Daniel vs The soup ladle

Isn't it annoying when inanimate objects suddenly get a mind of their own? When it happens to me, it seems they are out to get me. I've just made myself tomato soup and in the process I had a little confrontation with a ladle.

I decided I was going to be careful not to make any mess or have any spillage when I began heating up my soup. Any drops of soup that ended up outside the saucepan I made sure to wipe away with a kitchen towel. The ladle that was sitting in the saucepan took note of my efforts to keep the surfaces tidy of soup and then took it upon itself to fall out of the saucepan splashing tomato soup everywhere. I picked it up, cleaned the kitchen surface and then put the ladle back in the saucepan to stir it. Moments later the ladle decided to fall out again, and then after that it would refuse to stay in the saucepan for even a second. I didn't want to have to keep taking the ladle out when I wasn't stirring the soup because it would mean having to wipe it down again and again everytime I took it out, so instead I kept one hand on the ladle to keep it steady while I stretched the rest of my body around the kitchen to grab myself a spoon and a bowl, and did other things like putting cups and what have you in the dishwasher. This was a lot of effort to go into for a simple bowl of soup.

A couple of minutes later my soup was ready, and with the aid of the ladle I poured it out into my bowl. But then something happened that I know the ladle had been planning, probably in collusion with that prankster of fate, Sod's law, for the last 2 minutes. I'm not sure how it happened but as I went to put the saucepan down the ladle flew out of it and hit me in the stomach, getting tomato soup on my jumper and all over my jeans, before sending soup all over the cupboards and the floor. What made this an even bigger kick in the groin was the fact that I had just put a load of washing on and had no other trousers to wear, clean or otherwise, because they were in the washing machine. If the ladle was like one of those cartoon ones with a face and could talk, it would be laughing its spoon like head off, and if it had arms and hands it would probably be giving Sod's law a high five right now as well.

So, yesterday I had a meeting with the Personal Development tutor, Marian Meyer, about my dissertation. If you've been reading most of these blogs you would probably be aware that I've been freaking out about it. Not that uncommon though, the final year is a difficult time for students. But I've been really stuck with my work. I've had all sort of anxiety's and problems that have just been holding me back from even getting started and I really didn't know what anyone could do to help me. But in that short hour with Marian she helped me make a plan of the first couple of chapters of my disseration and has me believing for the first time in months that I could actually do this. So right now the plan is to write about 2000 words a week over the next four weeks until hand in. It's going to be a real slog but it always happens this way. It's like walking a marathon only to realise that you're not even halfway there and if you want to make a decent time you're going to have to sprint the rest of it and half kill yourself in the process. This is the way most people work, and I think sometimes some people work better under pressure of a looming deadline.

So in summary, I hate to summerize and conclude todays blog without a decent conclusion because I can't think of one... (actually, that wasn't a bad conclusion at all. It rounded things off well enough and it didn't seem to matter that it didn't bring what I was talking about to a close, so long as it brought todays ramblings to some sort of closure then it did its job.)