D stands for dishes, duckies and deliverance

Ugh. It's been a pretty ghastly past few weeks, particularly with some rather gruesome mid-term exams, one of which was comparative anatomy, which I was recounting to The Other Cat via MSN. She was asking if it was just the dog we had been dissecting over the course of the last few weeks.

Slinky: "No, there was some cat and other breeds too. It was kind of a mixed bag."
The Other Cat: "AAAAAARRGGGH! A mixed bag! Like Halloween candy?" (obviously envisioning being handed gunny sacks filled with various bleeding body parts and being told, "Identify!")
Slinky: "It was an expression, not a description!"

Anyway, this is the first chance I've had in a while to properly blog, so here goes:

This is the pile of dirty dishes left unwashed by Loves HerDog over the last two weeks. Clockwise from the black coffee pot:



Coffee pot, used about one week ago, still one-quarter full of coffee. I thought, for some weird reason, that fungus couldn't grow on liquid coffee. I was wrong. There was a little raft of blue fungus that bobbed jauntily on the ripples when I pick up the pot.

Plate and bowl with dodgy red stain, used about one week ago when we were waching 'Zoolander' together (and when Punky nearly snorted water out of his nose when Christine Taylor said "I was bulimic" and Owen Wilson and Ben Stiller say, "You can read minds?"). I think the plate was used for LovesHerDog's dinner some time last week. I think it was something frozen and nuked in the oven, a safe guess since most of LovesHerDog's meals are like that. The dodgy red stain is, I THINK, strawberries. I hope like hell it was strawberries.

Plate: yesterday. You can't see it, but there's this gawdawful piss-yellow stain all over it. I don't know what it was. I don't want to know.

Miscellaneous cutlery and bowl: ranges form two weeks ago to this morning.

Baking tray with brown-glazed aluminum foil. Remnants of dinner two nights ago, which was some sort of pre-marinated chicken breast thing. Yes, it's still sticky. I know this because it stuck to my arm while I was trying to do my dishes this morning, which made me flail my arms like a crazy person for a while.

Cans of baked beans and cannelloni beans: were both opened about one week ago. There's still a glaze of that strange orange sauce they put baked beans in, but no signs of fungus. Proof that canned food is probably loaded with preservatives. There's also half-finished bowl of baked beans which has been festering in the fridge for about a month. I haven't dared to excavate it. I've plucked up enough courage to shift it prominently on display in the very front of the fridge, but no luck, LovesHerDog doesn't seem to have noticed it yet. Fingers crossed.

Big mixing bowl with miscellaneous cutlery: used about two weeks ago for her birthday, when her relatives came over. I think the big mixing bowl was used to make scones (which were not offered to Punky and me. I feel great umbrage at this, since we bought her a $50 gift voucher at the local DVD shop to add to her already impressive collection of DVDs. That was $25 I seriously couldn't afford. Bah. Maybe it's because I refuse to let her lick out my brownie mixing bowls?)

We have a practice where on Friday nights, if we're all in, we take turns to cook for each other. Rule is, if you cook, you don’t wash up. Most recently, I made sweet glazed roast chicken with rice and stir-fried vegetables when it was my turn, then Punky made chicken mushroom risotto (mmmmmmmmmm, Punky risotto......) and three days ago, LovesHerDog made overcooked steak (she forgot about it while it was in the oven), salad and corn. And then tried to sneak that pile of dishes which you see above into the dishes she had used in order to make dinner in the hopes perhaps that Punky and I would do them too.

As you can see, we didn't.

Oh, and this is my new bicycle, which I scored for $30. He's called D, short for 'Deliverance From The Stupid Bus System'. Buns of steel, here I come. Buying groceries is less of a sherpa-esque trek now. Unfortunately, it's mandatory to wear a helmet. Wearing LovesHerDog's helmet (she's not just about being a slob), I look like a giant bobble-headed dork.



Unfortunately, I forgot that I am limited in how much I can buy by how much I can stuff in my gym bag. This unfortunate miscalculation led to the serious deformation of my fresh-made loaf of bread. I tried to fluff it back into shape when I got home, but in vain. It still looks like I stomped it. Note to self: next time balance bread on handlebars.



This is the view from my house. Yes, that is a little bridge. Now you know why despite all the whining, I haven't moved closer to the damned university. Traveling is a small price to pay when this is literally thirty seconds from your front door.



These are my nearest neighbors. It's spring now, so we've got fluffy teeny ducklings. I nearly fell off my bike and into the pond when I saw them. I can't get close enough to take a picture of them, unfortunately. They all swim off like a little aquatic conga line to the middle of the pond when I try to sneak up on them with my camera.