Yesterday, as happens relatively often in a house containing three regular cooks, the sound of the oven door being opened was followed by a brief pause and a howl of pain and rage, characteristic of whoever had just been burned – literally. If it’s the Editor, it will be something like “AH son of a GUN!” If it’s myself, well, it was just a loud yell. If it is Papa, the author of the reviews on his site, well, it’s an epithet I won’t post here (and it’s not going to be Homeric).

As it happened, the hole growing in the thumb of our main oven mitt had reached critical mass, and there I was, running my hand underneath water, as a lima-bean sized welt started to appear, and trying to simultaneously remove 24 chocolate muffins from the oven as ravenous family members descended upon the kitchen, promised something good if they got up for church.

I followed standard procedure: rinse in cool water, dig something cold out of the freezer (a piece of ice, but those were wanting since some people haven’t been refilling the ice racks and our automatic ice maker died about an eon ago), wrap it in a napkin, apply to the source of misery. I carried this with me to church, and back, and at some point happened to pull my hand off for more than about two seconds. This was a mistake. To paraphrase a cousin of mine, a heat “with the rage of a million suns” errupted on my poor little hand.

T’was going to be a long day.

A long procession of cold things were applied to keep me in a state of sanity throughout the day, and finally right before bedtime the anger subsided enough to go to sleep without much of a hitch.

This morning it was no longer white, and I can carry it around with me as long as I don’t do anything with it. Anything like, say

button my shirt

tie my shoes

hold the dog leash with any precision

strain the basmati rice

butter toast that is skidding across the counter

or, of course,

type.

However, thankfully I’ve never learned to type right anyways so I just adjusted to nine fingers. Not bad.

The small country that has arisen on my thumb probably won’t last the week.

Meanwhile, I sit and wait to for the cleaning lady to come before I can leave for school. I walked BT, as the rain makes him spiteful and he takes it out on us if we don’t walk him. Now, three wet, muddy, and bitter dogs are sitting outside in the rain (well, not in the rain; we have a roofed patio the size of a large living room that stays mostly dry), willing to give their firstborn puppy to come in the house.

V, fifteen year old brother, plays the intro to “Kiss Me” on his guitar as he waits for the caravan to TVS to move out.

I think about reading Philosophy for class somehow in the next hour.

And then he starts to play the intro to ”In The Flesh.”

It might turn out to be a long day.