Home Alone
My dad has now left for Hong Kong and the remainder of the family are on their way to Bavaria, so that leaves me at home alone for a week. My mother was vastly paranoid about me coping by myself and has left me about a month's supply of food along with last-minute instructions on how to catch a bus.
Being alone does feel slightly weird after all this time, especially as I was reading about Internet screamers while at work today. Incidentally, the first ever recorded "screamer" was perpetrated by Haydn in his 94th symphony, when he included a quiet passage with a sudden inhumanly loud chord to wake up sleeping people and scare everyone to death. True story.
So there's now a new regime in the house - there are going to be some changes here now that I'm in charge. What I've been doing since coming home from work is tidying up the kitchen, something that hasn't been done since Brian installed it during the year of my Highers. The first revelation came when I looked under the cupboards, clearing away the debris, and found that we have lights above the counter that have gone untouched since it was renovated.
The focal point of the cleanup operation was around the kitchen sink. The draining board hasn't been emptied for a good few months at least, because most things get thrown in the dishwasher, and anything that's put in the drainer tends to go unnoticed. I found a huge amount of cutlery in there (I had been wondering where all the steak knives had got to) and some useless tubs, which I put in the Cupboard O' Useless Tubs. We have one specifically for the purpose.
I also rediscovered the grill handle, which had been lodged in a lost-looking desk tidy. No one else had really noticed its absence because I'm the only one in the house with the dexterity to attach it to the grill - other people tend to grab it with their hand wrapped in a towel, then set it down carefully if it hadn't caught fire.
Moving on to the side table, I decided that candles shouldn't really have been left out since a month ago, but I couldn't find the lid to their tub or any other small one, so they've been left alone for now. Underneath them, though, was the other half of the chopping board. I have no clue how the chopping board came to be in two perfect halves - it looks like someone was overenthusiastic with the bread knife. I've reunited them but have no glue.
Also on the table was a handy LiDL fire extinguisher, still wrapped. I freed it. There was an audio book of Dante's Inferno next to it, read by John Cleese, which sounds very entertaining in a "Don't mention the Malebolge" kind of way.
Passing the cooker, I found out that "low sodium" salt contains not sodium chloride, but potassium chloride. I can't remember much about my chemistry, but putting one ion a period down sounds a bit risky to me.
This was all done while waiting for a chicken pie (also from LiDL, the German supermarket of choice) to cook in the oven. Packaging photographs are always deceptive - I had been looking forward to the juicy-looking bakery product depicted, and instead got a load of pastry filled with a thin layer of something resembling catfood. I can't say it didn't taste nice, though.
And the pasta to go with it - fusilli is ridiculously small, and impossible to judge how much you'll need of it. (As it turns out, a conservative handful will just about feed a family.) Somehow the manufacturers found room to put the ingredients in about sixty different languages on the back, some of which aren't even from this planet, but no room for portion guidelines or cooking instructions. It's easy to cook pasta, though - you just throw it in a pot of boiling water with salt (or potassium chloride, in my case), then sit there and watch it lie there glumly and refuse to cook. And as soon as you turn your back, they'll all gang together and make the water boil over.
This is all ideal practice for next year, but I don't think Whitney is ever going to allow me to cook anything except sticky toffee pudding. Recently, though, I've suddenly been overcome with an overwhelming desire to make squared cake. I think the geometrical curiosity of it is too much for me to resist.