It was after lunch and I was hustling around cleaning up the various kitchen hot spots—stove, table, counter—while.my son did the dishes. Because my son washes dishes as though he has a hundred hours in each day and not a care in the world (read, slooooowly), I had set the timer for him.

“Get this many dishes done in ten minutes or else you have a window to wash, too,” I threatened.

So he was washing at a steady pace—not super-fast, but not slooooowly either.

However, the other thing he does when he washes dishes is he talks.

Or whistles.

Or sings.

Or makes weird noises.

Or asks questions.

It’s more of an undercurrent of sound, not loud and abrasive, so I wasn’t paying him any mind this afternoon until he said, “Mom?”

“Um, yeah, um…” I said, focused on straightening out the throw rug. And then, suddenly aware of the question dangling in the air, “Oh, sorry. I wasn’t listening. Try again.”

“Nah,” he said cheerfully.

I paused my clean-up to observe him washing. I do this occasionally—turn myself into a hawk, head jutting forward, eyes popping and piercing—because we have trouble with the dishes getting all the way clean. Every business needs quality control management and the home kitchen is no different. There’s no point in washing the dishes if they aren’t going to get clean, I’m forever saying.

“Boy,” I harped, “you didn’t even wash the mouth of that glass! And all I used it for was cutting out the muffins. It’s filthy! Look at what you’re doing!”

Unfazed, my son swiped the rag over the glass’s rim. “I’ve washed more dishes in my life than you have in yours,” he stated calmly.

“Yeah, whatever.”

“As soon as I was born,” he continued, “my mama looked me in the eye and said, GO WASH THE DISHES.”

Which is probably what it feels like. I’ll give him that much.

In other news, another Kitchen Chronicles is out this week. It’s all about eggs.

And Dutch Puff.

This puff gets divided four ways and disappears lickety-split. Soon I’ll have to make two each time. (Actually, my daughter is the Dutch puff maker. All I do is bake it.)

This same time, years previous: cream puffs (another thing to make if you’re swimming in eggs), oatmeal crackers

I think my thumb might fall off any day now. It’s the one on my right hand, and it has a lot of ailments—namely, a slew of warts and a way-down-deep splinter.

Yes, “warts” is a dirty word and I’m sorry to use it here, but I feel compelled to tell the truth. (Mainly because if I suddenly stop writing, you’ll know it’s because my thumb fell off and I can’t type anymore. You need to know these things.)

The warts have been there for eons (they’re all over my hand, and only my right one is stricken—perhaps I committed a grievous sin with it and am now reaping the dire consequences?), and we’ve become rather fond of each other, the warts and I, but then I got a little cut (I was grating cheese and decided it’d be a jolly hoot to grate my knuckle, too) and had to bandage up my thumb for a couple days which resulted in my wart, thanks to all the moisture trapped in by the bandage, puffing up to gross proportions and looking very much like a baby cauliflower that was sprouting from my thumb.

About that time, I discovered a baby wart a little higher up on my thumb. And then I poked my thumb on a jagged wooden doorframe, so on went another band-aid. A day later my thumb was hurting kind of bad, so off goes the bandage and that’s when I realized that part of the wooden doorframe was still in my thumb, a quarter-inch down in and with no easily graspable part of it sticking back out. And, two more baby warts were starting, yay and yay.

So I applied some wart-eating acid pads, put on two band-aids, and went to bed. The next time I take off the band-aids, there will probably be a whole colony of warts under there, whooping it up real good. I’m scared.

And as for the splinter, I had a thought. Once I put a too-big piece of wart-eating acid pad on my daughter’s finger and it ate off part of her finger along with the wart. So if the splinter doesn’t come off on its own, I’ll just stick a quarter-inch strip of acid pad over the splinter. That ought to do the trick, don’t you think?

(Notice there are no pictures. You’re welcome.)

Nothing makes a house feel dirtier than swarms of flies. They congregate around certain areas on the floor/counters/stove/table/computer, and even though those areas may look clean, the cloud of flies is a dead giveaway that they’re not. It’s like the flies are infrared detectors, but instead of heat, they’re detecting food smears. It’s quite gross.

