Angry Dust

We haven't gotten much work done in the kitchen since the last time I talked about it -- or else I would have talked about it. You see? How this "blog" thing works? It's okay, it took me a while to figure it out, too. Gosh, for months there I was just floundering around, muttering about boobs and valium. Once I figured out you want the real smut, though, it all fell into place. Thanks for that. Now, where was I? Oh.

We haven't got much done around here lately, what with Johnny leaving and One Friend coming in and out, then Johnny returning home "just feckin' bollocksed" and having to spend a week on the couch trying to think his blood pressure back down under 200.

Seriously. It just so happened that he had a doctor's appointment two days after he got back. His blood pressure -- on his regular medication -- was so high that they put him on an EKG machine to make sure he wasn't dying. He wasn't. Obviously. (Or I would have talked about it -- see?) But now he's taking two different blood pressure medications until it gets under control. A beta blocker and an, I don't know, gamma ray or something. Doctor says it was caused by drinking so much on holiday and then stopping abruptly when he got back home. Doctor says it's a kind of DTs he's going through, and maybe it would be a good idea for him to have a beer. Johnny says nuh-uh, I drink that much all the time, it was just sleep deprivation combined with seeing the condition that the other house is in.

Oy. The other house. Could I have a few of those blood-pressure-curers, Doctor?

So anyway, we haven't gotten much done in the kitchen, is my point.

To wit:

This box is, believe it or not, still functional. This box is, believe it or not, how we've been switching on the kitchen lights for going on a month. Grope wrong in the dark and who knows what could happen, so we've developed a system for the middle of the night in which we light one of the gas burners on the stove to guide our way.

Kidding! I kid! Really what we've been doing is a lot of putting our fingers in the water glasses to feel when they're about to overflow. Which means no getting drinks of water for each other in the night, because who knows where fingers wind up when folks are sleeping.

This, meanwhile, is where we've been plugging in the microwave.

Nuff said?

Actually, let me just add one thing (well, come on: have we met?): it never occurred to us, until the day that we pulled down the walls, to wonder what that switch beneath the plug might correspond to. Somehow never, in four years, had we thought to give it so much as a toggle. Probably a wise choice, considering what happens to everything else in this house when you put it to the purpose for which it was supposedly intended, but nevertheless. Now that we'd noticed it, we figured that it must -- obviously, der -- control the outlet that it is attached to. So, just to kill the cat, we plugged in a radio and flipped the switch.

It does not control that plug. It does not control anything. Or else maybe it used to, and it's just burned out. Like everything else in this house. Including us.

So, to sum up, this is our kitchen:

Still.

(Although, if you're very astute, you may have noticed that the wainscotting is gone. Most of it. I'll write about that bit tomorrow.)

In the meantime, it's a good thing we have one of these:

Erm. That's a bottle-opener. I meant to take a picture of the fire extinguisher, but I couldn't find it. That's not good. I know. And I will look for it, I swear. But I didn't think waking Johnny up to ask him if he knows where the fire extinguisher is sounded like a very good idea. He does still have that high blood-pressure, after all.

For which, come to think of it, that bottle-opener might come in very handy.