Baaaaaad day today. However, as is so often the case, there is a silver lining.
I have finally crawled out of bed and stumbled into the kitchen. After blunting the point of one of my best knives trying to hack open a pill bottle (don’t even ask), I get the coffee going.
Then I turn the oven on to the max, drop a couple of pieces of bread onto the bottom rack, and set the timer to twelve minutes in order to 1) have oven-style toast, an old favorite, and 2) warm up the kitchen.
By the time I’ve stumbled to the front porch and retrieved the newspaper and then got back to the kitchen and poured a cup of coffee, the timer has gone off and I retrieve from the oven the left slice of bread, now nicely toasted on the bottom.
As an aside here I need to point out that when I “dropped” the slices of bread onto the lower rack, the act of dropping was far less casual than the word implies. Different parts of the oven floor heat up faster than others. The left slice goes over a hot spot so that it browns faster than the right slice and can be jellied and peanut buttered and returned to its spot on the rack just as the right slice becomes perfectly browned on the bottom. This also means that the fully slathered left slice browns on the new bottom shortly after the peanut butter and jelly jars have been recapped and returned to the refrigerator and the knife (for the peanut butter) has been licked clean and tossed into the dishwasher and the spoon (for the jelly) has been dropped into the little tub of Lucerne Lemon Cheesecake Low Fat Yogurt. (This stuff is way better than you might think.) The left slice can be half eaten, with exactly 50% of the yogurt, before the right slice is ready, so I get perfect consumption temperature for both slices.
But I digress. As I am spreading the toasted side with jelly, I observe that one of the air bubbles goes all the way through, so there is a hole that I must carefully avoid or the jelly will drip through onto the oven floor while the other side toasts, making a mess that I find far more offensive now that my housecleaner has deserted me.
Considering the state of my manual dexterity today, this is not an easy task, and I crossly realize that I should have inquired in the checkout line, “Does this bread have holes that go all the way through?”
Not quite, I admit, fully up to the standard set by the little old lady who, according to my friend Jim did not want her purchases passed across the scanner, complaining, “Too much radiation”, but I’m getting there. And at my current rate, I’ll be there soon.
OK, OK. I fumbled the damn knife and it fell point down into the sink. I should be grateful, of course, that I didn’t cut myself open with it. On the other hand, had I done so I could have rushed outside and sat down on the curb so I could have the line in my obit, “…bled to death in the gutter.”