Bathtub Blues

           I have made progress in life, really. I’m no longer spreading newspapers on the kitchen floor, spraying caustic, lye-based, skin-searing cleaner into my oven, and then 20 minutes later on my hands and knees with my bright yellow rubber gloves (and breath held) wiping that cleaner out with 1,000 paper towels.

          Now I’m living large, with my lovely wall oven – good news for my knees.

          And my oven is self-cleaning. Except I’m too much of a wuss to feel comfortable about jacking it up to the 500+ degrees necessary.

 

         So I go old-school: baking soda and vinegar, backed up by SOS scouring pads.

Pretty much just as effective, without scary heat or smells.

          Living the condo life can mean a convenient wall oven, but I do have a bone to pick with the original owners – the ones who opted for two showers instead of at least one tub. There are times, like after a long day of gardening, when I’d like to lower myself into a bunch of water for a long, relaxing lounge.

        

  And I wonder if they realized that they'd be leaving the next owner with nowhere to soak the #!* oven racks.  

At the Wheel Again

          On Sunday I met my partner-in-pottery-crime to try out the pottery studio in my town. It’s a brand-new venture, run by two young women who started from different places, but they seem to have melded together successfully as business partners.

Haven

 

        By sheer dumb luck, when we moved to this condo we hit the jackpot as far as a backyard went.

Garabaldi Search

 

Garibaldi search

No, not Giuseppi, the Italian revolutionary from the 1800s.

What handicap?

 

          I’ve been dodging my golf league, which is strict about score-keeping, for the past two weeks, but today I broke down and played. Being a middling-to-poor player, I’m tired of perpetually being teamed with those in the top division. I’m even guilty of signing up to play because I know there’s a 99% chance of rain that day (as I did last week).

Mahjong, yoga, and turkeys

 

Life lately has been a soothing stream of routine events. So soothing that I haven’t written a blasted word anywhere.

Still, there have been a few breaks.

If I only had a brain

 Ah, the comfort of wandering our town library and finding something by a favorite author. And once home, possibly setting it aside in the pile, to read last.