‘Goodness, ThirdCat,’ people have said of late, ‘you seem happier these days. The spring has returned to your step, the sparkle to your eye, the glow to your skin…what is the secret of such lightness of being?’
‘Oh,’ I say breezily because I have recently been to the dentist and am not afraid of haliotosis, ‘I’ve just made a few simple modifications to my home. Simple things, but they’ve made life much more comfortable.’
‘So you’ve fixed that top drawer, the one with the cutlery and other useful things so that the whole front panel of the drawer no longers comes off in your hand every third day or so forcing you to use language you’d rather your children hadn’t become quite so fluent in,’ they say.
‘Well,’ I reply because it would be rude to ignore them, ‘that would make a great difference to my general sense of well-being, but no, that drawer remains only temporarily repaired.’
‘Oh,’ they say because they are as interested in the intricacies of my life as I am in theirs, ‘so you’ve ripped out that floating floor because while the name floating floor sounds so ethereal, in actual fact, when things such as metal marbles are dropped on them, as they very often are in a house with two young boys, the sound is enough to snap synapses three houses away.’
‘Oh, no, nothing quite so life-changing as that,’ I say.
‘Ah,’ they say, ‘so you’ve ducked into the hardware shop, that one you walk past every second day, to buy another small roll of felt, and you’ve fixed the felt to the bottom of the kitchen chairs so that they no longer scrape against the floating floor in that way which has grown from irritating to something approaching the sound of fingernails down a blackboard.’
‘Well, no, in fact, yet another of the chair legs has just lost its felt.’
And by the time they get to there, the new chopping board – the one with enough space to fit all of the slices of the bread and the block of cheese while I make the sandwiches – doesn’t seem to have made that much difference to my life at all.
But luckily, most people are too polite to say goodness me, ThirdCat, you’re not looking quite as good as you were.
how my life resonates to your blog. spooky really. 🙂 CB
And I just said to myself this morning, as I swept two slices of bread off the board to fit the cheese on – wouldn’t it be great if this chopping board was just big enough for 4 slices of bread and the cheese all at the same time.
I’m with you, ThirdCat.
6 slices of bread it fits…six slices plus a block of cheese…of course there’s nowhere to store it so it has to sit on the bench the whole bloody time. But it does its job when it counts – which is first thing in the morning.
– Mine only has to fit four slices, but it is the very act of slicing the cheese at 6:30 am which undoes me.
6.30 am! You should do something about that.
Fabulous post, 3C.
Ah, the joys of a kitchen utensil that hums with its perfect fitness to the task – I have a cake carrier like your chooping board – big enough for the tallest cake so the decorative strawberries don’t get mushed, and there’s a lifter insert which eradicates finger gouges in the side of the cake from trying to get it out…I feel hapy every time I take a cake somewhere…
My children’s father slices the cheese and makes the sandwiches.
Made a huge difference to my life.
I have 5 (five) chopping boards. Two have little troughs around the outside to catch juices. I’m about the throw 2 out as they are pitted from too much dishwasher.
I’m inclined to the view that it’s horses for courses with chopping boards.
I have tried, in vain, to prevent others from putting the good sharp knives in the dish rack instead of straight in the knive block.
You can lead a horse to water, FXH, but you can’t make it drink. Such are the difficulties of household negotiations.
Where do you store all those boards? Do they fit in your cupboards and drawers?