My daughter left for a week-long trip to Washington, D.C. Saturday afternoon. All I could think to do about that was to rearrange cabinets and thoroughly clean my kitchen. It was residual guilt from an episode of Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares on BBC America. Gordon Ramsay is my interim obsession post-Top Chef, pre-Project Runway. Like: he bleeps incessantly. Dislike: too much hair gel.

I turned on the self-clean feature on the oven, and the house filled with the smell of burnt popcorn. There's evidently no way to stop a self-cleaning oven once its mind is made up. This oven was on a three hour tour. Burnt popcorn morphed into level 20 flat iron and then finally to broiled nothing smell. When the oven beeped its end, there was no more black caked-on goop, just ghostly remnants of white dust.

There is a new miracle sponge on the market called The Magic Eraser. I'm positive it's straight from Roswell. It erases anything: Sharpie, soap scum, Kool-aid stains. I have even used it to erase paint streaks on a wall. While I was wiping the weird paste of grease-dust off the blades of the ceiling fan, I thought about using it on those rough spots on my feet. Then I moved on to my cellulite. Then I thought how great it would be if it came in Q-tip size, so I could reach into my brain through my ear and erase my first marriage. The possibilities are endless.

I scrubbed the kitchen floor. I had to do it in one foot increments on my hands and knees. It had been awhile. There remains a no-man's land of errant potato peel, chunks of cookie, chopped onion in that one inch wide space between the cabinet and stove. It's like looking down into a cistern. I can barely make it out. From what I can tell, it resembles the caked on goop from my oven topped with the salad of lost chunks. Maybe after a few more years I won't have to worry about going through all the trouble to bring someone over to help me move the stove so that I can get in there and shovel it out. It will just grow and grow until it's the same height as my kitchen cabinet. I would paint it white, of course, so that it matches.

I would love to tell you more about the excitement of moving casserole dishes to their own cabinet space, arranging skillets and mixing bowls, but I suppose I'd better get ready for work. If I could only use the Magic Eraser on my bills...

Namaste