Jun 1, 2008 | Captain OCD
Ikea’s genius is that they have so many items that look useful but you’re not sure for exactly what yet. Because they are only $2.99 or $5.99 or $8.99, they are cheap enough to buy, in multiples, and put in the Someday I’ll Be Really Happy that I Bought All This Crap box. This simple aluminum wine rack ($8.99) was in that box and I finally attached it to the ceiling in the pantry (the only place there’s room for it). We are not wine aficionados (economy-sized bottles are more our speed), so there was just one regular-sized bottle on hand. I showed Captain OCD the rack, with three of the four holes empty, when he got home and he loved it. So much so that he wanted me to buy three or four more (Ikea is a most-of-the-day trip from here). We don’t really have a need for that sort of stockpile of regular-sized bottles of wine. Then he went down to Fred’s (the store on the corner – I’m not sure what its real name is, but it’s been in Fred’s family for about 400 years) for milk or charcoal or marshmallows three years past their sell-by date and came back with three more bottles of wine. Because we can’t have empty holes. And he was still excited for me to buy more wine racks. I envisioned a never-ending quest to keep the wine rack full: The wine in the racks would be off-limits and he would instead drive down to Fred’s to buy whatever was required for the current situation. If we were to use a bottle, in, say, an emergency, he’d be at Fred’s at dawn the next morning to buy a bottle to fill the void. Which means he’d buy extra bottles to have on hand so he could instantly fill the holes, which kind of defeats the purpose of a wine rack if you also have wine bottles taking up room on the shelf. He would be constantly opening the pantry door to make sure there were no empty wine-rack holes and would have forgotten that, until I’d installed the wine racks, we’d lived happily for decades on the pay-as-you-go plan and had no stockpile of wine at all.
I relented and bought one more rack the next time I was at Ikea (it’s only $8.99!). Another immediate trip to Fred’s so that the contents of the pantry weren’t sucked into the vortex created by the empty holes in the wine rack. But we discovered a problem: most of the Chardonnay (The People’s Wine) bottles are ever so slightly bigger around and they don’t fit unless you force them, which tears the labels and makes a horrible noise as the glass scrapes against the aluminum. Even worse, they make the same noise when removing them. So the other day I put the offenders in backwards so that they were just barely secured (but I wouldn’t walk under them when the washer is spinning in the next room). Not quite as aesthetically pleasing (although still the most pleasing thing in the pantry, by light years), but it works. And I didn’t mention the reorientation of the bottles.
This morning I see one of the scraped-up-label bottles in the fridge. Did I forget that we were having guests tonight, guests for whom we’d break out the one-step-above-cheap wine? Why would this bottle be taking up valuable refrigerator real estate when there’s already an opened big bottle in there? And if that bottle is in the fridge, then there is a hole in the pantry, and I know that’s not possible. A quick inspection revealed that someone has discovered that Pinot Grigio bottles fit just fine. If you want white wine not from a jug when you’re here, that’s what you’re getting. Unless Captain OCD is home, in which case you can have whatever you like because he’ll be going to Fred’s to buy it.
Apr 29, 2008 | Captain OCD
Most evenings before I go to bed I grind coffee and set the pot to turn on at 4:30 the next morning. I don’t drink coffee, so how it tastes is of no concern to me, although I’m told that it tastes good. I wouldn’t, however, presume that to be the general opinion of coffee drinkers who are particular about their brew. When Captain OCD doesn’t work regular hours, I don’t make coffee the night before.
If you’ve ever ground coffee beans, you know that they are oily and the grounds are staticy and they stick to the plastic bits of the grinder. I don’t wash it regularly because it’s hard to get it completely dry, which makes the next grind session even messier. Because lately I haven’t been making the coffee every night, that grinder is sitting there, mocking Captain OCD with its grounds stuck improbably to all of its interior vertical surfaces. So, of course, he scrubbed it up and now it’s nice and sparkly clean. So clean that he doesn’t want to get it dirty, so he drives down to the corner store every morning to buy a cup of coffee.
Apr 24, 2008 | Captain OCD
This is what I sometimes wake up to. After 26 years.
Apr 19, 2008 | Captain OCD
I believe that zip loc bags are an invention on a magnitude of importance right up there with the discovery of penicillin and the invention of color TV and don’t think I can live in a world without them. So it has been with great excitement that I welcome the proliferation of commercial packages that come with a zipping top, like the little plastic bags some delis put your lunch meat in, or the many bags of vegetables that now proudly proclaim “Resealable Bag.”
