livingsimpleton does housecleaning on one leg

01/04/10



Last Friday's NYT crossword (which I attacked today) had as an answer to one of its clues "alegtostandon" as in "a leg to stand on" which sums me up pretty neatly these days. On a sunny day (or when when I've been drinking heavily) I might be tempted to think that I'm better on one leg than most people are on both legs but I'd be wrong. As I so often am though I'll admit to a certainty that I'm better on one leg than almost any number of college vice presidents are on however many legs they can steal or pad their vitaes with.


That said, I did figure out how to limp around the house on one good leg and a pair of crutches pretty well during my last convalescence. This got to a point where I could get up to the third floor for a clean t-shirt that I hadn't worn for awhile or out to the trash cans with the cat litter or all the way down to the basement to raid the freezer when Susan was out of sight and not likely to be home any time soon. I even managed a little vacuum cleaning on the level stretches.


This afternoon though I was faced with a situation that tried my patience so thoroughly that Miles was probably looking for a chair to hide under. I was frazzled from lack of sleep: up way past a sensible bedtime last night, up way too early this morning and what sleep I'd had interrupted by a near shutdown of all airways to my lungs courtesy of whatever bug has set up housekeeping in my upper respiratory lately. I'd also received an annoying email from the closer on our house loan re-fi telling me cheerily to expect to bring $3,600 to the closing rather than the $500 I'd been pitched in the first place. Throw in a call from Susan's hair salon and the heavy responsibility of being asked to call those folks back to reschedule her appointment and I wasn't in a particularly receptive mood for any extra bumps in the road.


I got through a reheated lunch of last night's leftovers. A tangy lemon chicken copped off the Today Show website with boxed wild rice and frozen mixed vegetables. Plenty good enough for the likes of me. My mistake was thinking that I deserved more. I went rummaging around in the dreaded baking supplies drawer for the dry roasted peanuts that Susan had brought back from her last grocery run. I went to pick the bag up and was lucky enough to spill only half of the peanuts out onto the floor and back into the dreaded baking supplies drawer. I've known for quite awhile that the plastic bags in the produce and bulk food sections at Cub are flimsy beyond imagination. I knew that the darn things start to biodegrade as soon as you pull them off the roll and that they have an effectiveness shorter than the attention span of the average chipmunk. However, I had never seen just how disastrously that could play out in my own personal life until the peanuts started pouring out of a gaping hole and bouncing around the kitchen floor like the little balls in a bingo hopper down in the church basement. Grrrr.


Normally this would have been a relatively easy fix. I'd have claimed a handful on the five second rule and then gotten the broom and dustpan and swept the rest up and into the trash can. Not so easy on one leg though. Hobble halfway down the basement stairs to the landing to get the broom and dustpan. Spend five minutes sweeping up the cat litter that Miles strews so carefully all over the floor as a vital part of his toilette. Pick up the plastic bags that have mysteriously settled to the stairway landing and stuff them into the recycling bag with the others where they belong. Hobble back up the stairs with broom and dustpan in tow. Sweep up the peanuts which have by then stopped bouncing around all over the floor. On to the dreaded baking supplies drawer.


Our house has several areas that would probably qualify out at Mt. Palomar as authentic black holes. At her surliest, Susan would contend that our entire house qualifies as the big bang grand-daddy of all black holes. The dreaded bakery supplies drawer has a life of its own. But what the hell, no time like the present. Start emptying the drawer of its contents. Pour the spilled peanuts out of the approximately two dozen measuring cups which had collected them as they spilled into the drawer. Find the two or three measuring cups which didn't have peanuts in them because they were buried so far back in the drawer as to avoid that and because they were already filled with flour that had escaped from its bag in some earlier cosmic upheaval. Empty the drawer of 1 1/2 bags each of brown sugar and coconut, one bag each of semisweet morsels, semisweet mini-morsels, butterscotch chips, peanut butter chips, three bars of Ghiardelli baking chocolate, four large squares of semisweet baking chocolate, two little containers of cinnamon sugar blend., two small half full bottles of chocolate flavored cookie decorations, a little tub of paper muffin cups, two strips of baking yeast packets, a half bag of craisins, a few pieces of rock-hard dried peaches (been wondering where those had gotten to), a small brown bag from the co-op with pancake flour about ready to disintegrate and spread its contents with the rest of the lose stuff in the drawer and, last but far from least, a small piece of paraffin that, as Susan reminds me every once in awhile, she and the sisters add to the melted chocolate dip for the peanut butter balls to give it some staying power. Honest to god. It could have been worse. I didn't come across any open bags of powdered sugar. I shudder to think.


Susan sensed the tension in my voice when she called to check on me after this brush with the infinite in the kitchen. When she got home she was gentle and gave me high marks for the way that I'd straightened up the now-not-nearly-so-dreaded baking supplies drawer. Just like when she gives me high marks for organizing the cupboard with the plastic storage containers, an area which may be the best single exhibit in this hemisphere for the validity of chaos theory. She gives me high marks but I know she's already looking forward to the days ahead when all of that hard-won order and discipline will again succumb to the inevitability of random distribution. Bring on the black holes.