Dave Smith > wrote in
:

> Psychotron wrote:
>
>> She cleaned up everything except for the pan. Like I
>> said... she doesn't like it. She wanted me to buy a
>> new non-stick pan and I came home with cast iron. Now
>> it's kinda "my baby". "You bought it, you clean it."
>
> Dang. I am beginning to think that some women should not be
> allowed in the kitchen, or that they should have their own
> utensils and leave ours alone.

[kitchen horrors excised]

I have a medium-sized non-stick frying pan that my wife has been
instructed to use when she feels the urge to cook herself something.
She is not allowed to use my knives or my pans or my bowls or my pots
(and I say mine because I bought them with my money, not household
money). To her credit, she went and bought an IKEA 5$ set of knives
for herself which of course now end up everywhere in the kitchen. On
the down side, she insists on using the spaghetti fork to serve salads
(instead of the salad servers I bought) and trying to cut bread with
her cheapo IKEA knives, while using the bread knife to slice meat or
spread peanut butter...you get the idea. And *she* took Home Ec
classes in school while I had to take shop. You'd think an economist
would be able to get a clue...

My main gripe is that I have a specific area where I work (between the
stove, the fridge and the sink). This is also where everyone else will
come and drop everything they can, empty beer bottles, dirty dishes and
cutlery, dirty cups, bags of nuts, teapots, empty coffee pots...not all
at once, but in sizeable groupings. Cleaning up for every meal is an
uphill frikkin battle and somehow the annoyance of it is not ever
registered as a bad thing. To make matters worse, the dishwasher (a
roll-up unit) sits between the stove and the fridge (there really is no
other place to put in when it's not in use) and is often open when I
start supper which means that if I don't think about closing it, I can
bang myself on the door, as the many bruises on my shins attest.

Should we ever be so conspicuously bourgeois as to feel compelled to
own a house, I will have a separate guest kitchen set up with a small
stove and some cheapo implements and a sink. The non-cooks (and that's
every female in our family) will not be allowed in the kitchen proper
to cook.

This week she's abroad at a conference. The kitchen is still fairly
tidy and the only thing in my work area is what I put there myself.

--

German to Picasso in front of Guernica: Did you do this?
Picasso to German in front of Guernica: No, it was you.