Clumsy

The One About Spring Cleaning, Taking A Tumble, And Discussion Of Said

/ Ally Bean / 248 Comments

The Spring Cleaning Part

Last week we decided to do a proper spring cleaning on the first floor of our house. It’s almost all wood flooring, the outliers being the powder room and the laundry room that have tile floors.

As you can imagine cleaning and waxing all the wood floors means moving furniture, rugs, plants, lamps, decorative items from one room to another; then moving them back from whence they came.

Please note that we’re not obsessive about doing all the spring cleaning in one day, like we were when we were younger and working and being social butterflies who had places to go, people to meet.

No, now we go with the flow and take our time.

Over a few days.

The Tumble Part

Well, we’d done the floors in all the rooms except the living room. And I suppose I was feeling a little cocky about how efficiently we’d moved furniture and such around the first floor, like pros.

But pride goeth before the fall, people. [No pun intended but it is one.]

So as we were carrying the rolled up 8′ x 10′ heavy wool rug + pad back into the living room preparing to place it just so, I lost my balance on the slick clean waxed floor and dramatically, albeit slowly, fell down, KERPLUNK.

At this point, if’n we were a younger married couple, my true love would have rushed to my side making sure I was uninjured.

However as a much older married couple my true love knows I’m clumsy as all get out, so he just looked at me in a heap on the floor and said: “it’s just a few more steps to get the rug into place, you gonna help?” 

Thus prompted by his *concern* I stood up, doublechecking the knee on which I’d fallen to see if it still worked. And it did. As did my toes that had gotten twisted around and smashed when I sat unceremoniously on them.

No harm, no foul.

The Discussion Part

Now the foregoing isn’t meant to be a motherly warning against wearing only socks on your feet when you move heavy items around on wood floors, which I think we can agree might not have been, in retrospect, a good idea.

Instead think of this tale as the precursor to the conversation that followed in which we discussed what I could/should/might say to our primary care physician when I go for my annual physical checkup wherein she’ll ask: have you fallen in the last year?

The answer to this question is, of course, dependent upon how you choose to define “fall.” To wit:

Is a fall any incident wherein you find yourself unintentionally down on the floor/ground despite the unusualness of the situation? Such as what happened to me while helping with the rug, something that might be classified as a minor mishap, merely a slip.

OR

Is a fall specifically when you lose your balance unexpectedly whilst doing something normal like walking around your house, your neighborhood, a store, a park, wherever? Such as tripping over something, or having a stroke-like moment, resulting in a serious keeling over out of nowhere. 

I await your insightful comments, my little moonbeams of good health. Trust me when I say this has been an ongoing, unresolved, conversation here at Chez Bean.

What say ye?

In Which I Read A Book, Then Hit The Wall

/ Ally Bean / 183 Comments

A Cautionary Tale from my Daily Life

YOU SEE, I WAS IN BED READING A BOOK. I had a LED clip-on light attached to the book and I was involved in the story, eyes wide open. However my eyes got tired and started to blur so I stopped reading and put my spectacles aside.

I got up from bed, walked over to the light switch on the bedroom wall to turn off the overhead light [yes this one], then walked into the dark bathroom to avail myself of the facilities therein.

As one does.

I thought I could safely walk to where I needed to be in the bathroom, but I was temporarily blinded after turning off the lights in the bright bedroom and then walking into a pitch black bathroom. Thus it came to be that I walked smack dab OH MY GOODNESS TO THE GRACIOUS into the bathroom wall.

Yes, I hit the wall, literally.

Naturally being the mature woman I am I started yelling for Z-D to come help me because I KNEW THE END WAS NIGH. I was convinced I’d broken my nose and would be shuffling off to a hospital where I’d not be able to wear a mask because of my broken nose– and I’d catch Covid-19.

It was perhaps an overreaction, but during these dreary days of the endless pandemic one cannot be sure about what is going to happen to oneself after a bathroom wall willfully gets in your way.

