What a difference a day makes &c. I was practically a W-O-M-A-N today. (Sing it, Maria!) And yet it wasn’t that I got so much done as that I attended to so many different things, one of which was finishing The Kiss Murder, Mehmet Murat Somer’s “detective novel” starring an Audrey-Hepburn-like drag queen who’s also a gifted kick-boxer, a veritable Jackie Chan in YSL. In Istanbul, did I mention.

PLUS! PLUS! PLUS! I fixed the dishwasher. Me, moi! All by myself.

Okay, no plumbing was involved. What had happened — a fit of pique. The sort of thing that happens only when I’m really too tired to be in the kitchen. Sure, I’d floated through the evening on a sea of Sancerre and Champagne, but intoxication was not the culprit. I wasn’t so much a drunk as an overtired three year-old. If you’ve been around an overtired three year-old lately, you know that it is easier to plug a volcano with your index finger than to quiet a toddler who has gotten stuck in the phase change between wakefulness and sleep. (Cue the streaky Star Trek effects!) That was me on Wednesday night. I gave the middle rack of the dishwasher a yank. No doubt I meant to punish it by forcibly evicting it from the dishwasher. In this I was successful. How to put it back, though….

Only when all the dishes and whatnot of the not-a-birthday party had been washed (on the bottom rack; the dishwasher continued to work just fine, at half capacity) did I figure out how to fix the thing. As you can imagine, what was missing after the defenestration was whatever it was that kept the middle rack from rolling on indefinitely, right off the retractable rails. What in model railroading was called a “buffer” — the things at the end of the track at Washington’s Union Station that will keep a locomotive from ploughing into the passengers. I new that I was missing the dishwasher’s objective correlative of these stoppers, but I had no idea what it looked like. Until I chanced to see the upper rack, the very shallow shelf for silver (this is a Miele we’re talking about; none of those ground-floor silverware baskets here!). At the end of each retractable rail, there was a little plastic plug. Aha! I was looking for two items. What did they look like? And — in a miracle of modern cognition — no sooner did I realize that I was looking for two plastic plugs (as opposed to the band of aluminum that I’d imagined) than they both appeared! Unbroken! Plugged into place, they did their job, although the trauma of ejection had weakened the grip of the join on the right. So I fastened both plugs with twist-ties.

Wasn’t that fascinating?

Having shared all of this wonderful news, I find that I have no energy at all for a discussion of Los Abrazos Rotos, the new Almodóvar film. I saw it late this afternoon — something else that I did today that wasn’t exactly taxing. All I’ll say now is that Penélope Cruz has never been more ravishing. Her brilliant smile eats up the screen with the gusto of Audrey Hepburn — or Katharine, if you prefer.

Kathleen will be leaving for Florida in the morning, even though the weather there is supposed to be worse for Florida than what we’re going to have is for New York. I’ve sent her off with a last supper of some of my best dishes: tomato soup, grilled lamb chops, steamed baby asparagus and roast new potatoes. A Hepburn sort 0f menu, when you think about it.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 8th, 2010 at 11:59 pm and is filed under Gotham Diary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.