I employ a housekeeper. She comes twice a week, cooks, cleans, does the laundry, etc. We communicate through notes. All in all, it is a very satisfactory arrangement. Except I think she believes that there are four of me, and that we all have poor taste in color coordination.
Four of me? I guess this by the amount of food that she makes for my dinner. The salads are enormous. I take them to work the next day to share with my office. Of eight. On top of the salads (which are good, don’t get me wrong, just enormous. I’ve learned that if I eat the salad at every meal, it will take me two days to finish it. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner), she’ll make a main course. Tuesday it was a Japanese stew that I could consume about half of before it went bad. Thursday it was a roast chicken with potato, carrot, and onion. And another salad. And a huge bowl of cut-up mango.
Thursday’s roast chicken posed another problem beyond the amount. It was a full chicken. Not chicken breasts. Not all parceled out like they do at KFC. Just a whole chicken, balefully staring up at me from its bed of root veggies. I’d had a long day at work and was starving. So I scooped up some veg onto a plate then grabbed a knife to cut some chicken.
And realized
that I’ve never in my life (32 years)
cut up a whole chicken.
I had no idea where to start. It was smallish as it was not one of the fancy American hormone filled chickens. So that was a plus. But still. Where do you begin? I kind of stabbed at it with the front of the blade, trying to find a fleshy part. I heard random small crackings and imagined I was cutting through some tiny bones or whatever were in there. So I stopped smacking the blade into the curved top of the chicken and started hacking at the appendages, figuring that if i separated them off, maybe the ‘meat’ part of the chicken would be more visible. So I got what I believe to be a wing separated from the body and pulled some of the meat off to throw to the cat that was attacking my feet and crying trying to get to the bird. Then I poked the knife in at the torn-away site to see if there was more fleshy bits. There were, so I tried cutting them and eventually flipped the whole thing over to find a treasure trove of flesh. Yay. So I sliced a few more bits off, wrapped the rest up, and went to eat my dinner.
The next day, I was going to cut up the rest of the chicken to take for lunch. Except I still wasn’t really sure HOW you cut meat off the chicken. Either the birds here just don’t have any meat or I’m an idiot because I couldn’t really FIND any more meat. Not in serious hunks anyway. There were more bits and bobs that I was able to scrape off, half to me and half to the demoncat, but nothing substantial. I’ve heard two people can eat off of one chicken, but are these fairy people or diet maniacs? Because there was a good bit of skin and bone on this thing, but not a lot to eat.
But other than the chicken, which I’m sure has more meat on it that I just can’t find, my dinners are ridiculously substantial and almost scary in proportion. Hence, I believe she thinks there are four of me.
The struggle with the towels and bathmat is what leads me to believe that she thinks I have crap color coordination abilities.
I have two bathrooms (okay, I have 3.5 bathrooms, but two that I keep stocked) and two sets that go in these bathrooms. One is lavendar and dark brown, the other is orange with cream and light grey zebra striped towels. At least, this is how I imagine it should be as those are the color schemes I had in mind when I bought the items. However, I’ve noticed that the towels migrate. When I set things up with the orange bathmat, grey/cream and orange towels, after my housekeeper comes in, they migrate to where the grey/cream towels have been replaced by the rest of the orange towels or by the brown towels. Then, the lavendar towels are left on their own with the lavendar bathmat and lavendar and white shower curtain. So I’ll go back and change everything around. Then the next time, it will all be changed around again. It is a silent battle of wills and taste.
Which, if she has a lack of faith in my taste, that can only have increased over the past few days, as I’ve decided to paint my apartment. My walls are beige-y white depression color. So I’ve been painting them red and blue and orange. I have a few blocks of color on one wall in the hallway and am using them as permanent frames to place photos in. On another wall, I’ve painted red and orange polka dots in varying sizes. On a third wall, I’m painting a series of red, orange, and blue stripes.
It will either look awesome, or like insane clown children attacked my house.
My housekeeper hasn’t commented on the paint job yet. But she is making fajitas for dinner on Tuesday. I have a friend coming for a visit so we may actually get through most of the food. Although, I did tell my housekeeper that I had a friend coming to town. So she may decide to make more food than normal. So that we each have enough.
Tags: chicken, helper, mass quantity of food