One member of this family, though, can’t be bothered with either opening a zip loc top according to directions, or zipping a top that has already been opened according to directions (I’m a big fan of well-written directions, although a reasonable person might assume that instructions on how to cut the top off a plastic bag while at the same time preserving the zipping function would be superfluous to the requirements at hand).
I buy this lettuce at Costco because it’s whole leaves removed (not cut) from the head. There’s a nice big bag full of nice green leaves that I have access to any time the mood strikes, without having to exert the effort required to actually separate the leaves from each other. Because the leaves aren’t chopped into little pieces, like most bagged lettuce, you’re not left with rigid ribs with a tiny bit of leaf on either side and it lasts longer in the refrigerator. And, because it’s not in head form, I don’t get halfway through making a sandwich only to discover that there are no big leaves left because someone makes salad by ripping off the top of the head, leaving a stump of hard, bitter ends. Not that I complain out loud about that, because it’s most often my salad that he’s decapitating the lettuce for. But this time I look in the refrigerator and discover that Captain OCD hasn’t defiled the bag of lettuce yet,
Silly me. Perhaps he thought I wouldn’t notice if he entered from the bottom end:
Apr 13, 2008 | Captain OCD
There is a soap dispenser on our kitchen sink that matches the faucet. About four months ago it quit dispensing and it’s taken this long to get the replacement pump (Price Pfister sent it to the wrong address three times, with each time resulting in about an hour on hold). On that dispenser is a Never-MT (never empty, get it? I didn’t), a very cool, simple, and cheap device that allows you to pump out of a Costco-sized soap bottle instead of the little bottle that comes with the dispenser. Good thing, because the stock dispenser bottle doesn’t fit our toddler bathtub farmhouse sink, and because the person who washes most of the dishes around here uses a good half-cup of soap per wash session. The device is a couple of lengths of tubing with a check valve between them. The check valve is the key, as I discovered when I thought I could save four bucks by just using a long length of tubing. Further evidence that the reason I got through high school physics (the only girl in the class) was the chocolate cakes I baked in exchange for, um, assistance in the class.
I’ve kept all the tubing, the bottle-top adapter (a lid with a hole in it), and all the soap that’s inside the tubing in a zip-lock bag for the last four months because it can take a while to prime the pump to get the soap all the way through the three feet of tubing and out the dispenser pump. This slimy mess has been sitting in a basket in the kitchen all that time, waiting until the replacement pump arrived. For four months we’ve been looking at that goopy mess, but it was worth it because having the tubing already full of soap makes putting it all back together again infinitely easier.
I announce that we need to put the soap dispenser back together tonight. Ten minutes later, Captain OCD shows me a sparkling clean Never-MT with every last drop of soap painstakingly blown out and washed down the drain: “Here you go. All cleaned up.”
Apr 11, 2008 | Captain OCD
I mentioned at dinner that a couple of my Web sites had been hacked and defaced and Captain OCD joined the conversation. He knows nothing about that sort of thing, but knows that I get very nearly incensed when people ignorantly complain about The Emails when everything they know about the Internet is only what the ladies on The View have told them to be very afraid of. MySpace, for example, is clearly the work of the antichrist and the reason that perfectly innocent 16-year-old American youngsters fly to Pakistan to marry 23-year-old guys who deliver groceries on their bicycles (add people who use the word “youngsters” to the list of things that get me very nearly incensed). I don’t really care about MySpace one way or another, but I wish that people would know what they’re talking about before they denounce anything newish as the reason that the world is on the express train to Hell.
He asked if I would make a copy of the recipe for the rhubarb crisp he made this morning (because the copy machine is in That Room, the one full of mysterious, glowing green indicator-lights that he’d just as soon stay away from). I told him that I would give him the URL for the recipe (“Huh?”) and that he could pass that along.
When I further explained that “URL” is an indication that the recipe is on the Web site, he said, “But it’s been hacked! You won’t be able to trust the recipe!” At least he knew enough to be a smart-ass. Laughing, C1 said, “I can just see the little hacker, messing with the Rhubarb Crisp recipe: ‘I’m gonna really fuck these people up! One teaspoon of cinnamon instead of two! Brown sugar instead of white!'”
