe.”

His breathing slowed to a normal rate and I checked his pulse periodically. Getting better. The moisture pads and lidocaine helped the pain, and the red area around his eye actually calmed pretty quickly. I was comforted by the fact that there’s a hospital only a few hundred yards from his house, just in case. So we stayed home and called him in sick for work. He was pretty unhappy about that since he was scheduled to wait on George Clooney again that night. But something tells me (and must also have told the managers of the Very Nice Restaurant where he works) that the blisters might not have done much for the tip.

He’s feeling much better now – still in pain, but out and about and still his usual crazy self. More blisters are forming on his face (it looks kind of awful but I will never tell him that) and his arm and shoulder are peeling like a bad sunburn. But it could have been so much worse. The whole kitchen still smelled of gas after we’d had all the windows open for several hours, and what if that had all ignited? I had been standing only a few feet from him when it happened – it could have been both of us. That burn above his eye could have been an inch lower. And if he hadn’t just rolled out of bed, he might have been wearing a shirt – which might have ignited, might have melted to his skin, might have spread the flames down his other arm and onto his back.

I’m not much for praying, but I spent a good deal of the day talking skyward to who or whatever is up there, pouring out thanks that the man I love is safe and mostly sound.

I hope you had a better weekend than we did.

I swear I took my camera to the St. Patrick’s Day festivities on Tuesday so I could have some fun “look-what-I-did” pictures like all the cool bloggers.

But I didn’t take any pictures because I forgot since I was sloshed by 11:30 am, like all the COOLEST bloggers!

My boyfriend lives in Dogtown, the Irish barrio of St. Louis, home to everything shamrocked and the Ancient Order of the Hibernians. It’s not a fancy neighborhood – lots of older homes, duplexes and four-family flats and smallish single-family houses. 364 days a year, it’s just a nice little neighborhood with a few good places to eat and an ecletic, left-leaning population of hipsters in stovepipe jeans, dazed stoners, young families, and some old people who have lived there since the neighborhood sprung up for the 1904 World’s Fair, or possibly before.

A lot of people partied for St. Pat’s over the weekend. But the AOH parade in Dogtown is always ON St. Patrick’s Day, whatever day of the week it is.  And the turnout, no matter what day it is, always tops the city’s “official” parade from the weekend before. The parade isn’t full of slick and glossy floats like the one downtown. Most of the AOH parade is just Irish people walking under their clan crests. There are bagpipers and Irish dancers and marching bands, but the best parts are the people who are just walking on the street, drinking beer, being Irish, and throwing shiny green beads and candy to screaming hooligans like me. It’s an hour and a half of FANTASTIC.

It snowed in 2007. Last year it was cold and muddy and sloggy. The 2008 turnout was pretty crummy (about 30,000 compared to this year’s 50,000) and we shivered in galoshes and sweatshirts.

But this year…

It was SEVENTY-NINE degrees! My sundress saw some sun for the first time in 2009 and I am proudly sporting a shamrock-shaped suntan sunburn line from the glitter tattoo I wore on my shoulder. All we did the whole day was drink, sit on the steps, and walk back inside for more drinks. E lives about half a block off the parade route, so the party was on our porch.

Someone else took that picture over there and put it on Flickr. I took the time to look it up for you. I wish, wish, WISH I had a picture of the pin my friend Kati got. You know the red and blue graphic of Obama, the one that was everywhere in the campaign? It was done in green and orange, the Prez had sideburns and a beard, and it said “O’Bama” on it. Lurve.

Everyone is happy on St. Patrick’s Day. It’s such a nice, non-divisive holiday that brings people together to eat and drink without the negative connotations of the debauchery of Mardi Gras. There’s no forced family love like Christmas, no lonely-hearts crap like Valentine’s Day, no political or religious agendas spewed. But everyone decorates their houses. You can dress up and wear beads and not get flashed. Parents pull their children out of school* and dye their hair green. DOGS get dyed green.

It was a wonderful day and I wish I could tell you more. I would if I remembered any more of what happened before I zonked out at 2:30 pm. Maybe the best days are like that.

But I CAN assure you that I did not eat any cabbage.

——————–

* Unless said children go to St. James the Greater Catholic School in Dogtown, which cancels classes anyway and Jesus loves them for it.

“Good morning, Breakfast!”

“You could just call him by his name, E.”

“You never told me his name.”

“Lars.”

“Lard?”

“Lars. He’s a Norwegian pig.”

“Lard, lard lard!” And he made the pig dance again.

Sigh.

I’ve been so tired lately. My body has been tired, I mean – my brain is usually in go-go-go mode so I can’t sleep and make my body less tired. Blech. That’s partly why the blog content has been so weak – I have things in my head when I’m laying down and staring at the ceiling fan at 6pm, but my brain can’t seem to convince the rest of me to get up and wander over to the computer. It’s no wonder my pants don’t fit.

