it's peanut butter jelly time! except no. no, it's not

I put up with quite a bit in my line of work. Toilet seats constantly being left up. A garage that looks more like a warehouse than a vehicle holding tank. Snoring. Grunted responses. Questionable underwear. It's tough being the only female wading through the raging tide of testosterone in my house.

But this?

This, my friends, is an outrage (and the shadows in that ominous photo also make it look terrifying)!This is what I found this morning when I decided, as I do every morning (were I a creature, my name would be Habit), that a slice of delicious, melty peanut butter toast would be the best way to start my day. But no. Not today. Because The Others who live with me left me with this! Is this the first time they've left an empty jar out to taunt me? No. No, it is not. In fact, as usual, I fell for their "Heh, heh, heh...we'll put the lid back on the jar to make her believe there's peanut butter in here. Again. If our mouths weren't clamped shut with delicious globs of extra chunky, we could hide in the corner and laugh and laugh when The One Who Is Not Like Us discovers our tom foolery!"

Sure, there are probably some of you out there who are saying there's enough of the delicious spread in that jar to scrape out and slather onto my bread, but to that I say BAH! We may be living in difficult times, people, but I shall not taunt my toast with minuscule amounts of peanut butter! Why, there's not even an errant peanut in this jar to make it worth my while.

So, what am I going to do about this? Well, for starters, I have screwed the lid back on the empty jar and placed it back in the pantry (where - shocker! - I found only the heel pieces of the only remaining loaf of bread in my house...nice...), and, like I do when I walk into a bathroom and find the toilet seat left up yet again (and again and again and again...)(almost to the point where I feel like I should just give up and buy a Go-Girl)(but no), plan to use this as another in a long line of successful teaching moments I've been employing since I said "I do," and heard "It's a boy!" and that is the 'Do not mess with me' lesson. Clearly it's working well.

I'm also going to eat the last Pop-Tart.

p.s. - True story - I buy Wal-Mart's brand of super crunchy peanut butter (choosy mothers may choose JiF, but I choose to save a buck). A couple years (or maybe it was earlier this year since I can't keep track of all this chaos in the world. What is this swine flu business, anyway?) ago when the government warned us away from certain peanut butter products due to salmonella, I laughed like a super hero and kept feeding my kids peanut butter sandwiches from my Wal-Mart jar. I kept dipping in and enjoying, too. Then, one day, when the jar was pretty much empty, my Mom forwarded an email with an updated list of recalled products and their lot numbers. Naturally, my jar of peanut butter was from a recalled lot of Wal-Mart brand peanut butter. Two days later, my kids became adverse to sunlight, began screeching rather than talking, and I'm pretty sure I heard them plotting to take over the world when I thought they were actually asleep. Somehow I was immune to it, and after multiple viewings of I Am Legend, I knew what I had to do to save the world. Except not really. I just watched the movie a lot even though I thought it sucked. Instead, I threw the jar of peanut butter away and got paranoid every time one of the boys said they had a stomachache. You're on your own with this swine flu business.

p.s.s. - This was supposed to be a Wordless Wednesday post. If you just look at the photo and don't come this far with the words, I suppose it still is, but you really miss something in the delivery if you do.