Domesticity agrees with me (mostly)

Anyone who has lived with me can attest to the domestic disasters I am capable of creating. There are many good reasons why I dislike doing the cleaning after I've cooked something delicious, and the most important one is that I've probably just made an epic mess of the kitchen and surrrounding three city blocks. I also have a good hit rate with knives, nicking myself about one in a hundred strokes, which when you think about it in terms of carrot sticks - it takes about four strokes to make sticks out of a carrot - is a really high number. I'm also very clever about finding creative ways to burn myself (more on this later), slam fingers/toes/limbs in doors, and generally maim myself whilst being otherwise productive.

A brief recounting, then, of the first meal John and I cooked together at our new flat (I like to imagine this told in a David Attenborough sort of whisper):
Danielle and John are peeling vegetables for a delicious meal of roasted root vegetables with sausage, garlic and rosemary. Danielle is working on the turnips.
"Shit owowowowowowow turn the cold water on owwwwwwwwwwwwwwww"
"I don't think we have any plasters in the house."
"Shit."
Danielle improvises a bandage for her newly shortened fourth finger out of some bathroom tissue and duct tape.
"Wow, this looks really delicious. Are we done preparing it?"
"Oh yes, it's ready to cook, and I have already preheated the oven!"
Black, acrid smoke billows out the oven, which was not stripped of oven cleaner before the lovebirds started it*.
"Shit."
The smoke detector begins to beep urgently.
"Agh, turn it off, turn it off! Just rip it out of the wall, my ears, the neighbours, we haven't even met them yet and it's the night!"
"Shit."
The smoke detector, which was formerly wired directly into the wall, now bears several broken wires and is definitely not attached to the wall.

So that was our first foray into cooking a meal together. Today I had the apartment to myself while John was at work, so to procrastinate from the serious cleaning that needed to be done (have you ever looked closely at your carpets? Don't. Living in a place with ALL laminate flooring has just helped me realize how much shit gets ground into the average carpet every five minutes. Adding a cat who thinks litter kicking is a sport multiplies the mess by a factor of five), I decided to bake my own bread. Also, HSBC and Sbux UK payroll have the combined efficieny of a polio-stricken child with rickets on a bicycle, so finances are a little tight until John gets paid on Friday, and baking my own bread seemed like a cost-saving idea. No word yet on what the electricity to power the oven cost us. In any case, we had yeast from making our own pizza dough, we had flour, I had the required pinch of salt and a very clean counter...and behold, the bread rose! And I poked it, and it fell! Shit! And it rose AGAIN! And then I baked it, and it was stuck to the pan, so I tried to pry it up, and somehow held my knuckles against the pan long enough to sear the flesh from one of them, forming a very colourful and much-less-painful than it looks blister. I rawk at being domestic! And while the bread was rising, I did two loads of laundry (in my combined washer/dryer which I love with the tender passion of someone who knows that she is going to fall out of love when we get the first electric bill) and all of the dirty dishes from the weekend. Then, while the bread was baking, I scrubbed the bathroom (read: sprayed all surfaces with Dettol. Let soak while I watched the ending of High School Musical. Rinsed when I showered later) and mopped the floors, which was nearly as satisfying as baking my own bread, except that I didn't have to give of my flesh to get it done properly.
And the bread? Crusty and heavy, just the way I meant it, since it was to go with homemade chicken ginger soup (that's my story and I'm sticking to it).


*the lovebirds did not put the oven cleaner into the oven. They did, however, neglect to check the cleanliness of the oven before setting it 450*F.