Dyslexic oven knobs and Chicken finger stir-fry

I’ve been having trouble in the kitchen lately, which is a bit of a problem. I mean, you have to eat don’t you… so I can’t really avoid that room of the house. If I was having trouble with the garden shed I could just shut the door and forget about it. It’s not like I’m really hanging out to do gardening after all. But the kitchen…

The first sign of the trouble ahead was when I went to heat up some milk for a pasta sauce. I carefully put the pot on the right-rear element, scanned the controls for the appropriate knob, and turned it to high. There is a saying, “a watched kettle never boils”. I have another saying, “a pot on the wrong element never even has a chance of boiling”. Here I am staring at the calm surface of the milk in the pot, wondering why there is no steam, no little bubbles that show that something is happening… wondering why my left hand is starting to get hot! Instead of the right-rear it seems I’ve turned on the left-rear element.

“So what”, I hear you say.

“We’ve all accidentally turned on the wrong element”.

Yes… well… how do you explain that I did the same thing three more times this week?! And I was really concentrating too! I take my time, confirm which element the pot is on, check the knob, re-check the pot, re-check the knob, slightly less confidently turn it on, wait… dammit!

I think I’m seriously losing my mind! How hard can it be to turn the correct knob?

Last night I had a different problem while cooking at my parent’s house (they are away so my brother and I have been eating dinner there to check on the place and make it look like someone is still living there). I was chopping an onion for use in a chicken stir-fry. As I was cutting I thought to myself, “be careful Andrew… slow down… sharp knife”. Why don’t I listen to myself I wonder? I had nearly finished my chopping when the knife slipped off the onion and on to… no prizes for guessing… my middle finger. A quick exclamation followed by a profusion of the red stuff from the end of my finger. I washed it out while yelling to my brother to go find a bandage, and being a skilled first-aid practitioner (yeah right) put pressure over the surprisingly deep wound.

Mark goes bounding up the stairs to the bathroom to look for medical supplies and I can hear him banging around. Cupboard doors are crashing, drawers are opening and shutting at a furious rate. I’m bleeding everywhere. Then I hear him come back down the stairs… with the bandage? No… he’s now in the guest bathroom. Crash! Bang! Thump! Silence… this time… here he comes. No. He’s going back upstairs again. I’m still bleeding. More loud noises before he comes back with some ridiculous gauze pad that I have to tie on my finger with some equally ridiculous gauze bandage… apparently no sticky band-aids in the circa 1970 first aid kit.

For those that are interested… the stir-fry, although considerably delayed in it’s delivery, was very tasty.

We had takeaway tonight.

Wonder

I’ve been reading a lot of science fiction lately. Not for any particular reason… it’s just what I feel like reading at the moment. In the last 6 weeks I’ve read about 8 books from some of the masters; Arthur C Clarke, Philip K Dick and Isaac Asimov.

The thing I keep reminding myself as I read these books is the age in which they were written. These days we live in a time where the moon landings were nearly 40 years ago and television and movies have dulled our wonderment of space travel. But some of the books I’ve been reading were written in the 1950’s, a time when man knew little about what was really ‘out there’ and I’m amazed at how accurate these writers were!

It seems that we’re not surprised by anything technologically new these days… I can almost believe in anything being possible. But I think about the changes that happened in my grandfather’s lifetime (1913 – 2004) and the absolute wonder he must have felt about the pace of change in the world around him. Just think… the first airplane flew a mere 10 years before he was born and yet by the end of his life inter-continental flight is common place, and we’re on the verge of commercial flights into space.

But what I will remain in a state of open mouthed wonder about is the amazing scale and detail of creation. I was looking at a book full of photos from NASA which included some pictures from the Hubble telescope, and I came across a photo of the Orion Nebula, 1500 light years away from earth and visible to the naked eye. Here’s the thing, this one feature is 30 light years across! To be geeky… light travels at 1,079,252,848.8 km/h… which means light will travel around the earth approx 7 times in 1 second… but light would take 30 years to get from one side of the nebula to the other! All I can say is wow! None of the science fiction in the world can match the reality of God’s creation.

Movin'

I’m going to have to move house soon… again. My landlord has decided that he needs to sell the house. Admittedly it’s for a valid reason – his elderly parents are sick and he needs to buy a place close to them to look after them – but it doesn’t make it any easier on us.

So the drama at the moment is the stream of real estate people traipsing through our abode, accompanied by curious onlookers… potential buyers. I feel like we are part of an urban zoo.

“Come see the habitat of the reclusive ginger haired Androo”, says the tour guide, gently straightening their red sports jacket and flashing a smile to their wide-eyed entourage.

“Look how he casts off his old socks like a snake shedding his skin”.

A mother quietly draws her child a little closer and glances nervously around. “He’s not lurking here somewhere is he?”

There is quite a bit of pressure keeping the place perfectly clean all the time. We never know when we will get the phone call from the real estate people wanting access. They’ve been pretty good at giving a few hours notice… but often I’ve already left for work when the call comes. So every morning I make the rounds, making sure everything is put away, the dishes are done, the carpet is vacuumed.

As a thanks for us being so lovely to deal with the agent left us a gift the other day… a six pack of fancy expensive beer. I appreciate the gift, but really… is leaving beer for us the best way to ensure our continued good behaviour? They might bring the next lot of unsuspecting onlookers around to our humble zoo to find us in our underwear, singing the theme song to Spongebob.