You Just Mind Your Snails

I did not do Thing One in the cabinets last night, except settle an argument once and for all. I couldn't face them; after four hours of accomplishing fuck-all the night before, I just didn't have it in me. Of course, that whole four-hour thing itself was entirely my fault. It's not like four hours worth of work was getting done.

I'd say a good half of that time was spent standing in the middle of the kitchen, hands full, slack-jawed, just thinking. Not thinking good stuff, either, but more along the lines of: "Uhhh... should the flour go... in the... but what if... and where will the... and what about the rice!?"

Another half was spent second-guessing every decision I did manage to make, and re-shuffling every item -- at least twice -- after it was finally put away.

A third half altogether was spent labelling the jars of spices on top of their lids with a Sharpie marker. So that, you know, I wouldn't have to pick them up to know what-all they were.

It seemed like a good idea at the time.

I labelled them, alphabetized them, put the doubles in a bag and heaved it up the attic stairs, then divided the little bottles up by category: baking, cooking, pickling, and finishing (this last is a category I made up; it's for things you shake on top, like cajun flavor). I put the baking ones there and the pickling ones there, then decided that was dumb and switched them off. I put the cooking there and the finishing there, then ditto. Finally, I ditched my carefully-alphabetized system because what sense does it make for oregano to go all the way in back?

Then, when it was at-last, honestly finished, I made like I was looking for the tarragon, just to prove what a clever girl I am and how gosh-darn convenient those newly-Sharpied lids would be.

Very convenient. If you take the top of the cabinet off and go all Mission Impossible from the kitchen ceiling. Poor Johnny. He can't even see their factory-labelled fronts.

Fortunately, they're not going to live where they are forever (so it's a real good thing I spent so long fretting over it, what?). Which brings me to the argument I mentioned at the start.

Here's the issue:

We have one of those tucked-away ironing boards in the kitchen. See?

That's it there, behind the potatoes. (That's the wok brush hanging from the door-handle. For some reason, Johnny thinks that's where it goes. It's not.)

Okay wait, hang on. Maybe some of you don't know what I mean. It seems a perfectly normal thing to me to have an ironing board hidden in the wall of your kitchen, but I do know people who have never heard of this before. So I'll go open the door and show you how it works.

See? Ironing board. It opens out like this:

And there is a handy outlet on the bottom of the cabinet to plug your iron into:

BLEAH!

In my defense, I believe this may be the first time I've opened that door since we moved in. Still, though, that's embarrassing. Oh well.

Now, there may be those of you out there (I'm sure there will be those of you out there) who will want to reach through the internet and choke me for saying this, but: I'm pretty sure we're taking that ironing-board out. Unless my father can give me some good reason to leave it in (and maybe even then we won't).

What I want to do is leave the plug live (it will have to be re-wired when we do the rest, but what's one more plug when you've got the walls torn open anyway?) and save the board up in the attic (in case somebody, sometime, wants to put it back). Then -- after a good hose-down and a coat of paint, of course -- I want to install some little shelves and turn the compartment into a cabinet for spices.

You see? How I manage to come back to the point? Eventually?

What Johnny wants to do is knock down the section of wall that the ironing-board's in and make the doorway wider. What you can't tell by these pictures, though, is that those two feet of wall are all that stop the master-bedroom door from opening directly to the kitchen. Also, look at that top photograph again... If we make the doorway wider, it will look out at the hallway wall. Not like we'd be creating a big old schmorganic, wide-open, architecty space.

He's wrong, right?

I told him last night that the fight was over. That the spice cabinet was the only way to go. I believe the words I used exactly were: "I'm doing it."

I'm right, right?