Batchelor Blues, or, How Do Single Dads Do It?

My wife is away for a ladies' fellowship a couple hours from here. I'm happy for her. Really, I am. (No, no resentment at all! Honest!) But man, I'm glad it's only for a day!

We have this wonderful daughter, see, age five. We've looked, but standard equipment on five-year-olds doesn't seem to include a mute button or an off switch. This regrettable oversight in design or manufacture results in a product that can make getting things requiring concentration accomplished even more challenging than usual. Add to that the fact that a National Guard mobilization may be required to handle the cleanup operation every time I attempt anything more complex than frying an egg in a kitchen, and it's not a good thing to leave us alone for all that long. (Yes, I do have a hard time frying eggs -- the accursed things either splatter all over the place when I attempt the cracking, or they don't crack enough to break, resulting in me smashing them into little fragments when I try to open them. I'm not a conspiracy theory kind of person, so I'm refusing to believe that the chickens have it in for me. My repeated devouring of fried chicken, chicken adobo, baked chicken, chicken fingers, and Buffalo wings -- that's pure coincidence.)

On the upside, my daughter tells me that I'm kinda fun. I think she's just trying to console me about the trouble with the eggs, though.