The Project has officially made the deadline, and Elvis is already more cheerful and less stressed. I am so happy for him-- for all of them of course, but mostly for him.

Last night, I slept like an absolute log. I think the half bottle of red wine at the pub was a good idea, and the mini-backrub Elvis gave me just before we tried to go to sleep, so that I would relax and not worry about dropping off, was a wonderful idea and really did the trick.

Today I woke up cheerful and raring to go. I had Plans for today. Things to Do. There was the dry cleaning, and a trip to the little grocery, but my main goal for today was to clean out my closets and drawers. It needs it, and now that the weather is getting cooler it is the perfect time. The fact that it's still rainy outside is a bonus, and I had pretty much the whole day to get it done. I was determined. Things would be organized. Wrinkly things would be ironed. I would try everything on. I would be honest with myself. I would be ruthless with my discards.

I made a cup of tea, and checked the weather on the internet. Then I headed to the bathroom for a shower, and Calliope headed for the kitchen in the hope of more food. I heard her jump up on the kitchen counter. Almost immediately afterward, I heard the crash. It was a tremendous noise: a boom, then a crash, then a shatter, all blended together into a single wall of sound.

The carnage in the kitchen was amazing. An entire cupboard had fallen off the wall and smashed onto the floor. Jars and bottles and boxes and cans were scattered amidst broken glass and the contents of burst bags, and there appeared to be blood on the floor. Not a seeping pool of blood, but a pile of it complete with guts and God knows what, and I fancied I saw a splintered bone sticking out from under the cabinet. I screamed for Calliope, then realized I smelled basil. The blood and guts on the floor was nothing more than a smashed bottle of pasta sauce. However, there were no tomato-y paw prints on the floor, nor had I heard her frantically skittering down the hall accompanied by her patented doppler yeeooow.

There was definitely stuff trapped under the cabinet, which had plummeted head first. It was sitting at an angle between the floor and the counter, its doors opening downward. One of them had fallen off, and was leaning drunkenly against the stove, blocking my view even further. Things were very unstable and I poked around gingerly until I decided that the cat probably wasn't there. It took me a while to find her-- she had just gotten the scare of her life, and she didn't want to be blamed for it, either. Eventually I coaxed her into poking her head out from under the skirts of an end table. It's possible that she was fleeing the scene so fast that her paws never touched the ground.

Then I put on some shoes (but otherwise stayed completely naked-- why make more laundry?) and went back into the kitchen to start dealing with the disaster. The cabinet that fell was where I stored tea and coffee, baking supplies, pasta, canned and jarred goods. I keep my spices in a drawer, but the pepper, salt, vinegars, oils, tabasco and other hot sauces, worcestershire sauce, curry paste, mustards, asian sauces and condiments, and similar items were all kept that cabinet as well. Miraculously, the electric kettle and food processor, which sit on the counter directly under where the cupboard used to hang, seemed to be spared. Unfortunately, I couldn't get past the carnage to make myself a cup of tea.

It was an incredible mess, and cleaning it all up was not unlike a salvage operation amongst the rubble of a demolished building. The floor was covered in an unholy mixture of grits, oatmeal, dried pulses and grains, and tomato sauce, and there were clouds of flour everywhere. I use little tablets of sweetener, which I buy in the economy size of 1200 pellets, and they were scattered everywhere. When I would step on some-- and you really couldn't avoid it-- half would go shooting across the floor and half would crunch underfoot like broken glass. Cleaning it up took planning and forethought, and about five hours, excluding breaks. The hardest bits were trying to extract stuff from underneath the cabinet without tipping the whole thing over, and leaning over the back of the cabinet, without actually touching it, to reach down and rescue a bunch of glass items that were trapped behind the remaining cupboard door without sending any of them smashing on the floor. I think I pulled something in my hamstring during that maneuver: I really need to do my yoga more often.

