A pinch here, a tad there...

One Thing Leads to Another

Decided to clean the front of the microwave today (you all already know what I think of that mike...) so sprayed it down with my handy-dandy refilled, environmentally friendly citrus cleaner. YUCK! Ok, clean the mike. Done. With the face of that thing shining, the faceboard above it looked a bit grungy. Hey, no prob. Spray that down, clean! Yay... no, wait a minute. Now the doors above the faceboard above the mike really look bad and those stupid white ceramic handles are pretty gross. Remove doors, dropping screw between stove and cupboard. Pry fingers from goo on doors. Remove hardware. Slather on citrus cleaner. Nope, that's not doing it. Try gel dishwasher detergent. Ok, that works. scrubscrubscrub rinse. Yuck, just yuck. Repeat on remaining 3 doors and hardware. Figured it's a good thing my grossitude index is pretty high or this would've done me in. The knobs took a little extra attention, too. Like a razor blade to remove encrusted whatever-that-is. I think I'll throw that green scrubby away because it's looking pretty sad and I can't seem to get all the brown stuff out of it. While I was up messing about I noticed the top of the fridge was pretty bad, nothing like the cupboards but still... Remove every last blasted thing from all fridge sides and top, climb up on stool, spray, wipe, spray, rinse. Ok. Much better. Except for the drizzles down the sides. Oh, yeah, and on the floor. So, wash down sides and floor. Good! Time to put the doors back on. Uh, there's the small problem of that missing screw. Fetch flashlight to peer down into what reveals itself as the crack of doom. OMG What IS all that stuff? Where did it come from? Damme, there's a mixing spoon down there, too. Retrieve poker from fireplace, get down on floor and use poker to drag as much uck out as possible. That leaves the stuff on the sides of both cupboard and stove. Hmmmmmmm, well, let's see. Ah, I know! Fetch Farmer's Grain Association Meeting 1918 wooden yardstick from closet, wrap with cloth, soak cloth in cleaner and start jamming it around in the space there. After a few minutes of that, feeling relieved that nobody had noticed what I was doing, I figured it looked better than it did. After putting everything away, sweeping up that awful stuff that came out of the Black Hole, and having a nice cup of coffee, I promised myself I wouldn't look too closely at the other top cupboards. Not yet.

At least I found that screw.


Hot Hot Hot

Having been approached by Himself with a plaint having to do with the recent lack of Jamaican-style Jerk in our diet, I decided to make the poor guy happy and do some up. (Mind you, there is not a chance of grilling it. The gas grill is in pieces for the winter and I'm not about the try to regulate a fire in the smoker or the small grill in a 40 mile per hour north wind. Just Not Gonna Do It. Not even for my sweetie.) DS1 and DIL brought back a little jar of authentic jerk seasoning from Jamaica over the holidays and it is really delicious. Only problem? It's not hot enough. The best answer for that is to brine the clucker, include all the ingredients that I would normally use as a marinade and hope for the best. So, that's what I've done. (If this works out I might post the recipe for the brine.) Besides the onion, garlic, sugars, spices and such-like, scotch bonnets are the pepper of choice for us fire-eaters.
I have a lot of them, too. They're in the freezer. What might not be evident to a casual onlooker is the fact that they tend to dehydrate in the freezer. This concentrates the capsaicin to an astounding degree. Either that or they just keep getting hotter by some mechanism unknown to me. I work with hot peppers a lot and they don't usually bother me, no sneezing, no burning skin, nothing. This ain't the case with these particular scotch bonnets. I wear gloves and try not to breathe very deeply. I also stem them and put them in my lovely mini-prep machine to grind them up, which I've found saves not only time but my nose. Usually. I figured since the chicken is over 5 pounds and there it takes quite a bit of brine to submerge a beast that size, I had better use 4 peppers. No problem there until I foolishly popped the lid from the prepper in mid-breath and promptly went into a sneezing fit. Please note, I wasn't bent over with my nose anywhere near that prep machine. As a matter of fact, it was at arm's length. Made no difference at all. Sneeze sneeze sneeze sneeze... after more than 5 minutes of rhinoblastation, the nose settled down enough to allow me to pick the prepper bowl up and carefully rinse the contents of the prep into the pot with the brine before the pepper mash ate through my pink rubber gloves. After all, I have to save the gloves to be able to turn the chicken in the brine several times over the next few hours. And I ain't doing it with my bare hands. No way. No how.

