By Phil Riske | Senior Reporter/Writer
(Another in a series of articles about the pleasures and vagaries of retirement)
Upon retirement, I became a house-husband. It’s been an eight-year lesson about what most wives go through preparing thousands of meals.
“Now, you know what it’s like,” said my bride of 44 years, after I commented on my new marital responsibilities.
My biggest complaint about KP (kitchen duty) is not about loading the dishwasher or cleaning the oven or planning a week’s worth of dinners.
It’s the “Drawer from Hell,” the place for every kitchen/cooking utensils known to man. Imagine (and I’m sure many of you have such drawers) a fairly small drawer containing 44 years worth of everything from spatulas to bottle openers to whisks to ice cream scoops . . . well, you get the idea.
My wife claims she knows exactly where everything is in the pile of metal and plastic tools — a junk drawer.
It’s that proverbial needle in a haystack syndrome looking for one item.
The bad guys in the Drawer from Hell are Mr. Spatula and his cousins. If you dare move one of them or fail to place them exactly in the pile where they were, you won’t be able to close the drawer. Spatulas must go in a separate drawer, face down. They are a menace to sanity.
Brilliant as I am, I decided to take a bunch of the items in the Drawer from Hell and place them in another drawer. Little did I know they would clone themselves.
Update: I now have three Drawers from Hell.
And my much better half is having quite a chuckle about it all.
