and for her next trick, she'll make the empire state building vanish

Okay, so the nightly catastrophe for yesterday was as follows (prepare for protracted backstory. abandon hope, all ye who enter):

I got up really early yesterday morning and started making bread. I decided I wanted a nice brown bread (oatmeal, molasses, whole wheat flour, some rye) to go with our leftover soup (chicken and cavatappi). Okay, I mix it all up, to the delight of Finnegan and the bemusement of Beatrice. I mix, I make a sponge batter, I let the yeast proof and the whole shebang, kneaded for 15 minutes and popped it all in the great big bread bowl I bought when I lived in Minneapolis and have lugged from house-to-house since then. So far, so good. I come home after a wretched day at work (about which more, another time) and punch it all down, separate, allow to rise in the good Chicago Metallic bread pans on top of the stove while getting the oven up to temperature. Took the dogs for a walk; came home; baked. Okay, so Kelly and I really like homemade bread, and especially like it still warm. So we eat about a half a loaf of this bread, because we are believers in moderation. Also, we are looking forward to sandwiches with this bread for Thursday.

So we're cleaning up the remains of the dinner, and I get this phone call from one of our reporters, and the long and the short of it is, he's got a piece that has to run on Thursday and I need to edit him, though he had promised me the script by 3 and he didn't get around to sending it until 7. Okay. I go off and fix up the syntax and question where he got all his stats and such. In the meantime, Kelly has gone upstairs and is watching a movie and is wearing headphones so that he can really appreciate the THX that George Lucas went to all the trouble of figuring out so that people can have their gallbladders shake whenever the Dark Lord of the Sith comes on screen, or whatever. So I finish up this edit after about 40 minutes, and go brush my teeth and get ready to go to sleep. (Early to bed, and early to rise, suckas.) I go upstairs and lay down and am reading John Keegan's "The First World War" (because I am a shade underwhelmed with all the Greatest Generation Love going on with the new Ken Burns film on The less-Great War). Kelly comes up and says, "what did you do with the bread?" I say, "what do you mean, what did I do with the bread? It's on the counter next to the loaf we didn't eat yet." (Can you guess where this is going?)

Okay, so we troop downstairs, mystified by the Disappearing Bread, and then...it's like a moment out of a movie. We're looking around, mystified, the cooling rack is on the floor, there are no crumbs, NOT A ONE, on the floor...and we both, as if on a synchronized swivel, swing our heads to look at...Beatrice. Who, on cue, licks her chops. Oh, good grief. The dog ate a loaf-and-a-half of incredibly dense bread. And all of the crumbs.

Okay, this is not that big a deal, but seriously...it was like aliens swooped in and kidnapped all this bread. Not. A.Trace. Not anywhere. Somebody call Anthony LaPaglia and Marianne Jean-Baptiste. And there Beatrice stands, looking for more. Or, possibly...for a pound of butter to wash it all down. Anyway, this morning, I think she was still pretty full 'cause she looked a little green around the gills and was unenthused about breakfast.

In other news, there's a bull loose on the streets of St. Louis after some kind of weird truck accident. Watch out, Missourians! Look both ways before you cross the street!