The Kitchen Project

Today was a day off from construction. It is just as well, because the temperature hit nearly 100 and the humidity was high enough to match.

I skipped the gym after work because of the heat. When we got home, I started making salad while Greg tackled the built-up dust in the front rooms and hung sheets against the plaster expected tomorrow. Everything was going well in the “kitchen” until I reached into the vegetable drawer for the cabbage and found that zucchini from God-only-knows-when had liquified into a pulpy mess inside its plastic bag, and that bag began to drip into the drawer as I tried to get it out of the fridge and SOMEWHERE ELSE as quickly as possible. Vegetables of use only in a working kitchen will not be ignored.

This was not a major crisis, and I regret that I did not rise to the occasion. I was already feeling cramped by the hot plate taking up much of our countertop and the piles of newspapers, office supplies, and plastic bags on the table behind me which I hadn’t bothered to clear off before starting to cook, and faced with a new variable, I crumpled. I dropped the bag into our small compost holder along with some reasonably sound celery and radishes that had been too close to it in the drawer and, when Greg returned from the basement laundry room, explained that he had to take care of it somehow. I took the drawer into the bathroom and washed it out in the bathtub. After that was done, I finished the rest of the salad, told Greg to please assemble the rest of the meal (leftover hamburger patties), and retreated into the bedroom with the a/c.

To his credit, he not only got out the hamburger patties but made them into cheeseburgers and retrieved a bottle of wine from the basement. It was perfect.

He’s off shopping for breakfast supplies. It wasn’t a terrible day, but we’re glad to put it behind us.

This is our countertop as of Sunday when I cooked the hamburgers.

Who’s reading this blog? We aren’t checking the IP logs and I’m curious about our audience.

I revised our crazy comment preferences yesterday to make it easier to post. I know we lost a few comments due to the defalt settings. If you’re here and want to speak up, post!

It’s going to hit the 90s today and I have closed all of the windows and shades. This is the one bright side of Somerville law requiring all windows facing on construction dumpsters to be boarded up with plywood in case of fire. Our front rooms are half cave and it’s keeping yesterday’s cold air in.

I’m up and down stairs doing laundry all morning while Greg enjoys his college reunion in the Berkshires.

Update: Greg, I just remembered. I’ll water the plants.

We lost our laundry room with the demolition of the kitchen. Coincidentally, our tenant’s dryer broke the same day. We’ve been accumulating laundry for over a week.

The dryer has been fixed and whites are washing, all in time for the first heat wave of the year. We won’t have to take advantage of the offers we received to do laundry at friends’ houses. Yay!

We bought a set of new appliances for the kitchen. Over several years of renting and ownership we’d gradually replaced the ancient junk that Greg found when he moved in here in 1994, but we did not invest in more than the basic level of what we needed, and won’t miss them.

We gave our rollaway dishwasher to our tenant, who has none. I first encountered one of these beasts when I was 20 and living in Cambridge for the summer with five or six classmates. It made me feel like an adult then. It doesn’t now.

In the process of offering this, we found out his washing machine was on its last legs, so yesterday we crab-walked the rusty, screechy mess out of his half of the basement and moved in our machine, which had been on our porch since demo. Yale Electric will take away one appliance for every one they deliver.

Our electric dryer is still on the porch. Want it? The local appliance shop didn’t, but they bought our stove.

There’s also a small tube tv with a vcr velcro’d to the top on the porch. No hopes that’s going to walk away.

The fridge is in the dining room. If we’d spent $80 more at Sears in 1999, we might not have spent the intervening years threading the damn cheese drawer into its tracks every week. A lesson learned. I won’t miss this, either.

The microwave? After finding out that no one in the kitchen industry takes AmEx, we’re going to buy one with the Amazon points from everything else. For now, it’s our lifeline, along with the toaster.