Today was National Ice Cream Day, which seemed the perfect opportunity to make some homemade ice cream.

I froze the bowl this morning and washed all the other parts of the ice cream maker. (It had been a while since we last used ours.) I bought cream. I read through the manual and recipe.

I remembered that in past occasions the ice cream maker has overflowed and set out a cookie sheet on the stove (outlets are at a premium in my kitchen, so things that need to be plugged in are often used on the stovetop) to hold the contraption and catch any overflow from seeping down into my burners.

I plugged in the base, pulled the bowl out of the freezer, added the blade and lid, and poured in milk, cream, and sugar. I turned it on, and the lid started to click past its stopping point. This was a problem.

With the lid off, I attempted to shift the blade and realized I’d made a tactical error: it was frozen in place. The liquids had already started to freeze, locking the blade where I’d put it. (I should have turned it on and then added the ingredients.) I rocked the blade out slowly (it’s plastic, so there was a good chance of breaking it in the process), and started to scrape down the sides of the bowl with a plastic scraper.

Eventually I got it to a point where I could get the blade back in, but couldn’t get the lid all the way down. Would that work? No — if the lid isn’t locked in place, the entire thing spins together, and the cream doesn’t churn.

More scraping, and eventually I got it to a spot where the lid nearly latched in place. No problem, I thought to myself, I’ll just hold it in place until it spins down enough to get it down that extra quarter inch.

This is the point in a sitcom where you at home in your comfy chair shake your head. Mishaps are about to ensue. An outside observer can see where things are about to go off the rails. The unwitting actor does not have the benefit of your wisdom.

I flipped the switch and pressed down on the lid.

The ice cream started to spin, but I was holding it down from above. Physics still exist, though, so the only thing not being held down started to spin — the cookie sheet the whole thing was sitting on. It crashed into the pepper mill and the milk pitcher and the tea kettle in quick succession. Realizing my mistake, I reached for the off button. But to do that, I let up slightly on the lid, and the base started to spin with the cookie sheet — and the off switch went out of sight.

In this moment, the only obvious thing that occurred to me was to pick up the entire contraption off the cookie sheet in an effort to find the switch.

“Help! Help!” I shrieked.

Rudi, who’d been taking a nap, stumbled in to find me holding this Exorcist device, and I, the cookie sheet, the stove, and everything in the vicinity (which he’d literally just scrubbed down earlier in the day) covered in cream.

We had very thin milkshakes to celebrate National Ice Cream Day instead.

It was a stressful workweek, with lots of deadlines and quick turnarounds and making sure the people who work for me were doing a better job with self-care than my boss and I were doing. But there is no way through such weeks but through…

And we did get through it and the organization didn’t burn to the ground and people did herculean amounts of work with my thanks and we all made it to Friday night relatively unscathed. Rudi and I toasted five o’clock with Filipino doughnuts that I’d ridden my bike through the midday heat to pick up. (Thank you, past me for ordering them!)

I marked the start of the weekend by picking up some holds from the library. Rudi and I went to the garden, sighed over the tomatoes that had disappeared from our plot (and the one that didn’t, but that now has a very large bite gone from it). We picked a foot-long cucumber and gave everything a good dousing.

We ate pizza and ice cream for dinner and watched episodes of The Librarians and Parks and Recreation.

Since I didn’t do a good job of it during the week, I’m going to continue this evening’s focus on self-care through the weekend. I’ll attempt to refind my living room, which is currently buried under my kitchen — which admittedly looks amazingly spacious with only the bare minimum in it from the fridge move yesterday.

I’ll order some more masks in fun designs and cute motifs, because these are the new universal fashion accessories and I’ve had to hand wash mine twice this week. I’ll go outside in the evening when it’s cooler and sit in the park. And maybe I will give making pasta a shot (in the kitchen, not in the park). It was on my list of things to work on while social distancing way back in March — a list that looks so painfully naive and optimistic all these months later.

But whatever I do, I will not be doing work.

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. Did I mention to you that after our air conditioning died our refrigerator also bit the dust? (The timing is not surprising; our fridge was old and refrigerators do not like being warm.) We were lucky because the freezer kept working, but we’ve been keeping our true perishables in our picnic cooler and also had a bag of ice in the fridge trying to keep from losing absolutely everything in it. Today, a new refrigerator arrived. We ordered (our landlord will pay for it) from a local company because they could get us the size we needed with only a week’s delay, rather than the month that absolutely everyone else quoted us. The delivery team showed up, wearing masks and gloves, within 15 minutes of the start of their delivery window, and had our old fridge out and the new one down the stairs and into our apartment in less than 20 minutes. I had a cold soda tonight to celebrate.

2. Rudi went out for supper last Friday with the political campaign he worked for this spring and I, after chatting with my folks and eking out any last light at the park on a clear evening, picked up a sandwich for supper from the local Greek restaurant. The owner and I chatted while I waited for my order and he said after a bad experience when the city first asked restaurants to do contact tracing, he’d been very pleased with everyone’s willingness to share their info. It was nice to chat with a longtime neighbor for a few minutes.

3. I got to buy period supplies and ibuprofen with my flex-spending card for the first time ever. One of the best things to come out of the COVID-19 situation is that feminine hygiene products and OTC pain meds are now allowable expenses for flexible spending accounts. I’m running out of time for that to be relevant to me, but I am so happy for younger people that Congress finally rectified this stupid, biased policy. Now if we can just get pads and tampons made tax-free nationwide and also provided free in prisons…

How about you? What’s been beautiful in your world lately?

The unraveling is mostly only in my reading. In Oona Out of Order by Margarita Montimore, the main character suddenly starts experiencing years of her life in non-chronological fashion. In Livingston Girls by Briana Morgan (thanks, Jenn!), Rose’s new all-girls school turns out to be a little … witchier … than she expected. In Sal and Gabi Break the Universe by Carlos Hernandez, Sal accidentally brings his dead mother back to life for a little while for a festive meal. And in Yes No Maybe So by Becky Albertalli and Aisha Saeed, Jamie and Maya are trying to figure out what their relationship is during the final, frantic days of a crucial local election.

On the sock front, I have turned a heel! Now I just need to pick up the stitches and we can start flying toe-ward! I’m looking forward to taking something off the needles finally!

Head over to As Kat Knits for more of what folks are crafting and reading.

Dad and I have been talking a lot about Harry Chapin recently. If you aren’t familiar with his songs (or just know “Cat’s in the Cradle,” which is the only song of his I remember hearing on the radio), you should check some out. He writes beautiful stories about people down on their luck and people who find love against the odds and people who live at the fringes (for better and for worse).

“Dance Band on the Titanic” is one of the songs of his that you can sing along with, even as we’re all thinking, “Please, God, S.O.S!”