Adventures in (Avoiding) Editing

Friday I stayed home from work. I had a touch of a stomach bug, enough that I definitely needed to stay home, so I wasn’t ditching work–I was just really glad that I needed to be home. I needed the day to edit.

Edited all day Saturday, excluding a grocery store run and probably some time wasted at some point.

By Sunday I was getting tired of editing. So I made a deal with myself–twenty minutes of editing, ten minutes of break. There’s a lot of stuff I’ve been needing to do for a while, and I wanted to get some of it dealt with.

The first break, I cleaned the litterbox, then decided to light a candle to deal with the residual smell. I grabbed a candle holder, took an empty tealight shell out of it and crunched it in my hand, then dropped a new tealight in and lit it. Then I touched my face or something with the other hand, and scratched my freaking face deep enough to draw blood with a tealight shell.

I went back to editing.

Next break, I decided to see if switching the light bulbs in the track lighting in the kitchen would help anything. We hate the track lighting, but we’re not ready to have it replaced. Anyway–took a little longer than ten minutes, but I got the bulbs replaced and the kitchen is 3x a bright as it was, yay me!

I went back to editing. But before very long I hit a rough patch. Decided I’d just go ahead and see if I could fix the under-the-hood light as easily as I’d dealt with the track lighting.

Friends, I should have stuck with the editing.

First, there’s a grease shield over the light. Of course. For some dang dumb reason, grease shield is locked in place with a screwdriver, and the top of the stove was in just the right place to keep me from getting the screwdriver straight. After a lot of struggling (and thinking I should just go back to editing) I pulled the stove out to get at it.

It’s a gas stove, so I couldn’t just unplug it and pull it all the way out. No, I had to keep squeezing in and out, trying different tools because once I got the grease shield off, the stupid light bulbs are secured with screws too! And there’s only about two inches between top of screw and side of hood, so again–can’t get a screwdriver in there.

Finally I gave up. Supposed to be editing! So I put the grease shield in the sink to soak (I don’t think it had been washed since being installed, EW!) and pushed the stove in.

It fought me. I pushed harder. Suddenly POP! SWISH! and water (thank lork not gas!) is spraying everywhere.

My poor roommate comes running into the room to the sound of pans hitting the floor, water shooting everywhere, and a lot of loud obscene words tumbling out of my mouth.

I’d somehow managed to break the metal tubing connecting my refrigerator icemaker to the sink. I crawled under the sink to shut that off, then realized I’d tripped a fuse.

Bear in mind, all this time, I should have been editing.

I knew where the fuse box was, but none of the fuses looked burned out. And there were only six–not really enough for a house this size. So I went looking for more and found the circuit breaker box outside, reset the circuit breaker, got the fridge turned back on, pushed the stove (finally!) back in, and returned to editing.

After three rounds of editing, I decided I could at least wash the grease shield. That wouldn’t result in any more catastrophes!

No, but it did end up in a two-inch slice down the front of my left index finger, that bled a lot and then the band-aid made it hard to type while editing.

My roommate came into the kitchen as I was wrapping up my finger. I told her of my most recent adventure.

“So,” she said, “I take it the editing isn’t going well?”

Still can’t imagine how she knew…

Later she mentioned she wanted to make bread pudding, but didn’t feel like cubing a lot of bread. I offered to do it for her. She told me I wasn’t allowed to touch a knife.

So…yeah. I feel like that scene in Adventures in Babysitting where Elisabeth Shue sings the blues.

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