September 8, 2004

• Woohoo!!
  No more dirty dishes on the floor.

  The job’s not done yet, because Doug still hasn’t cleaned countertops,
  dish drainer, appliances, sinks, etc., but the only dirty dishes left
  now are recently used and barely fill one sink.  I didn’t take
  pics of the piles of dirty dishes on the floor before his latest
  dishwashing binge.  I don’t usually celebrate or document messes
  – that’s Greyfox’s thing.  When Doug and I came back from the Big
  Field Trip ten years ago, the last few phone calls I made home to
  Greyfox from the road, he said he was cleaning house.  I never
  would have known when I got there, if he hadn’t told me.  It
  didn’t look clean to me. 

  Then, later, I saw the pictures he’d taken of the mess of empty vodka
  bottles and beer cases and general debris that collected during that
  months-long binge while we were gone.  Why he liked to pick up the
  camera when he was drunk and document the messes he made, and even turn
  it on himself for some repulsive self-portraits, I can’t guess and he
  can’t tell.  It’s all done in blackouts, he says.  I’ve
  gotten a few good shots of him in similar times, too, such as the one
  passed out on his cot with the cat crouched on his chest, or even
  better, the one of him naked on top of our car out at the end of the
  driveway — but I digress.  That’s a whole ‘nother blog there.

  –might as well digress a little more here, a little current snapshot of life as Susitna Valley trailer trash:

  While I was working on those first two paragraphs above, Greyfox
  called.  He left a brief message on the internet answering
  machine, and I disconnected and took his followup call.  He asked
  me how I was feeling today, because yesterday was one of those wretched
  times when the damned disease was getting the upper hand. 
  Costochondralgia, pain in the connective tissue between ribs, is one of
  the most difficult to deal with because it is re-triggered with each
  breath, turn, reach, or stretch.  The pain-switch technique is
  next to useless with it unless I’m sitting stone still and breathing
  very shallowly.  Shallow breathing is not a good idea either, and
  I used my nebulizer much more often than  usual yesterday. 
  But, today’s a better day — and I see that I’ve been digressing from
  my digression.

  Anyway, to get back to what I was saying, after I told Greyfox I was
  feeling more like my usual self today, and reminded him that he still
  needs to work on his NPD, we hung up and I got up to get something to
  eat.  I was in the kitchen when I heard Granny Mousebreath coming
  through the hallway, talking with her mouth full, bragging of her
  latest catch, a fat brown lemming.  When she crouched to spring
  over the gate between the kitchen and hallway (which keeps Koji out of
  the back of the house and away from the cats’ feeding station), I told
  her, “NO!”

  I asked her if the thing was dead yet, and she dropped it there in the
  hallway and gave it a pat with her paw.  It sprang up and tried to
  get away, and she caught it again… and again and again each time she
  let it go, until one time when she laid her paw on it while it was
  belly-up and it fought back.  That was about the most interesting
  bit of cat-and-rodent interaction I’ve seen lately, with Granny
  feinting toward it with her teeth only to jerk back when it went for
  her with its tiny teeth.  Finally, she let it up and got a better
  grip on it next time she caught it.

  Meanwhile, I was telling her, “Get it, Granny!  Kill it,
  damnit!  I don’t want any more live rodents in the house.” 
  All day yesterday, Koji was springing up from his naps to charge across
  the room at little furry scampering things.  Doug was the only one
  of us primates who saw one, and he said it was, “a vole or a shrew,”
  meaning it was small and quick and unidentifiable at that distance and
  speed.  The lack of identification was critical, since voles are
  edible, but shrews might make Koji very sick.  The cats appear to
  know better than to eat the heads, but this stupid dog will wolf down
  the whole thing if he catches it, and will scavenge the cats’ leavings
  if we don’t find them first.

  The next time Granny’s latest lemming got away from her, it scurried
  behind the pet food bags in the hallway.  Then while she was
  looking for it behind one of them, it ran out from behind the other one
  and my angle on the hallway (from this side of the kitchen gate) didn’t
  allow me to see where it went.  Granny was still searching behind
  the bags and I was trying to tell her the lemming had left, when Doug
  spoke sleepily, “There’s a mouse in my room.”

  I told him to tell Granny, and when she headed into Doug’s room, I went back and got my muffin out of the microwave and ate it.

