Eccentric Flower:201006/The Wry Smile

For days when you wake up half-dead and you have a project to install a new casement window that shouldn't take more than an hour or two, except you find that it takes you far longer to extract the mostly-carpenter-ant-eaten old sill board than you would have guessed, and you have to go to Home Despot to get things you didn't realize you'd need, and you forget to puncture the bead in the tube of construction sealant and when the pressure gives it squirts four inches of it onto your bare leg and the shorts which you had not previously reserved for shop work but actually wore out of the house, but no longer because the stuff is like oil paint and it will never come out entirely, and you work until 6:15 and all you have to show for your labors are a new sill board with drying sealant all over it with a light rain beginning oh my god I hope it's set enough to survive the night, the window is not the least bit hung at all, and there's at least another day's work of putting in the correct boards for the window mounting and removing old paint on the boards you kept, not to mention painting the exterior boards at some point, and you can't do much tomorrow because you have to go help push your brother-in-law's brick of a dead car, and you're really disgusted with the fact that you labored all afternoon and have nothing much to show for it but a pair of ruined shorts, and then you go into the kitchen and mix one of these.

[Caution: This drink is not for everyone. It is bitter and sour; in fact, downright astringent. Please keep any commentary pertinent to the personality of the drinker/mixer to yourself.]

[Caution #2: NO SUBSTITUTIONS. At least not for two of the ingredients. If you can't get orange bitters - and I'm happy to say that I'm seeing the Fee Bros. product in more places these days, a pleasant offshoot of the cocktail comeback - then do not make this drink. And do not use fresh lime juice instead of the Rose's; Rose's is more of a lime syrup and the drink needs that sweetness.]

[Caution #3: My cocktails are constructed on a basis of three ounces of the base spirit, plus other flavors. This makes a cocktail that some people would call a double. You have been warned.]

Ahem.

The Wry Smile

To serve one:

3 ounces London dry gin (you may choose your own, but I prefer Bombay Sapphire, which is stronger than most others)
1/2 ounce Cointreau (Grand Marnier is more brandy-like and would not work as well; triple sec would be better)
1/2 ounce Rose's lime juice
A great deal of orange bitters - four or five good dashes from the bottle

Shake extremely vigorously in a shaker with lots of ice until quite cold. Strain into cocktail glass, consume, watch the travails of the day vanish.