The Blender Blunder and Other Catastrophes in Jane’s Domain

Do you ever have one of those mornings that travel so far off the course of normal you think it’s better to just go back to bed and start over tomorrow?

Yeah. This morning was one of those. And it didn’t even start with me!

My morning started out normally. A normal morning for me is like this: I get up at 7 a.m., pull on my shoes and coat and take Maggie for her first walk of the day. We come back in and usually find Vince up and beginning the prep for our morning tea and protein shake. Once he gets to the part where he actually has to turn on the blender, I have to pick up Maggie and hightail it into the bedroom and shut the door so she doesn’t go postal on the blender. She somehow thinks the blender is going to kill us all.

But then, she thinks the same thing about our laundry basket and the dustpan and brush – so…I don’t know.

She’s crazy.

Anyway, when I walked in the kitchen, the blender was nearly empty – so I thought Vince had gotten ahead of the curve and was already filling our shake cups with the lovely grayish-green goop that is our breakfast.

But, no.  

My second glance over at the corner where the protein shake production takes place alerted me to the problem.

And the problem was this: Vince had somehow forgotten to turn the blender to the “off” position the last time he made a shake. Instead it was set on “high.” And “high” is not a good position when you fill the blender with ice and powders and water and greens. Without the lid.

There was an explosion of ice shards and powders and water and greens all over the walls and counters and floor. And there was an explosion of all that stuff all over Vince, too.

And yet. He was fairly calm while cleaning up the mess.

If it had been me, there would’ve been a lot of cussing and full-on crankiness going on as I swiped and mopped and wiped.

Probably, he knew I would pitch in and gather cleaning supplies and move in for the assist, so he wasn’t as upset. Or maybe it’s just because he’s calmer than I am when it comes to a crisis.

Nevertheless, it took us a good fifteen minutes to clean up the spill.  As it is, I imagine I will be finding glops of dried crusty goo for the next week or so in the most obscure places in the kitchen and we will marvel at how far wet protein powder can travel from a lid-less blender turned on “high.”

Sigh..

I thought I was fairly calm myself, though, as I gathered up the dirty towels and put them in the washing machine. After our morning routine of drinking our detox tea and protein shakes and then getting Vince on his way out the door and on his way to work, I headed back into the kitchen to finish cleaning up.

And that’s when “normal” took another turn on me.

I picked up my 30 oz drink cup with the simple intention of opening the lid, emptying the last of last night’s fizzy water, cleaning it out and then filling it back up again.

Only I couldn’t open the lid. I know it doesn’t just pop off; it has to be unscrewed.  So I practiced the rhyme in my head “righty-tighty, lefty-loosey” as I twisted and turned and tried to get the lid off. As I bent from the waist desperately trying to open the cup, I realized liquid from the cup was spilling all over the recently cleaned floor.  

Arggh.

As I began to clean up the latest mess on my kitchen floor, it occurred to me that I had let my recently relieved-of-her-duties cleaning lady go at a very inopportune moment and no amount of groveling on my part would get her back in time to clean up the sticky stew that my kitchen floor had become.

So out came more cleaning rags and the wiping and swiping began anew. I turned on the faucet to rinse the cloth and somehow the spray function on the faucet came on full blast. It was as if someone were playing a cosmic joke on me trying to see how long I could go before I got really cranky.

So there I stood, water dripping from my glasses and nose. There were puddles of water on the counter, which were cascading to the floor in a veritable waterfall.

It was at this point, I seriously considered chucking my plans for the day and heading back to bed, but I figured that I should probably dry off the floor at the very least lest it somehow cause flooding issues in our lower level.

With all the rain we’ve had recently in these here parts, we walked down to our lower level one evening with the intention of catching a little Netflix, only to squish onto the carpet at the bottom of the stairs.

Having soggy basement carpeting once in a lifetime is quite enough, believe me.

So with a heavy, put-upon sigh, I crawled around my kitchen floor mopping up the spill.

And then I hid under the covers for the rest of the day. 

No, I kid. But I did beat a hasty retreat far away from my kitchen.

And, so far, I haven’t had any more catastrophes today. Except that Vince is now home and has started the process of making his evening shake.

Yeah. I think that’s my cue to go hide under the covers. 

But first, I need to check the blender and make sure the lid is on. No sense asking for trouble. Wish us luck, ok? We apparently need it.