Cuddling something when I’m in bed tends to help me sleep better though. I still have my baby blanket that my great-grandma made and gave to me the day I was born. Now pushing twenty-eight, Blankie doesn’t look too snazzy. The original material has almost disintigrated, so just the backing and some patches are holding it together. But it’s mine and I love it, and it helps me sleep.

I’ve had trouble sleeping over at E’s house lately too, of course. The blanket does not travel with me everywhere I go (anymore, heh) so my arms are kind of antsy when I try to sleep in his bed. I suppose I could cuddle him, but I can’t sleep like that. And if I steal his pillow to hold, his head tips back and he snores.

Last week I hit on the idea of digging out a stuffed animal to keep at his house so I’d have something to snuggle and help me sleep. I took my old stuffed pig over to E’s place the other night and informed him that I had solved my sleeping problem.

“Who has a stuffed PIG?” he asked incredulously.

“I do.”

He cocked an eyebrow at me and picked up the pig from my lap, then bounced it experimentally on his leg. I laughed a little bit while he made the pig dance and do other dumb things like he was entertaining a two-year old. We’re both easily amused. E held the pig up to his face, snout to nose, and then waved at it.

“Hello, breakfast!”

“Hey!”

“What? Pigs are for breakfast!”

I snatched my toy back from him. “Shuddup, that’s my pig-friend.”

“That’s my pig-breakfast.”

“Pig hates you.”

He grabbed the pig back and stuck its ear in his mouth. “Nom nom nom!”

“You are attempting to eat a furry pig, you realize that, don’t you?”

“But it’s bacon.”

“FURRY. PIG.”

So I’ve been a little obsessed with these cupcakes ever since I saw them on Cakewrecks Sunday Sweets.

I’ve wanted to learn how to use fondant for a long time, and these looked like they might be an easy way to start. You don’t have to drape a whole big cake with one giant sheet of it, to begin with, and it looks like the shapes are fairly simple cutouts. But I procrastinate. I look at pictures and make plans and don’t do anything. I couldn’t afford the most recent cupcake class at Kitchen Conservatory. Damn my expensive teeth. Class with Stephanie of The Cupcake Project would have been so much better than a (still-aching) mouth full of Novocaine and goo. So I just moped for awhile.

Then E and I decided that in the interest of saving money, we weren’t going to do Valentine’s gifts this year. Maybe just dinner.

THEN they took the Pac-Man game out of one of our local bar haunts and replaced it with Big Buck Hunter, of all things. He was devastated.

So I hit the interwebs. “What’s Cooking, America?” has a recipe for marshmallow fondant, touted as a good learning tool for beginners. And tasty, too! Who doesn’t like marshmallows?

I do not like marshmallows.

Sticky, icky MESS. I was slathered up to the elbows in Crisco before I could get the stuff into a workable ball. Crisco, by the way, will make you drop everything you touch. I know this sounds obvious, but when you are covered in lard and you try to pick up a marble rolling pin, it WILL fall. On your foot. And when you try to pick up your Bud Light to wash away the pain in your foot, it WILL spill. On two of your cooling cupcakes.

But it got kind of fun – coloring the mix, adding chocolate to half of it, etc. I used a cookie cutter to make the chocolate slices to sit on top of the (strawberry cake, whipped-cream-filled) cupcakes, and that went over pretty easily. Black food coloring just sounded awful, so I mixed in some cocoa powder and chocolate bricks when I was heating the mixture. Worked like a dream and gave the mix a great dark color. Cutting all of those pieces, however, proved to be a problem.

Marshmallows, even in this recipe, do not cut very well, especially when you want to cut them into small shapes. I don’t know if I did something wrong or if it is just the nature of the marshmallow, but it is inclined to poof. I could not, no matter how hard I tried, get the crisp, clean edges of a traditional fondant. I ended up taking chunks of the mix and rolling out the shapes by hand, molding them and adding details with toothpicks as probes. It took me an hour, but here’s the result:

It’s not a great picture and the flash makes it hard to see the awesomeness of the colors I used on the little ghosts. Those ghosts, by the way, ROCKED. They had little chocolate dabs for the eyeballs. And of course, this selection features both Mr. and Ms. Pac-Man, sharing their love in the middle with a marshmallow heart.

E was ECSTATIC. He took the pan around to show his friends and his family and they were wowed with my domestic goddess skills. Since it was comprised mainly of straight sugar and lard, the fondant wasn’t especially tasty – although it outruns traditional fondant by a mile. So I included a jar of dark chocolate frosting with the cupcake delivery. The fondant peels right off and we put frosting on the cupcakes as we ate them. It was maximum Frosting Freshness!

I think I’ll try traditional fondant soon… this marshmallow recipe was a good starter, I think. And anything that makes his nuts family think I might be acceptable wife material is a perk.