The Epic Battle of the Band[width]

It's eventide again and a blissful silence has settled upon the House of Derp. The young Derps are peacefully entering Dreamland and the local airbase has mercifully grounded the F-16s until dawn. All is right with the world.

OR IS IT?! (Cue suspenseful background music)

The silence is pierced by angry murmurs from the master bedroom:

"It's MY turn!"

"Relax! There's only 20 minutes left!"

"Argh! I don't WANT to wait. It's my TURN!"

"I SAID, you can have it in 20!"

"Ugh! You're such a jerk, Derpus!"

What, you ask, has brought such ugly contention to the Kingdom of Derp? Alas. It began several months ago when, out of necessity, the Derps were forced to cancel our satellite service. I won't deny that I felt a strong pang of regret when I watched Derpus hand the box containing the glorious DVR over to the UPS man. Then, it was gone. HGTV, gone. TLC, gone. The History Channel, The Discovery Channel, NATGEO, ABC Family, gone, gone, gone. Gone were my beloved documentaries and home improvement shows. Gone were my redic "reality" shows and lurid teen soaps. All the wonderfully useless programming that filled those kid-free hours between 8 and 11.

Now, I know for some, this might have been a wonderful opportunity to reevaluate priorities and set life-changing goals. These hours would be much better spent on things like reading, exercise, etc. It could have opened up a whole new avenue of self discovery that led to enlightenment.

Did we do that? Of course not! We're Derps! Instead, we began a nightly ritual of squabbling over whose turn it is to use what little bandwidth is available for video streaming via our cheap-ass Internet service. (FYI-Clear Wireless sucks monkey balls!) Watching something together is simply out of the question. I loathe the endless crime dramas favored by Derpus, and he'd spend the evening poking needles into his eyeballs before he'd watch 'Downton Abbey' or 'Firefly'. I'm afraid we've reached an impasse. I suppose we could get a faster service, but that would require an extra $20 a month and I'm pretty sure Derpus would sooner get a divorce than come up off the cash, so for now, at approximately 8pm, the cycle repeats:

"Do you have to watch 'Pretty Little Liars'? This show is for 13 year olds."

"Do you really wanna go there? You know you'd watch if it were called 'Pretty Little Liars of the NYPD'."

"Yeah, probably."

Sigh.

Fine Dining at Chez Derp

Since the birth of baby Kitten a month ago, life at the Derp household has been in somewhat of a state of flux. What with spending half of the day hooked up to the insatiable milking machine that is Kitten, and the rest dealing with whatever mayhem Bean managed while I was thus occupied, we've had to make a few adjustments to the chore schedule. Derpus, bless his heart, has tried to pick up the slack as best he can with some shall we say, interesting results in the dinner department.

Before I share some of his more spectacular culinary disasters, I feel I have to say a few things in his defense:

First of all, Derpus was raised in a large family. And I mean LARGE. As in NINE KIDS LARGE. How his parents even managed to keep them all fed is beyond me. If Derpus is any indication, it can't have been easy. He is a 6ft tall, 150lb beanpole, who has to consume at least 4000 calories a day or he'll lose weight. That's not an exaggeration. I can't even imagine having NINE of those to nourish. According to Derpus, it pretty much meant buying the cheapest food that would go the farthest. We're talking a crap ton of cheese, rice, and ground beef, for example. As you may imagine, he doesn't exactly have the most discriminating palate.

Secondly, Derpus has a very phlegmatic personality. He regards instructions to anything as "suggestions". Drives me freaking bat crap. I've never been able to make the slightest headway in convincing him that ignoring directions will give him a different result than the one he's expecting. It's probably because he's so easy going, he can't give flying flip if something doesn't work the way it should.

Which brings us to dinner a la Chef Derpus. Derpus has always had a couple of "go to" dishes that he can manage when asked to make dinner on occasion (grilled cheese sandwiches and chili dogs, to be precise), but circumstances have required him to make meals a few times a week lately, so he's had to "branch out" a bit, if you will. In the past few weeks, Miss Belle, Ender, Bean, and I have been treated to some fabulous gourmet delights.

Let's begin with the Macaroni and Cheese. We were out of milk, and Derpus decided it was probably a superfluous ingredient anyway, so he went ahead and made three boxes of the stuff sans milk. (Side note: Derpus has, since Miss Belle first began to eat actual food, labored under the delusion that children require a portion size large enough to feed at least 3 burly lumberjacks.) The congealed mass of noodles that resulted pretty much had to be cut into squares in order to be served. Luckily, Mac N Cheese is already so phenomenally disgusting, any alterations to the formula aren't injurious. The kids hardly even noticed the difference.

Next, there was the pizza. Derpus took the "crispy crust" concept and ran with it. I'm not entirely sure he was after blackened, crispy crust, but whatever. Once the darker areas were scraped off, it wasn't so bad.

The encharittos weren't terrible either, once the "hot-on-the-outside-cold-in-the-middle" issue was resolved.

Lastly, we have the delicious cream of chicken soup on wheat bread. This started out to be cream of chicken soup on rice, which is one of Derpus's all time favorite meals. (Did I mention he doesn't have a very discriminating palate?) Sadly, Derpus mistook hard red wheat berries for brown rice, and spent the next hour repeatedly checking the rice cooker, wondering why the "rice" wouldn't soften, and the following hour enduring my spontaneous fits of laughter while we ate the substituted chicken soup on wheat bread instead.

All in all, I have to say, I'm grateful for Derpus's help, mishaps notwithstanding. At the very least, it makes dinner an adventure and adds some spice to our lives. (And by spice, I mean the loads of granulated garlic, pepper, and montreal steak seasoning that he puts in everything.)

Until next time, Bon Appetit!!