The tax man's taken all my dough

This Monday is escaping with its life, I see. For a day that began with a feeling of smug satisfaction as I ran intervals on the elliptical, I've done a 180. I'll probably lick the plate after this piece of chocolate chess pie is gone. True there hasn't been much consumed between this morning's non-fat Greek yogurt and the pie, but let's hope this pastry eating at 10:15 p.m. isn't a harbinger of midnight banana splits to come.

No, of course not. I like it when my pants are falling off me even when I'm sober.

The pie is Sophie's fault. It was not a planned pie. After my threats involving holding the door open so the cats could escape, she stopped texting me about her stabby sore throat and toughed it out at school. She came home, swallowed the Advil I handed her when she walked in the door, thanked me, flopped on the sofa and announced that she had a craving for pie dough.

She looked so pitiful, what was I supposed to do?

There's a pie dough law that says if you marry flour, Crisco, salt and water, you are obligated to take the pastry cutter to it and finish by rolling it out.  Sophie got the trimmings to satisfy her craving, the rest of us got a pie that should have a blue ribbon hanging off it.

As I was tossing the dough with the fork, I thought about a piece of writing I'm working on and it occurred to me that the pie could make a great metaphor for that, as well. Not that I'm going to use it, but let's just say that MathMan did the taxes this weekend and figured out how much our income had dropped from 2009.

Our financial pie shrunk from a nine incher to the size of one of those frou frou tarts with the kiwi. I'm sorry, but kiwi? On a little pie? Please just hand me one of those lemon tarts, please. All the glaze in the world isn't going to hide the fact that that is a kiwi hiding under that bulbous strawberry. I'll leave that for someone who can truly appreciate it. I prefer my kiwis in the raw.

A quick look at my old patterns would suggest that the late night pie is stress eating. Perhaps, but I'm not going to stress about it now. I'm not going to follow the old patterns either. Instead, I'm  going to pop in my teeth bleaching tray that looks like a mouth protector and put a dead stop to any more snacking. And if I'm doing that anyway, maybe I'll see if MathMan wants to play the Wrestling Game. I think our tights are clean......

Pie?