Tuesday, August 18

Ordinary day, mild for an ordinary August. But not this one. Sitting outside in the gazebo, listening to the crickets, the stopwatch of twilight,  fall in and out of sync. The utter lack of inspiration continues unabated, but I’m not worried; if I’m not going to go to Cape Cod and sit on an Adirondack chair and stare at the surf, might as well sit in the backyard and blog about inessentials and trivialities. 

Today’s primary accomplishment so far: cleaning out the kitchen cupboard that holds the plastic containers. 

Really. Over the years disorder asserts itself with frightening glee; what was once devoted solely to a particular style of container becomes a mishmash of brand and lid-style paradigms. My wife doesn’t help matters – she saves plastic containers, which is one of those things I . . . don’t. My mother did it. Saved plastic Sue-Bee Honey containers. Oh, they were fine examples of the container genre, thick and durable with a variety of mid-60s hues, suitable for stamps and rubber bands and other bits of domestic flotsam, but they rate of usage exceeded the rate of accumulation by a factor of five, so there was always a tottering column of the damned things in the cupboard, accompanied by a slippery stack of lids. Since most of the uses did not require lids, the number of lids exceeded the number of containers, but you couldn’t throw any of those away. At any time the Depression might return and we’d have to throw everything into small plastic bowls and set out for California on the old truck, you know. 

I jest, somewhat, and I’m glad she saved them. I have the lids somewhere. I kept them for the graphics. The containers I threw away. 

Anyway: you know how you end up with 25 different shapes and sizes, and 37 different lids. Drives me nuts. The other day at Target I saw a box of containers with a new lid design. You’d never lose a lid again. You’d never be unable to find them. Behold: the lid is stored on the bottom of the container. Snaps right in. If there had been an app for the iPhone that lets you slaughter a virtual goat in praise and thanks, I would have fired it up and done it right there. (You draw your finger across the throat of the goat, but quickly; be merciful) I bought the box and looked forward to throwing out everything else. 

I hadn’t gone through this cupboard in a while. It had some sippy cups – brush away a tear, toss ‘em out – and a strange bacon cooker we’d used a few times before the bacon actually melted the plastic, imparting an unusual and not altogether salutary flavor. Some home-made popsicle molds, purchased by my wife in a moment of nostalgia for her own childhood – she loved making her own popsicles, she said. But Natalie has never been one for popsicles, suspecting there are many other quiescently frozen confections available that provide more oomph. I can take them or leave them myself. Except for banana. But I’d dump a banana popsicle if they were handing out Dreamsicles; those were rare treats, the childhood equivalent of single-malt scotch. They combined a Push-Up with ice cream. O the marvels of the jet age! 

The popsicle molds had a metal rim, which was rusted. Out. 

Found a box of corn-cob skewers. I’m always surprised no one ever commits a crime using corn skewers. They’re damned nasty things, and you never use them without fearing you’re going to shoot one straight through your thumb. Make a great close-combat weapon. 

There seems to be a rule that corn-cob skewers look like corn cobs, which is at it should be. 

Emptied the cupboard, then got the box from the basement. It was then I realized that this new, perfect world of lids and cups forever joined might have a flaw: 

I couldn’t stack them. They’d have to be placed in the cupboard in rows. All of a sudden this made no sense at all. 

Well. I got them out, washed them all, attempt to affix the lids – and discovered that they didn’t snap to the bottom. I hadn’t bought that kind. Somehow I’d bought another kind with oldthink lids. No! I knew the box said something about lids. It made a point of rethinking the lid issue. Sure enough, it had Nev-R-Lose lids or something like that, or E-Z-Stak lids. The lids nestled together, and there were only three sizes. They fit multiple containers. I arranged everything in the cupboard, and it looked nice and neat. Showed my wife when she came home from a hard day of lawyering.

“Very nice,” she said. 

“Just don’t use them,” I said. 

Later, upon examination of the items, I find that the lids do indeed lock into the base of the containers. 

So it’s just win-win all around. 

Later today: oh, I don’t know. This is a lazy week. A Comic Sins update, yes, and the Stribblog once or twice. I tend to update around noon. In the late afternoon: Black and White World, the last of the seasonal sci-fi additions. Summer is when I watch old b&w drive-in-style films in an attempt to capture some sort of bygone hot Chevy night vibe, but those nights never came this year. Usually the slight chill at midnight makes you sigh, realize summer’s gathering up its things and heading over the curve at the end of the world, but this year was different. Summer never turned its face to us for more than a moment.