A V-8 Moment (Among Others)...

If my posts a few weeks back about discovering what the buttons on my TV remote did made you wonder how I manage to match my socks in the morning, you'll love this story. I promised to post this one for my new friend S. What would my daughter call it? Epic fail? :-)

You've probably come to the conclusion that I'm not terribly keen on my new/old apartment. I've been here two months and it's not yet growing on me. Hopefully the hanging of some artwork with the help of friends over the next week will help make it feel more like home.

The one area of the apartment which I do like more than the rest is my kitchen. I wrote of the beautiful kitchen counters (which on move-in day I nearly cracked when I made the mistake of trying to lift my bowl mixer on my own and dropped it). The previous owners had renovated seven years earlier and had kept it in good shape. 

I hardly use a microwave, yet one sits above the stove where I'd rather have had an exhaust hood. To any of my friends who cook I'd grumble about how dim it was with that contraption in the way. It, and the stove both being black made it quite dark and difficult to see what I was preparing. So dark in fact, that I'd propped up a camping lamp on the counter beside the stove to be able to peer into the pot to see how far along my meal was.

One of my new volunteers heard this complaint when we were speaking of her own kitchen reno (finally finished, yay for S!) She stopped by earlier this week to take me for an appointment at the bank, but first came upstairs. S slipped off her shoes, headed straight for the kitchen and pointed to the control panel on the microwave. In a gentle voice, she said "Light?" A light button! Here I was thinking that was for an interior light in the microwave - lo and behold the space underneath was now brighter. "And fan?" A fan button! Although not a strong exhaust, it sure was better than the nothing I had before.

Who woulda thunk that a microwave was specially designed to make use of the space underneath? I know, stick with matching my socks...

Some of you know of what I was up to this past Monday evening. An incredibly moving experience, but I'm not quite ready to put it into words yet. I didn't want the participants and my friends to think that it was not worth posting about, quite the contrary - I feel it needs more time to fully sink in. Bear with me!

And if you don't get the V-8 reference, you're probably too young to remember when there were no microwaves in the kitchen either.