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Apologies for any verb tense agreement problems below. When I get excited, I tend to slip into present tense, and my attempts to reign that in have been spotty in some parts.

It started off pretty well. While I could do without four-foot snow drifts outside my front door, Seuss and I had decided that this would be a good excuse to huddle up inside the house and hibernate. Squeeze requested that we clean the litterbox at 7:00am, and while that seems pretty early, that’s a pretty standard time for us to be up. You might even say she let us sleep in for an hour.

Seuss cleaned the litterbox while I dove into the kitchen to try and find the counters under all the pots and pans. I gave the kitchen a thorough cleaning, and then embarked on making pancakes.

Now, I’m not a bad cook; most of what I make usually turns out pretty tasty. Where my skills fail is when pancake batter and/or egg meets my non-coated frying pans. I can’t seem to cook things in non-coated pans without facilitating a melding of the food-molecules with the pan-molecules, creating a burned, concrete-like substance. My first pancake started out pretty well, until I went to flip it over, at which point it disintegrated into four separate pieces, none of which even remotely resembled a pancake. “Okay,” I said to myself, “maybe Pam was a bad choice. I’ll try oil next.”

Clean pan, new oil. Added the batter. Went to flip it, and ended up folding the pancake over into a weird pancake-omelette. At this point I had to step back and do some meditative breathing, lest I put the frying pan through the wall. Seuss rescued me from my own incompetence, and we eventually sat down to eat the pancakes and the doughy mess I made. My doughy mess tasted a lot like pancake-flavoured foam-mattress, but thankfully the pancakes turned out much better.

I made myself a mug of tea, and we retired to the couch to enjoy the rest of the morning. Fifteen minutes into our movie, the walls start rattling. Seuss and I looked at each other, wondering what sort of renovations the neighbours were doing. We shrugged it off until the noise continued for another fifteen minutes, drowning out our movie. We started searching the house trying to figure out which side the noise was coming from. Definitely a hammer-drill, definitely on the shared foundation somewhere.

I pulled on my boots and started trudging around the building in search of the origin of the sound. ‘Lo and behold, I find the neighbours hammer-drilling the outside wall of their foundation. I try to plaster on a friendly smile.

“Um, how long are you going to be doing that?” I asked.
“Another hour, we’re installing a dryer vent,” my neighbours said, smiling sheepishly.
“Okay, thanks.” I trudge back through the snow to my front door.

Seuss looks at me expectantly.

“Another hour.”
“An HOUR?”
“Yeah. They’re installing a dryer vent.”
“Don’t they already have one?”
“No idea.”
“Aren’t they supposed to leave changes on the exterior to the condo board?”
“Yeah.”

We retreated to the couch, reaching for ear plugs in anticipation of further drilling. The sound died down after a while, likely around the time that the noise had finally got to one or both of our other two neighbours. That’s when I smell something burning. Seuss leapt up from the couch and ran into the kitchen. I hurried after him to find that the pan that had been sitting on the stove with water and soap had actually boiled down and started burning. Our good pan.

Seuss started scrubbing away while I Googled a way to try and get the burned soap off of our pan. Apparently boiling some vinegar in the pan will help loosen the burned material, so I set about doing just that. Seuss apparently didn’t hear me telling him that I’m going to do this, and flipped out when he saw the pan sitting on the hot element. He grabbed the pan without uttering a word, sending warm vinegar flying everywhere.

“WHAT are you DOING?”
“The element is still hot!”
“Yes, I know that.”
“Why did you put it there?”
“I’m trying to clean the pan, as I mentioned to you.”

Seuss mopped up the vinegar off the floor, as I tried to breathe deeply and go to my happy place. Seuss then headed off to try and fix the bathtub faucet, which has been leaking for months. Now, this faucet was installed back in the day by yours truly and Forever North (the ex-bf), but having done it only once, I’ve retained very little of the exact process we went through to install it. The hot-water seat has been repeatedly treated with an anti-seize compound, but as the seat remained seized, we decide to remove the faucet itself in order to try bathing the fixture in a chemical bath to loosen the components. The only problem is, I don’t quite remember the order of how we got the faucet on in the first place.

The knobs are easy to remove, of course. Unscrew, pull out components. I cut the caulking around the back of the faucet, and gave things a tug. Not moving. Hmm. The hamster wheel in my brain started moving as I tried to muddle my way through. I looked for more screws. Ahhh, shower-pull. I unscrewed the shower-pull and removed it. The faucet still won’t budge. More hamster running. I reached underneath and felt an opening where I could feel a nut that connects the fixture to the pipes. Obviously that would have to be unscrewed, but one problem: the opening is too small. Hamster continued running, and it soon became obvious that we’ve missed a step.

Google to the rescue! See those rings you thought were part of the fixture? You can unscrew them, and the whole thing neatly slides off. Hamster jumps off wheel, curls up and goes back to sleep. For the first time today, something started working. Seuss took over, leaving me to go downstairs and continue breathing deeply, seeking the relaxation that has been missing all morning. My eyes are burning from the combination of smoke and evaporated vinegar in the air, but the GLORIOUS SILENCE that has returned is more than enough to make up for that.

This day will yet be saved. All is not lost. If I have to do lines/drink enough to blot out my short-term memory, so be it.