Cause and Effect

The other day I was making fruit smoothies. Orange Julius style for those who are interested. It was for a church thing, so a couple of us were in the kitchen at the church building, blending away.

Perhaps I should have prefaces with the fact that this was on a Saturday morning. Apparently the only productive and safe place for me to be on a Saturday morning is in bed.

Allow me to explain.

I'm a clean person. I hate putting a dirty spoon on the clean counter for two reasons, 1) it gets who knows what on the spoon (because let's be realistic, actually how clean are the counters in our houses?) and 2) it gets whatever is on the spoon on the counter.

In an attempt to keep any of these things from happening, I will often use a lid or a box to set my spoon on. Especially if our handy-dandy spoon holder thingie is dirty. Still. Again. Whatever.

As I was dumping ingredients into the blender, I put the end of the spatula on the back side of the foil, yogurt lid. Good idea, right? It fit just perfectly.

Well, after I got everything into the blender, it wouldn't turn on. I won't go into the almost bad words that were uttered in the church (because I did NOT want to clean out the blender we had used to make the peanut butter banana smoothies in) or the very technical checklist I went through to get the dang thing working. At one point I even poured all of the smoothie stuff out into a picture so I could get to the bottom of the blender. Nothing wrong. It worked fine. So I poured it all back in and ta-da, Orange Julius. Yum.

But where had the top of my yogurt gone? I had to use the juice can for my spatula. Probably on the floor, where I would be sure to step on it later.

Our activity didn't start for about 30 minutes, so I poured the smoothie back into the pitcher and put it in the freezer. Right before we started, one of the girls poured the smoothie out into cups. After she had poured at least ten, she said, “Uh, what's that?”

I said, “What's what?”

“That?”

I blinked. I'm sure I made a face. I grabbed a set of measuring spoons and pulled it out chop-stick style.

Stupid yogurt lid. How had it gotten into the smoothie!?!?

And now it was in pieces.

The disclaimer I gave the audience was funny, and quite awesome. I feel like having something go wrong at the very beginning allowed everything else to run smoothly. You're welcome, everyone.

And only two of the girls found bits of foil. I told them they were strong to have survived my assassination attempts.

As we were cleaning up, and still laughing about the whole thing, I got to thinking about how characters in stories need to have these little quirks. The need to keep the counter clean (which did work, by the way) resulted in foil in smoothies. One little thing. Who knows what can happen?