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My kitchen in CLEAN. Not only is my kitchen clean, it is entirely possible that, in the history of eating, no one's kitchen has been this clean.

The scary part is that, prior to today's scrubbing orgy, I thought it was....well, not clean, but clean-ish. Dude, did I ever blow the lid off that theory this afternoon. It all started because I sprayed my oven with caustic chemicals last night, thinking I would then give it a quick wipe this morning and be done with it. Ha! I spent 90 minutes bent over on the ceramic floor (just ask my knees!) with my ass sticking out of the oven. Breathing those toxic fumes for so long clearly addled my brain, because next thing you know I was taking everything out of all my cupboards and drawers so I could scrub them down, too.

Can I hear an Amen?

No, I hear a Ewwwwwwwwwwwww.

How can a cabinet which contains only clean glassware get so dirty? I was astounded and frankly a little queasy. Hey, I store my glasses upside down, the part where I place my lips rests on that shelf. Ewwwww.

Still, the act of looking at every item in my cupboards was rather enlighteneing. I discovered that we had three bottles of oregano. I discovered that I really need to stop buying so many kinds of tea and start drinking them. And, in the liquor cabinet, I discovered that at some point, grown StepSon helpfully replaced the alcohol in four bottles with water. (We only keep hard liquor for company, so it has been at least a year since I was in that cabinet.)

I threw a lot of stuff out today, including those four bottles of water. I threw out old spatulas, broken lobster picks, mismatched measuring cups, five corkscrews. (Hey, I said we don't drink liquor.)

Oh, and speaking of wine....which we weren't, we were talking about my clean kitchen and my bottles of water....Yesterday Husbandly One, Mum and I made wine at a local "microwinery", which is the fancy name for a do-it-yourself place in a strip mall.

We have never made wine before, and while I have long had romantic visions of creating my own delicious wine, I have neither the patience, space, or overall intelligence to perform this miracle. Enter "microwineries". You go in, tell them you want to make some Merlot, they stir some stuff up in a bucket, and then you add a packet of yeast. (which, for some reason, is a legal requirement.) The yeast thing was the only "hands on" moment of the experience; I think we were there for twenty minutes total , and I certainly wouldn't classify it as fun. In eight weeks, however, we go back to bottle the resulting hooch ourselves. That has the potential to be fun.

I couldn't believe, though, the massive quantity we will end up with: thirty bottles of Merlot! Our wine rack is full, where the hell am I supposed to put thirty new bottles?

Well, at least I know there's room for four of them in the liquor cabinet.