It’s growing as I type this.

At about 4:35p, my husband made sure I was responding to him (because sometimes when I’m writing, it’s hard to get my attention), and left instructions on what to do with this thing:

Then he headed out the door.

Erm. Yes. Well. It seems, I wasn’t paying attention quite as well as he (or I) thought. Five minutes later, I looked up, saw that it was making a bid for world domination — or at least, for the dining room table — and punched it down. That much, I know how to do, since it requires more brawn than brains, both of which, apparently, I hold in short supply. I couldn’t for the life of me remember what else he told me to do with it. He’s the bread baker around here. It’s been 20 years since I got my hands seriously into a piece of dough. At this point in my life, I’m just an enthusiastic consumer.

When my fist hit the dough, I learned two things. 1) This dough is very lively. 2) This dough is very wet. Oh, and 3) I’d better take off my rings. That’s not, by the way, what it looked like when he left, or even immediately after I punched it down. Its appearance here came later.

Dough punched, I look up at the clock. Uh. That thing’s NOT going to last until the Husband returns at about 6:15 or so. I am woman, hear me roar — I can do this. I dig my hands in to pick the dough out of the bowl.

Oh. Very wet. Sticky. Sticking to my hands, the bowl, and everything else. I manage to divide the thing in half by hand and plopped one part on the kitchen counter, intending to pull off roll-sized pieces and place them on the greased cookie pans the Husband thoughtfully left on the stove. The first roll-sized piece very quickly became a roll-sized glove as I tried to mold it into a ball, impossible to peel off. Still, I managed to get all but a thin layer of it off my hand and back into the half batch sitting on the counter, and stood back to take stock.

Maybe the world didn’t need to hear me roar. I made a grab for the dough, to dump it back in the bowl with the rest. A significant portion of it preferred to remain glued to the counter. I did what I could, plopped everything I could reasonably salvage back in the bowl, and washed my hands.

I realize that I am playing with and possibly ruining a significant portion of tonight’s supper, but in the time it’s taken me to take that picture, get it onto my computer, do a little basic cropping, and upload it, the dough has grown… significantly. I can’t resist.

A very short while later, it looked like this:

Like I said — lively. Astonishing, what a little yeast can do. I poked it, and this happened:

It did not so much punch down as deflate. I finished punching it down — it didn’t want to go, and fought back vigorously with yeasty halitosis and sticky residue, but the thing is beaten back.

For now.