Moose in the Kitchen

Last week, I decided to make amazing things happen with THE POWER OF MY MIND. Don’t laugh. My mind’s been known to bend spoons. How, you ask? Because I was thinking about whether or not I have a copy of The Pickwick Papers in my storage closet and whether I should unearth it or just get a copy from the library when I accidentally set a heavy skillet on top of a spoon in the sink. What? I STILL SAY THAT COUNTS.

Adjusting the definition of “amazing things” seems to be the key here. On Wednesday, I accepted as amazing a teenager barreling down a hill on a skateboard, crouched so low the pockets of his jeans were in danger of being sandpapered off. On Thursday, my standards burrowed yet lower when I decided the delivery of my Friday Night Lights DVD counted. Because I’d just been thinking about knitting while watching a little something. And, hark! Fresh entertainment, right there in my mailbox! AMAZING.

By Friday at noon, I was about to abandon my Make Amazing Things Happen With The Power Of My Brain experiment. But then (oh, then!), all the computers shut down with an alarming digital whoosh and the entire building went dark. As our office doesn’t deliver much in the way of actual sunlight, the technical term for this circumstance is “totally screwed”. People wandered out of pitch-black offices, knocking over garbage cans and mumbling things like “somebody upstairs is pissed” and “plagues of locusts” and “where’s my damn wallet?”

Grabbing my purse, I shouted, “God says it’s time for tacos!” and we exited the building like the sheep dogs of Satan were chasing us or, more accurately, like the spicy pork tacos at La Taqueria were in our immediate future. After sitting in the sun and chowing down our lunch, we steeled ourselves for the inevitable and dragged our unenthusiastic tails back to work.

The power was still out.

Full of naive hope that we might get an extra hour off until the lights came back on, we went in. And were told we didn’t really NEED the electricity to continue working. To which the paper cuts on my hands – gleaned 15 minutes later when I tried to yank a file out of a dark drawer in a dark hallway – say: BULLSHIT. As I walked under one of the emergency lights I realized my hands were covered in blood. Twenty minutes in the dark and I was officially a bio hazard. Luckily, I didn’t have to make any executive decisions about whether or not to wave my bandaged fingers in my boss’s face and beg to be released, because the loudspeaker piped up with a blessed announcement: The power would be out for another five hours.

Grudgingly excused, we skipped merrily across the street and into a sunny bar. And spent Friday afternoon drinking instead of working.

Official designation: Amazing. 

So what should my spoon-bending, PG&E-foiling brain do this week?