After cleaning up the gloop and broken glass from the floor, I had to wash and dry practically everything I managed to salvage. I have it piled up on the far counter. I don't know where I'll fold my laundry until things get fixed, but at least I have some space for food prep. Not that I could do laundry at the moment anyway, or empty the dishwasher: the cabinet is still in the middle of the kitchen floor, propped up by a trapped bottle of extra virgin olive oil. The cap flew off of it and was crushed, but it is almost empty and the bottle is square, so the oil isn't leaking out. It's too heavy for me to move, or perhaps that's just because it's bulky and unwieldy. Also, even though I pivoted the cupboard around on the bottle the best I could, I still suspect there's a piece of broken glass underneath, and I don't want to risk dragging it along and gouging the tiles on the floor. I've mopped around it the best I could, but the rest of it will have to wait until Elvis gets home to help me. I suspect it will take days and days of mopping before the floor is really clean again, in any case.

What strikes me now is the contrast between what perished and what was spared. I managed to save half of my grits, but the buckwheat, lentils and quinoa are all gone. The regular flour exploded all over the place, and the baking powder didn't make it, but the self-rising flour is just fine, although the ziplock bag it was in was a write off. The real maple syrup is gone, the artificial maple syrup is still with us. The sugar cubes, sugar bowl and glass sugar dispenser were all destroyed, but aside from one container, the artificial sweetener tablets and the box of Sweet-n-Low packets survived, as did the glass bottle of liquid saccharin. The wheat germ and a cannister of Quaker Oats are dead, but the peanut butter and Nutella emerged unscathed. The tins full of loose tea and the box of green tea are goners, but the Darjeeling, Earl Grey and Assam tea-bags pretty much survived. The cannister containing PG Tipps tea-bags was badly dented, but I manged to bang it back into shape and save half of the tea-bags it contained. I lost several boxes of various herbal teas, but the box of mulled wine spice didn't even need to be wiped off, nor did the little bottles of food coloring I use for Christmas cookies. My glass bowl of sea salt was smashed, but the glass shaker full of plain old iodized salt doesn't have a scratch on it. Boxes of dried pasta burst and were scattered, and cans of tomatoes were dented beyond redemption, but the jars of pesto and another of pre-made pasta sauce were just fine once they'd been cleaned off, as were the packets of instant pasta-n-sauce and Spanish rice. The instant polenta made it: the regular, slow-cooking polenta did not.

God's an additive fan, it would seem, and He's not opposed to a bit of convenience.

I did make it to the grocery store, eventually, where I bought some diet cokes and a bottle of red wine. I got rained on just enough on the walk home to give my hair more and bigger wings than a Flock of Seagulls.

Then I went to the dry-cleaner, where I discovered that they had managed to turn my favorite white silk blouse pale yellow. It's a pretty color, I must say, and one guaranteed to make me look jaundiced. Yellow and I do not get along. I bought the blouse in question in Milano a couple of years ago, so it can't really be replaced, and certainly not for what I paid for it. The poor dry-cleaning ladies were very upset, and I felt sorry for them. Accidents happen, though, and after what I'd already been through today, it didn't seem such a big deal. They'd gone and fetched the gal from the nail salon just in case, since she speaks English, although most of the discussion was in Portuguese. I've got to practice sometime, and it was nice to have a safety net. From what I can tell when, if I were Portuguese I'd have done something idiomatic at that point. I'm not sure what, since I didn't recognize the expression and had forgotten what it was by the time I was home with my dictionary, but I'm guessing it involves losing my temper and being generally pissed off, since they were so relieved that I wasn't. In any case, they're checking with somebody to see if it can be dyed black. I can always use another black shirt, I suppose, and I suggested it because I'm pretty sure it's not too difficult to get the color right, seeing as it's black I'm after and all.

I had planned to stay in tonight, but screw that. Some friends of ours are going out and asked us to join them. It took me all of ten seconds to make up my mind.

I'm out of here.

Author's Note: This entry has been backdated. I tried to post it last night, but something wasn't working right. Faced with the choice of fiddling around with it and getting frustrated, or going to the pub, I naturally chose the pub. I suppose I could apologize, but I'm not particularly sorry. ~dilettante.