To his credit Z-D did not immediately start laughing when he found me holding my nose and jumping up & down like a crazy person. In fact he turned on a light, politely examined my unbloodied, undamaged nose that never even got black and blue, THEN he started laughing like I was the lead character in the funniest Marx Brothers movie he’d ever seen.

And he would. not. stop. laughing.

Asking me over and over again why I didn’t turn on the light in the bathroom before I walked in.

Then laughing. some. more.

Finding this whole ridiculous slapstick incident much too entertaining, IF YOU ASK ME.

Happy Weekend, everyone. Try not to hit the wall.

The One About Unexpectedly Making A Noteworthy Mess In The Kitchen

/ Ally Bean / 133 Comments

Don’t do this.

I can’t say for certain that I created my worst kitchen mess ever, but I can say that what I did was so far beyond my usual kitchen messes that it is worthy of note.

And belongs on my Top Five Biggest Kitchen Messes Ever List.

If I had such a list.  But I don’t.

Here’s what I did. 

I got the wok out and put it on the cooktop because I was getting ready to stir-fry some vegetables for dinner. 

Then I grabbed the canola oil from the shelf and opened a new 32 fl.oz. bottle.  

Made of flimsy plastic.

I went to pour some oil into the wok but I lost control of the lightweight, squishy, poorly designed, this-is-really-not-my-fault bottle.  Thus I ended up pouring canola oil:

  • into the wok; 
  • onto the cooktop; 
  • onto the granite counter beside the cooktop; 
  • into the utensil crock filled with spoons and spatulas sitting on the granite counter; and last but not least 
  • onto and into the wooden knife holder, filled with knives, sitting beside the utensil crock filled with spoons and spatulas sitting on the granite counter beside the cooktop.

Say good-bye to half a bottle of oil.

As you can imagine the spilled 16 fl. oz. of oil immediately began to spread across the cooktop and the granite counter, dribbling down the front of the cabinets, leaving puddles of oil on the floor.  

This, you expect.

And, of course, the oil got inside the utensil crock, pooling in the bottom, where it stayed until I washed the crock and everything in it.  

Again, this is what you expect. 

But the big surprise is that once the oil covered the outside of wooden knife holder, it quickly oozed into the knife slots.  There, in an instant, the oil was absorbed into those slots in such a way as to make the wooden knife holder, that suddenly had begun to smell like mold, about as un-washable and un-usable as anything I’ve ever seen destroyed in a kitchen.

This sort of mess I did not expect.

So there you have it, another story in which my life is not as idyllic as one might hope.  A story, in fact, that lends itself to me asking you a question, my gentle readers:

What’s the biggest cooking &/or baking mess you’ve made in the kitchen?

The One About The Broken Bowls & The Price You Have To Pay

/ Ally Bean / 123 Comments

I broke 3 dessert bowls last week. It’s a personal best.

One bowl I placed in the dishwasher wrong and it got chipped.

Mea culpa.

The second bowl I dropped while taking it down from the cabinet shelf.  The bowl slipped out of my hand, falling to the floor where, with a sense of drama that reminded me of a 3 y.o. having a meltdown over the way his PB&J sammie was cut, the bowl circled around the floor eventually crashing into the bottom of a cabinet where it broke.

The third bowl, like the other ones, was bone china, a notoriously sturdy substance when not around me.  It was part of the now discontinued Lenox Poppies on Blue that was our china when we got hitched.  I liked fussier things back then.

This third bowl cracked, then melted/broke, while in the microwave.  I don’t know if there was a slight crack in it before I put it in there, but while it was twirling around in the microwave I heard a loud pop.

When I went to take the damaged bowl out of the microwave, unaware that the bowl was damaged, I grabbed it with my right hand and the ceramic was so hot that it burned the fingerprint off my index finger.

Only sort of kidding.

*ouch*

So here’s where I find myself today: I’m a wise, slightly klutzy, woman who realizes, and accepts, that I will probably live the rest of my life a few dessert bowls short of 8 formal dinner place settings, as one does when one is too cheap to replace the broken bowls.

$19.99 a piece? I don’t think so.

Ain’t gonna happen.