Of Rain, Work, and Chores

Seven-thirty in the morning and it’s pouring. We’re having a “scattered shower.” Pretty unusual at this hour: usually monsoon-season thunderstorms roll through late in the day. If at all, anymore…

But it’ll be nice: should cool things down for an hour or two.

Dreamed up an elaborate chore for myself yesterday: Clean all the kitchen woodwork, since I now have two new kitchen cabinets. Yesterday I got through half the job: scrub down the cabinets with Murphy’s Oil Soap, dry well with a rag as you’re going, then polish with orange oil. So half the kitchen looks pretty darned nice. Today I’ll finish the job.

As I was sitting here yesterday evening contemplating the defunct ovens, I realized I hadn’t cleaned and oiled that cabinetry since before the Adventures in Medical Science began…and that was over two years ago! Holy mackerel.

They’re pretty decently finished and so don’t dry up and warp or anything like that. But they certainly do benefit from periodic maintenance. For reasons I don’t understand, Satan and Proserpine fronted all the cabinetry and doors with pine. They claimed this was to their taste; my guess is it was the cheapest real wood available.

Pine is very soft. It dents and scratches easily.

So the cabinetry, which has got to be pushing 15 years old now, has a lot of little dings. When Charley was a pup, he would try to jump up on the counter — his big old claws scored long dents down one of the lower cabinet doors. The doors under the sink have a mystery mar…I don’t know what it came from, but think maybe I whacked it with a vacuum cleaner. And when I moved in, the panel across the silverware drawer had a bunch of little dents around the drawer pull, where Proserpine’s wedding ring had hit it whenever she opened the drawer. I don’t wear rings, but have found that even a fingernail will inflict a dent.

Oiling the wood disguises these flaws admirably — the cabinets look almost new after they’ve been cleaned and rubbed down. I’ve found that orange oil seems to work best, though lemon oil does the job, too.

Meanwhile, I didn’t do a lick of real work yesterday, except for sending the manuscript to a friend who vaguely agreed to beta-read the thing…before she had a chance to think better of the idea! 🙂

• I did not post 87 gerjillion ads and plugs to the social media, a chore I loathe.
• I did not write the introduction.
• I did not write the two or three chapters that remain to be done.
• I did not call around to find groups that might let me speak to them (that’s probably premature, anyway).

I did, in short, not work.

I don’t think of household chores as “work” because they’re so unproductive: the job is never done. Write a book, and it’s written. Clean the cabinets, and in another month or two they need to be cleaned again. Housework is a chore — a never-ending chore — because in fact you never accomplish anything.

Instead of ordering the proposed countertop oven from Amazon, I believe I’ll drive over to Williams-Sonoma. Although the Oster, the KitchenAid, and the Breville are well reviewed, some people have said they had trouble trying to return or get service on the things that they’d bought through Amazon vendors or through Sur la Table. In the past (anyway…), Williams-Sonoma has had a very strong policy of standing by the stuff they sell.

And… Their price is significantly better. Amazon is peddling the Breville Smart Convection Plus oven for $269; it’s $200 at Williams-Sonoma.

They may have changed the consumer-friendly policy, given their business tribulations. But I’m going over there to ask about it, anyway. If the rain stops by the time I finish cleaning the cabinetry, I may visit them today. Probably will have to order it, which will be good…

Because I sent off an email to the handyman asking about the wattage question JestJack raised yesterday.  The desired Breville oven schleps up 1800 watts. I dunno about that… Anyway, ordering it from W-S will give plenty of time for him to notice my query and answer it. If he says “don’t do that!” then it will be easy to decline to pick it up from a local store: a lot less hassle than shipping it back to Amazon.

Interestingly, there have been more class action suits against Whirlpool over the self-cleaning ovens that you can’t self-clean. The most recent filing I managed to dig up was dated 2014, so presumably if anything came of that it’s too late to make a claim.

But…whenever I have the money (right!!!), I think I’ll have the control panel replaced on the defunct oven, which will be a lot cheaper than replacing the oven. If I’m right in thinking that I won’t need a wall oven in the presence of a countertop unit, then there will be no reason to replace the set. If I ever sell the house, the oven will have to be functional. So whenever it’s fixed, I’ll just turn off the circuit breaker and let it sit. Turn it back on if and when the house ever goes on the market.

Dollars to donuts that’s exactly what Satan and Proserpine did.