He stood before our entire family at Christmas dinner, raised a glass to his own genius, and explained in excruciating detail how he’d conquered my last hobby.
It started with sourdough. My quiet, flour-dusted escape became his laboratory for gluten development and the Maillard reaction. Before the bread, there were bees, and my two simple hives were soon overshadowed by his infrared-monitored, professionally-installed apiary empire.
He was a joy thief.
Each interest I discovered was strip-mined for parts, optimized with expensive gear, and then explained back to me as if I were a child. The fantasy football league was supposed to be my last sanctuary, the one nerdy little world he openly mocked and had no desire to colonize.
Of course, he had to have that, too.
He thought the game was over when his algorithms beat my intuition for the championship trophy, but he didn’t know I was about to use his own meticulously automated house to conduct a symphony of technological revenge.
The Graveyard of Good Intentions: The Carcass of Sourdough
The sourdough starter, which I had affectionately named “Dough-rothy,” was dead. It wasn’t biologically dead, of course. It was sitting right there on my kitchen counter, bubbling away in its jar, a testament to six weeks of patient feeding and temperature control. But its spirit, its very essence, was gone. Murdered at my own dinner table.
My brother-in-law, Mark, held a slice of my freshly baked loaf up to the light, inspecting its crumb structure like a diamond merchant examining a flawed stone. “See, the gluten development is decent, Sarah, but your hydration is off. You’re getting a tight crumb here,” he declared, pointing with a buttery knife. “You’re probably not using a high-enough protein bread flour. I ordered a 50-pound bag of King Arthur Sir Lancelot from a specialty supplier. It’s what the professionals use. Completely changes the Maillard reaction during the bake.”
I just smiled. A tight, bloodless smile that didn’t reach my eyes. My husband, Tom—Mark’s older, gentler brother—shot me a look from across the table. It was his usual “just let it go” face, a silent plea for domestic tranquility. Our twelve-year-old daughter, Lily, was wisely absorbed in mashing her potatoes into a perfect volcano.
Just last month, baking was *my* thing. A quiet, methodical escape. I loved the feel of the dough, the science of fermentation, the simple magic of turning flour and water into something warm and nourishing. Then Mark had come over, seen Dough-rothy on the counter, and asked a few too many questions. A week later, he had a Rofco bread oven—a four-thousand-dollar piece of equipment that looked like a commercial safe—installed in his kitchen.
Now, he was explaining my own hobby back to me, armed with a week’s worth of YouTube tutorials and the confidence of a man who has never once doubted his own genius. He hadn’t shared my interest; he had strip-mined it for parts and left me with the hollowed-out shell.
A Bee in His Bonnet
This was the pattern. A year ago, it was beekeeping. I’d taken a local course, built two Langstroth hives in the backyard, and spent a blissful summer tending to my gentle, buzzing colony. It was fascinating, a tiny, self-contained universe humming with purpose. I loved the weight of a full frame of honey, the scent of beeswax and pollen.
Then came the family barbecue. Mark saw my hives. He squinted at my standard-issue bee suit and smoker. “You know,” he’d said, “the real apiarists are moving towards Flow Hives. It’s a revolutionary Australian design. Minimizes stress on the colony during extraction.”
Two weeks later, he had six Flow Hives delivered to his McMansion. He also had an infrared camera to monitor hive temperature, a digital refractometer to measure honey moisture content, and a custom-tailored bee suit that made him look like a low-budget astronaut. He started a blog. He posted videos. He lectured me at Thanksgiving about the precise angle of a bee’s waggle dance, a topic he’d learned from a PBS documentary the night before.
My two simple hives suddenly felt… amateurish. Quaint. The joy became tainted with a sense of competition I had never asked for. I sold the hives to another enthusiast at the end of the season. I told Tom the upkeep was too much, but we both knew the truth. Mark had colonized that world, and there was no room left for me.
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