Ever have one of those weeks when everything seems off to you, when you get annoyed by everything, where people you’ve known for a million years seem to be absolute strangers, when you want to correct everyone’s behavior and explain to them the psychological underpinnings of what they’re doing (and not in particularly flattering ways, either), when you just feel as though you can’t do anything and if you try to do something you’re doomed not just to failure but to Massive, Spectacular Failure?

Nah. Me neither. But if I were having one of those weeks, this would be it. Urk. I should go make some hot chocolate.

So, it turns out I did, in fact, break the KitchenAid mixer: I started it up today and the motor started but the paddle didn’t. I looked on the KitchenAid site for the nearest authorized repair place and called them. When I described the problem, the woman who answered the phone said, “Well, it could be anything from Such-and-such, which costs about sixty dollars, to This-and-so, which is about hundred. That’s what you’re looking at. And it’ll be about a week.”

A new mixer costs $250. And I have it tomorrow.

Now, it so happens that at the moment (hello there, first of the year) things are a little tighter and spending $60 on something is vastly preferable to spending $250 on it. But still: it’s something to consider, isn’t it? Get a wholly new mixer, fresh warranty and everything, for somewhere between two and four times what it would cost to fix the old one. And who fixes these things, anyhow? Just get a new one! Move on, move up! Consume! It’s not that much money! You can get something totally new!

Maybe if I had used the mixer day-in and day-out for the past few years and it had busted like this I’d say, Yeah, time for a new one. But it’s hardly ever been used, and I managed to blow it out doing something stupid. Hardly seems fair to reward myself with a new mixer, no?

The appliance repair place is over by the kids’ school, so I can drop off the mixer after I drop off the kids.

There’s not much going on around here at the moment. We all seem to have various degrees of illness. Darin has felt woozy, feverish, and chilly, and although this didn’t stop him from going to work yesterday, it did cause co-workers to call him “kind of dopey” because he was, it seems, somewhat of an idiot in meetings. (Yes, unlike most of us, when Darin acts stupid other people notice. He felt better today and had a better day at work.) Simon has had non-stop sinus congestion and Sophia…well, Sophia’s always healthy; she mostly suffers bad hair days. Me, I’ve had this cough that won’t go away.

Won’t. Go. Away.

Tonight in bed I lay there, perfectly still, thinking, “This is it, this is the time, I’m finally going to COUGH HACK COUGH COUGH.” I described it to Darin as having a dry tickle in my throat that can only be eased by coughing. “You know that’s going to get worse if you keep doing that,” he said. So rather than keep both of us awake waiting for the magical moment when the itch in my throat would stop bothering me, I have come downstairs to drink herbal tea with honey and hope against hope that this soothes my system enough to let me get to sleep.

As it’s 1am and I’m still sitting here, I’m beginning to think not.

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Tonight for dinner I made: roast chicken with rosemary-lemon-garlic rub (very tasty), along with roast quarters of sweet potato and broccoli, plus a wild rice-and-mushroom stuffing from Whole Foods (will not buy that a second time—as Darin put it, “You’ll never hear me use this word again, but this was overseasoned”). A very satisfying meal and fairly easy to put together. And I never thought I’d hear myself say that.

I want to make something for Sugar High Fridays 5. Puff pastry is a wonderful thing, is it not? More accurately, store-bought puff pastry is, ’cause there ain’t no way in hell I’m making that from scratch. I think I even know what I’m going to make; I just have to work up the energy to do it already.

When I’m feeling sick, the idea of doing fancy pastries (even with store-bought dough) is less than thrilling. More accurately, I want someone to make me a fancy pastry, not the other way around. Sigh.