Note to self: Idiot! Don't stick your face down next to the brine to see how it smells.

Bathroom Redux

We gutted and redid the main bath in 2006. That was surely a fun, fun time. (That's a lie. If I ever say that again, slap me.) As with the great majority of things in this house, the bathroom was a disaster. All gleaming white tile, idiotic 1970s swag light fixture. plate glass mirror that was (I swear!) 4 foot high by 8 foot long. I've seen smaller mirrors in dance studios. White w.c., white tub, teensy tiny tub, at that. White sink, white vanity, white drawer pulls, dark walnut trim and doors. The sheer blinding mass of whiteness, surpassed only by mid-antarctica on a sunny day, was accented by a royal blue shag rug. With foam backing. In a bathroom. That was a bright idea, folks, yes indeed. The tub had been fitted out with a set of wavy glass sliding doors that leaked. They not only leaked, they leaked badly. Know what happens to foam backed shag carpet over the course of 30 years of leakage? Yup. Mold, mildew and a rotted subfloor to boot. Yours truly is deathly allergic to mold and mildew and this state of affairs was simply not to be borne. We started out with the idea of just replacing that carpet with tile. But, once the carpet and pad were pulled up, the extent of damage was such that, well, let me just say it's fortunate the bathtub hadn't fallen through the floor into the bathroom downstairs. We also discovered that sometime back in the mists of time, the toilet had leaked, been pulled, refitted with the wrong wax ring, reseated and somebody stuck more tile around it to hide the problem. OK, so what the hell, let's just gut the mess and go from scratch. Which is just what we did.
Everyone here understands why I always get an urge to kick those hosts of television shows that redo a bathroom in 2 days. This particular project took months. MONTHS! Traipsing downstairs at 2 a.m. to go potty, taking showers in the boy's realm, after a few weeks of that, we just went out to the rv at night to piddle. Much easier and a lot cleaner. So we had a lovely new bath with all kinds of good things and it was warm and cozy and we have a whirlpool! Then a "small" problem rears it's head. The texturey-stuff on the ceiling, which we left intact during the redo, seems to be bubbling and falling off in chunks. Great. NOW what?
The "what" turns out to be one of those things that we deal with over and over, stupid stuff. The original builders, evidently suffering from a bad case of H.U.T.A. syndrome, didn't prime the raw, new sheetrock they installed. They applied paint directly to the gypsum board. Sorry, folks, no matter what you might like to believe? In a high-humidity area like a bathroom, even with a monster exhaust like we put in, paint will not seal sheetrock. Over the years, moisture has done some damage to the finish and at some time back there in the olden days, someone got the bright idea that since their paint was looking not-great, spray on a nice thick coat of texture. Where they got the idea that it would make a difference? Who knows.
Himself has been working on scraping that texture off since Sunday and the end is not in sight. Then he will skim coat, prime with some really good alcohol-based stuff and we shall try to figure out what color would look good as a final coat. Until then, no sinks, no tub, the w.c. works fine, just remember to wipe the seat well and take your toilet paper in with you. It's either embarrassing or comical to find oneself enthroned with no toilet paper, having to yell out "Somebody bring me the t.p., please?" When that somebody happens to be an 18 year old male? The pot is in direct line of sight when the door is opened even a little bit so the youngster has to figure out a way to stand to the side of the door and toss the roll in. Best you can hope for is that it lands somewhere within reach of the toilet brush, otherwise, you're gonna be drip-dry. This whole mess will be taken care of, eventually. Then we shall proceed on to the next mess, and the one after that, and the one after that and.....

Note to self: Hold breath while walking through kitchen. Brine seems to be getting a little odiferous.