Typical

This morning, I sat down at my computer to do some Serious Job Hunting (tm). Yet within fifteen minutes, I found myself browsing cegep and university websites, looking into interesting certificate and diploma programs. A certificate in Adult Education looked way nifty, and Concordia's graduate diploma in Communications seemed like it would be an awesome way to spend a year. I even spent a good ten minutes dreamily contemplating that if I suddenly found myself with a ton of money in my bank account -- due to the intervention of a particularly generous fairy godmother -- I might like to take the next five years and do the combined B.Ed./B.Sc. at McGill.

Oh, well. I'm nothing if not predictable.

(It also occurred to me this morning that I have never actually found a job through a traditional "browse the listings" job hunt. It makes me doubt whether I'll be any good at it. Sigh.)

And yet more obnoxious news

To continue the annals of "what doesn't help makes things worse":

All summer, the sink was getting slowly more clogged, taking longer and longer to drain. Finally, Saturday night, I bought some Draino and used it, and it seemed to work moderately well. The sink still wasn't draining great, but it was draining better than before.

Then Marc came home. He wasn't satisfied with how the sink was draining, so he used Draino again last night.

Suddenly, this morning, we've got a TON of standing water in the sink when I want to do the dishes. Draino says not to repeat the process more than twice (though it doesn't actually say whether that's twice in a row or twice overall), so I found my trusty plunger, filled the sink with some water, and plunged the bejesus out of it.

The end result is that things are now worse than ever before, just as clogged if not worse, and now I've got a ton of gunk from the pipes in and around the sink. (And on my bathrobe, but let's just ignore that for the moment.)

Clearly I'm not cut out to be a handywoman.

Edited to add: I have reached the end of my own resourcefulness. My concierge is taking care of another apartment right now, but he's going to come here after. Hopefully he'll be able to fix things, because I totally can't right now.

Updated to add: My concierge's solution involved pouring about a gallon of liquid bleach down the drain, waiting an hour and a half, and then running hot water down the drain. Seems to have worked, too. Yay!

Adventures in cooking: 5-minute chocolate cake

I've had a recipe sitting in my inbox for a long, long time. It's a recipe that makes chocolate cake in your microwave in about five minutes. It's all over the internet, but you can see a version of it here. For the longest time, I haven't made this recipe because I didn't have any cocoa powder on hand. But last weekend, I picked some up for a different baking project and had no more excuses.

The only change I made to the recipe -- on a hint from a different website -- was to add a pinch of baking powder to the dry ingredients, and I omitted the chocolate chips on account of not having any.

In the end, it wasn't the best chocolate cake I've ever eaten (by a long shot), but it wasn't the worst, either. It was (as other commenters have noted) very eggy, and next time I'll probably whisk up an egg separately and only use half of it. Still, for five minutes of work, it's certainly passable and something to keep as a standby in case I'm ever PMSing and desperately want something warm and chocolaty.