behindtheax

It's not my fault

More snow – oh brother. Been really busy the last few days. Saturday, Greg and I donned our handymen (person) outfits and went to the Rona Store and picked out paint, bought baseboards and casting and light fixtures and a few other things we needed for the finishing touches in the basement. Saturday evening and Sunday we spent priming and painting. It’s looking really nice down there. Our once cold, cluttery, unfinished basement got a new look! But you really have to be careful once you start a little renovation though because once started you usually want to gut the whole place and do everything over again. With us, we were house poor for the first seven years here and then we decided to quench our desire for a new fence last summer so we did that, and that led to new windows, new basement - when will this madness stop? Hopefully with a new kitchen at some point. This house is a century old semi and it does have a certain charm with its crooked door frames and slanted floors and it has a huge yard that is absolutely lovely - the main reason we bought the place - however the house itself had always needed a lot of interior work that we only now have gotten around too.

Anyway, although I was having a productive weekend it wasn’t without its mishaps. Saturday night I was making spaghetti and when I went to drain it, I grabbed these mother of all oven mitts, purchased straight from hell, that Greg had bought one afternoon after burning himself using one of the older pairs we have. He cursed a blue streak and told me I was always cheaping out on the oven mitts and that he was going to get a decent pair so off he went and brought back the freakiest pair I have ever seen. Not only are they made for someone that is at least 6’6” tall with hands the size of a football, they are made of this material that was probably initially invented by Nasa as a shield for reentering earth’s atmosphere. They almost go to my armpits when I put them on, giving me the look of Gumby. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love Gumby and appreciate the fact that he can skate along on the flats of his feet and enter pages of books but I question his fine motor skills, say like if he had to reach up with those round hands of his to grab the handle of the stainless steel strainer hanging above a stove? I tried to do exactly that with those gloves on – I was just about to drain my spaghetti over the sink but had forgotten the strainer so I put the pot back on the stove and attempted to grab the strainer, still wearing my Gumby gloves. Well, I dropped that heavy strainer and it fell from three feet into my spaghetti sauce. That spaghetti sauce boldly went where no spaghetti sauce had gone before. It even ricocheted off the walls and behind the fridge and into the next room. The ceiling, walls, stove, me, Greg, coffee pot, absolutely everything was splashed with a deep tomato red.
Of course I started to curse and blame the mother - -- - gloves and Greg said “you’re not telling me you are going to blame that on the mitts?”

“No, of course.” I answered as I counted to ten while wiping spaghetti sauce from the side of my shirt. “ I think I rather blame you for buying them.”

But by Sunday I began to realize that it was probably my eye- hand coordination that was off kilter. I was dropping just about everything and when I was in the grocery store yesterday and reached for a box of cereal, nine other boxes lept off the shelf, trying to follow the one I held, like lemmings off a cliff. As I started picking them up, holding up cart traffic for a moment or two, I felt like explaining to the nearest shopper, “honest, this is not my fault, it’s the cereals, they just started leaping from the shelf on their own.”

Secretly though, I just blamed Greg for not being around so that I could blame him.

posted by mary j. @ 1:03 PM