Open up, Jonah, I'm coming in.

The new steam cleaner arrived a few days ago, and I decided that yesterday's chore should be cleaning up the kitchen. What better place than the kitchen to test the mettle of something that says it's good at grime? I can't think of any, at least not here since my bathroom has been scrubbed down in the last couple of months and isn't that grubby. (It's a little grubby; it is a bathroom, after all.)

So, I could have just cleaned surfaces, and that would have been passable. It would have been enough, and probably more than anybody expected from me. Of course, I have this problem with the easy and/or practical way to do anything, namely that it does not occur to me first; also, that once I think of the hardest possible way, nothing else seems to live up to it.

It started innocently enough: I was going to need to clear the area around the stove in orcer to use the steamer, which was the point of this whole exercise. Then, since I had a little bit of energy and a lot of ambition, I decided to clean out the junk drawers. The junk drawer was full of sporks and moist towelettes; apparently it hadn't been cleaned in at least five years, since that was last time anybody who lived here frequented KFC.

So now the kitchen is empty-ish, and it's half cleaned. Predictible to anybody but me, my energy lasted about 2/3 of the way through the job. I had to take frequent rests, and when I got to bed, I slept until 11 a.m., which is late for the last week or so.

Now my kitchen is empty and useless, but I'm well rested and it's time to finish cleaning and put it back together, because I don't think anything edible--including toast--is coming out of that kitchen until that time. And I'm hungry.

before - after