So I got home anticipating a nice relaxing evening of making something for dinner, maybe sipping at a glass of wine in the post-work wind-down period, entertaining the cats with a bit of tuna because Flex in particular goes absolutely bananas for it and Annie could give a shit but she will occasionally deign to accept a small morsel which she then bats around the kitchen before wandering away. Then I step on the bit of fish and it's ground into the rug or into my sock when I step on it twice because I don't react quite quickly enough to prevent it.
None of that, however, happened.
I walked from the garage up the stairs to the living room where Flex and Annie were waiting for me, both flopped in the rays of sunlight streaming in the wide-open living-room sliding door. That meant I'd forgotten to close the damned blinds before I left this morning, the better to keep the afternoon sun from setting fire to the carpet and overheating the main floor.
I don't understand how fur-covered beasties can enjoy sunbathing when the ambient temperature's in the mid-80s, but these are the same cats who routinely pressed their wet noses against the too-warm glass in front of the fireplace a few months ago, resulting in horrible sizzling noises followed by cat yowls and acrobatic thumps as they jumped backward in stunned disbelief, only to creep forward to try it all again a few minutes later.
So first order of business was the skritchies, because I also don't much care for playing the part of the Six-Foot Mobile Climbing Apparatus to small creatures whose claws draw blood merely by their existence. A quick rub under the chin, a scratch of the ears, and they're content long enough for me to clear the 15 feet across the living room and draw the blinds.
To the fridge, then, for the bottle of Hogue Chardonnay I'd bought some weeks back. I reached for the Rabbit Corkscrew-Handling Device—I understand how the thing works but it's still just amazing, somehow, every time I use it—and two lever thrusts later, the wine was open and the cork (I use the term loosely, it was really that weird rubber/plastic foam-style cork material many winemakers use nowadays) was skittering across the floor accompanied by the two felines whose ability to chase small randomly moving objects is second only to their amazing skill at snapping full awake and dancing on my cranium at 04:59 daily.
Shrug. I reached for a wine glass, one of the high-quality set of six I use when I want to impress people or when I haven't washed the $2-a-piece set of six from Pottery Barn. The six glasses in that set are lying in a heap in my sink, and part of my relaxing evening is to wash them. Normally housework figures into a relaxing evening the same way Ebola figures into an adventurous African safari experience, but tonight I was also eager to get things mildly organized because the kitchen's looking a bit... well, "federal disaster area" is the term that leaps to mind.
Wine poured, I swirled and sniffed deeply and took a small sip and tried to discern the flavors and appreciate the color and bouquet and what I got was: "Inexpensive alcoholic grape juice with hints of spice and dust bunny." I did this because I saw Sideways yesterday, so I was trying to use what little wine knowledge I gleaned because I would kind of like to be a fully qualified wine snob and learn to appreciate the flavors and match them to food in the most pleasing ways possible. But through most of the movie I was too busy thinking:
Sandra Oh is hot! I wonder if that's why I liked Grey's Anatomy
since I just now realized that's where I've seen her?
and also
Virginia Madsen is hot! and I've never liked Virginia Madsen much before now.
And then Sandra Oh used her helmet to beat the hell out of Thomas Haden Church and I cringed and it brought me back to the now, which was really the then of watching the movie, versus the now of my own attempt at wine-tasting earlier tonight and the even more immediate now of my writing this.
So anyway, I sipped and inhaled to appreciate the wine and thought, fuck it, what I want is to drink the stuff, not appreciate it. It tastes fine for drinking; appreciating is what I do with a bottle that costs 5% of a paycheck. So I started sippin' and figured I'd do the dishes at that moment, because I also wanted to use one of my spreader knives to make a sandwich, and that knife was under the stack of inexpensive wine glasses in the sink.
Set down the wine glass, turned on the water, dribbled some Palmolive on my sponge, reached my left hand to put down the Palmolive bottle and pick up a dirty glass. That's when I noticed the spider on my right hand and my Dipshit Instincts took over and caused me to jump backward and toss the sponge one way and the Palmolive bottle the other.
The sponge landed in the sink—I never could have made that shot if I'd tried—and the Palmolive bottle hit the floor. It ejaculated a small stream of detergent as the pressure of bouncing from a four-foot fall overwhelmed the bottle's seal. No idea where the spider went, I was by this point nearly climbing onto the stove directly opposite the sink. It was I would estimate 45 seconds before I managed to cross the five-foot space to pick up the detergent bottle and wipe up the spilled detergent and only after an extremely careful examination would I return to the sink and finish washing the damned glasses.
So much for relaxing.
Oh, and somehow during this whole thing I splashed detergent in my wine glass, the active one I was sipping. I didn't notice, however, until I reached for it to take a big healthy swig, the better to calm my frayed nerves, and got a strong taste of soap to add to the hints of pear and oak and glass shards from the first taste.
You're wondering, however, where the disposer comes into this? Well, figuring the spider might have fallen into the sink and been washed into the drain, I turned on the water again and reached for the disposer switch to mince the little bastard and send it straight to the depths of hell, and that's when the finned rubber drain-blocker device came loose and the water and nasties that were in the disposer shot out directly toward my face.
If you've seen the 1988 remake of The Blob, the part where the kitchen worker gets eaten by the slime when it jets out of the kitchen sink, you know just how I felt.
Finished that bottle of wine in about an hour, didn't even burp.