The Pit-falls of Cooking with the Flu

I've got that nasty bug/cold/flu/whatever's going around these days. I had to go to work anyway yesterday -- there was too much my boss couldn't do on her own without destroying the office along the way -- but she let me go home early.

I came home, planning to fix one of my favorite lunches: juice, some tomato soup with a little bit of cream and some basil, crackers, and an avocado, followed by a couple Thin Mints. The plan is, I'll eat it as I read Stephanie Pearl-McPhee Casts Off and then put myself to bed.

It was the avocado that did it to me.

Everything is going according to plan. The juice is poured. The book is open to where I left off. I've got the pit out of the avocado as the soup is warming up. I use my fingers to remove it from the point of the knife when --

squirp!

It does not merely fly from my fingers. It decides to play pinball with my kitchen.

It was a high-scoring game.

Here is, I kid you not, the exact path taken by the squirpy pit:

And here's the thing: as I'm madly trying to catch it, two steps behind, the whole time I'm completely aware that it is going to fall between the fridge and the counter. There is nothing I can do to stop this.

So as my tomato soup looks on forlornly, I am, with a fever of 99.4, moving a refrigerator by myself out from the wall enough to get a disgustingly dusty pit out of there before the next cockroach comes along and decides to have himself a round feast. I even gave myself a minor strain in my right pec as I rocked the thing to and fro. I took a break so I could throw a pretty sizable temper tantrum, but that didn't get the effing pit out of there. So I had to keep shoving and pulling and pushing until I could free the stupid thing. Eventually I did.

And yes, the soup was cold.