(Again, notice there are no pictures. You’re welcome.)

In the car ride on the way to the theater (where we ushered for Richard III and my daughter was so freaked by all the killing that she alternated between fleeing the theater, burrowing her head into the doorjamb, and curling up in a ball on my lap—but she loved the play, she says), I asked my daughter what she wanted to be when she grows up.

I was trying to make conversation, discuss life on a deeper level, figure out the workings of her mind (which is very different from mine). Her answer, however, wasn’t exactly what I was aiming for.

“A grown-up,” she said.

I snorted.

Without missing a beat, she added, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

I don’t always understand the kid but I sure do think she’s funny.

Speaking of that daughter…

1. One evening when she was helping me load (two hundred dollars worth of) groceries out of the shopping cart and into the van, she hoisted up a bag filled with three boxes of store-brand cornflakes (99 cents each) and said, “If people saw us with all this cereal, they’d think we were spoiled!”

Which warmed my heart right up. I love it that my child thinks she’s spoiled because we bought cornflakes.

I really, really love it.

2. You remember how she got her ears pierced last fall? Well, she kept having trouble with the left ear and about six weeks ago it got so infected that we finally told her to take the earring out and let it grow closed. We promised we’d get it pierced for her again once it healed.

Weeks went by (she had every intention of being a pirate with one gold hoop for Halloween) and then last weekend her friend re-pierced the ear! It wasn’t all the way closed (though it looked like it from the front) and my daughter said it hardly even hurt. The friend poked the earring through back to front, so my daughter wore a reversed earring for a number of days before turning it around and becoming a normal, two-ear pierced little 10-year-old girl again.

I am experimenting with English muffins and having an awful lot of fun doing it, too.

The first batch wasn’t right, but the kids thought they were pretty wonderful. They ate all but two (plus the couple I ate) for lunch.

What are you up to these days? Go on, tell me a story. I’m all ears and warty thumbs (er, thumb).

The other afternoon on my way to the theater, I passed a van that had the following advertisement printed on its side: You live life. We’ll clean.

It made me mad for a few minutes, and then I forgot all about it until that evening when my husband and I were flopped across opposite ends of the sofa, rehashing our day. “Oh yeah,” I said. “I passed a van on I81.” And I told him what it said.

“What’s wrong with that?” he asked, feigning ignorance. We haven’t been married for eons for nothing—he bloody well knew what was wrong with that little advertisement, the little rat.

Even so, I enthusiastically broke it down for him.

“It’s implying that people are not living life when they’re cleaning, that’s what! People who clean houses ARE living life—it’s their livelihood. Cleaning is not separate from or less than the other parts of life!”

“Hey, calm down,” he said. “Some people need other people to clean their houses so they can do their work. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

“Maybe, and maybe not. I’m not saying that,” I snapped. “All I’m saying is that it’s wrong to imply that one is ‘life’ and the other is not. It’s not true. Plus, it’s offensive.”

“It’s a catchy little ad, is all,” he said. “You’re just in a bad mood.”

This conversation came on the tail end of another conversation (if you could call it that) in which I tried to express some ideas (about the current trend in which young adults marry later and the implications that has on for the church’s no-premarital-sex mandate) and he argued with every single thing I said.

I can handle a lively discussion, but I don’t do well with straightforward antagonization. It’s pointless, rude, and uninspiring.

So yes, I was in a bad mood.

I resolutely shut my mouth, refused to say another word, and hauled my irritated and grumpy self off to bed.

Which made my husband laugh out loud. “Ha! I made you mad!” he crowed. “You won’t talk to me!”

The next morning I gave my friend a rousing recap over the phone. She heard me (which is, I might add, different from agreeing with me), and we had a long, civil, and satisfying  conversation around the matters.

So vindicated did I feel that, when my husband walked in the door, I told him about my phone conversation. “She got it!” I said, triumphantly. “You are so out there in left field it’s amazing.”

“Just because she agrees with you doesn’t mean you’re right,” he said with a cocky laugh.

Ooo, the man is incorrigible!

But so am I. So there.

This same time, years previous: breaking the habit (and my heart)