  Now, I’ve resized the pictures that were saving to my hard drive when I started this piece.  Here they are:

  
  The cabinet over our fridge:  fifteen serving platters, a few
  plastic serving and storage dishes, and some sports bottles.  The
  knobbly orange ball under the shelf, on the top of the fridge, is one
  of Koji’s two favorite toys.  It  has to be kept on top of
  the fridge out of reach, or he throws it about and breaks things. 
  His other favorite toy (and these two tough objects are the only toys
  he’s had that he didn’t eat or at least shred) is a fluorescent pink
  knobby ring that we keep in the fridge because it we put it up top he
  apparently smells it, and keeps jumping to try to reach it.  Just
  the  other day I was getting something out of the fridge and he
  shoved between my legs and got his ring from the bottom shelf. 
  Such a clever dog!

  
  The cabinet over the microwave, beside the sink:  87 Corelle®
  dinner plates (42 different patterns of decoration) and, on the wire
  rack over the glasses, 58 Corelle® salad plates.   The latter
  size is our favorite, and must be popular with many people since I’ve
  found so few in thrift shops.  The top shelf is all plastics,
  light in weight and less likely to hurt when they fall on my
  head.  This shot was taken after I’d reorganized the
  shelves.  After Doug has washed these and put them away a few
  times, they will be falling out when the doors are opened.

  
  Here’s the corner cabinet, between stove and sink: in the lower shelf, on and under a wire rack are 
  46 Corelle® soup/cereal bowls;
  14 Corelle® “monkey dishes”, what I guess they call dessert dishes, another fave with us and very hard to find in thrift shops;
  92 Corelle® bread and butter plates (our favorite microwave cooking
  dishes for warming single servings — a big portion of leftover
  whatever, and a second little plate over it for a lid:  voilá!).
  Out of sight to the right of the lowest stack of bowls is a stack of
  9 more monkey dishes, all different kinds of “diner ware” heavy
  restaurant china, also hard to find in thrift shops.  We obviously
  need more monkey dishes. 
  Visible in the upper shelf are
  10 non-Corelle soup/cereal bowls (out of sight behind them is a stack
  of 7 smaller bowls and oddball monkey dishes that don’t nest with the
  rest);
  2 Corelle® custard cups, even rarer than the rest, and
  6 other Pyrex® custard cups.  Custard cups are my
  container-of-choice for dipping chips into salsa, and between Doug’s
  dishwashing binges I know it’s time to get him in gear when I start
  running out of salsa dishes. 

  By the way, I’ve been in quest of good, thick, chunky hot salsa for
  months.  After trying many kinds, most of them too watery, too
  sweet, not hot enough, or having oddball ingredients such as corn or
  black beans, I finally found — TaDaah! and voilá! — Emerald Valley
  Kitchen Organic Hot Salsa, from Eugene, Oregon — perfecto!  It
  has both jalapeños and habañeros, no sugar, no beans, corn, or other
  garbage, just luscious salsa.  Goes perfectly with the perfect
  chips I found while on the salsa quest:  Kettle Foods Five Grain
  Yellow Corn tortilla chips with sprouted grains–yum!  Okay, I’ve
  obviously got food issues, but when you’re an abstaining cinnamon roll
  addict in recovery, looking for healthful comfort foods, you do what
  you gotta do.

  All  right now, back to the tour of my kitchen cabinets…
  lighting these photos was a challenge.  The cabinets flank a
  window, so in ambient light they were backlit and densely dark. 
  The camera’s flash washed out the detail in the shots above and for the
  close shots below the flash washed out all detail and I had to get
  creative.

  
  A flashlight in one hand and the camera in the other, reaching into the
  lower shelf of the corner cabinet shown in the shot just above this
  one, past the end of the wire rack I caught just the top of the stack
  of 23 pasta dishes (what my mother called soup plates) one of the top
  three is Corelle®, the rarest of the rare, and the other two are
  Comcor®, evidently Corning’s commercial grade Corelle®.  The
  bottom 20 dishes/plates/bowls here are a variety of diner chinaware
  from Buffalo, Shenango, etc.  I love the elegant simplicity and
  solid durability of that stuff.  I am not that crazy about the
  solid weight of it.  My ex-, Charley, used to warn me that my dish
  collection was going to pull the cabinets off the wall.

  
  I used two flashlights, the same big black five-D-cell bludgeon used in
  the shot above, plus my newest little red one-AA-cell LED flashlight,
  to light the back end of the upper shelf of that corner cabinet, to
  show the odd collection of bowls and soufflé dishes.  This
  includes some of my best collectible treasures, which don’t get used
  unless we run out of less-precious clean dishes — and
  Doug, if you’re reading this, we better not ever run that low on clean
  dishes again, or I won’t just hide your new games, I’ll sell your old
  ones, too!

  That’s the end of today’s tour.  Up next, the pots and pans, and
  the cabinet over the washer and dryer where I keep the big mixing
  bowls, baking dishes, and my mug collection.  **Just kidding,
  unless of course enough people say they really want to see it all.**
  

  • 4:07 pm
  • 18 Comments