This Week's Punishment for Val's Good Deed

On Sunday, I set out to make spaghetti for Hick's supper. He had requested it a few days earlier. I figured I could get the sauce put together and let it kind of diffuse its flavors through the day. It's not like I coddle precious tomato plants in the house, then move them outside, raise them like spoiled children, pick the prettiest and ripest, peel and puree them, and simmer a sauce all day. No. Please try to conceal your surprise.

I hand-crank open a can of Hunts Tomato Sauce (With Meat). Let the record show that I've never seen any evidence of meat in that sauce. I screw the lid off a Save A Lot jar of pizza sauce and add it to the pan. I drain a little can of mushrooms and toss them in. Stir in about a pound of cooked ground beef. Squeeze in some minced garlic from one of those plastic bottles that you store upside down. Sprinkle in two packets of Splenda to cut the acidity. And then add a little fresh-ground black pepper from the grinder that my best ol' ex-teaching buddy Mabel gave me as a gift one year.

Simple, right? Even Rachel Ray could do it.

But not Val. Not on this day. I was on the final step. I wanted to get it ready before I left for town. I actually stopped on my way out the door to accomplish this task, because I knew I wouldn't want to dally when I returned with my 44 oz Diet Coke. The ground beef had already been cooked the day before, when I made pizza. Now it was only a matter of stirring everything together to stick in FRIG II until supper time.

Val plans. The Universe conspires. Even Steven guffaws.

I picked up the pepper grinder with my right hand. Took off the bottom cap with my left hand. Held the pepper grinder over the pan of sauce, and pushed the top button with my right thumb.

You know what happened, right?

THE WHOLE BOTTOM SECTION OF THE PEPPER GRINDER FELL INTO THE SAUCE.

That's right. The clear plastic portion that holds the peppercorns plopped right into that red sauce. I had to dump out those peppercorns and rinse out that section. I took it outside for a picture (because I don't like my indoor photos looking like I live where the sun don't shine) to show you the carnage.

There's the salt grinder, all smug and together, and the dismembered body of the pepper grinder. I usually rely on the mechanical aptitude of my college boys to fill those things up for me, or put in batteries. Now I was on my own. I had to clean them up from being on the cat-bed bird-toilet porch rail. Then I had to set them to dry over the heater vent, so all moisture would evaporate.

Hick has no idea what I went through to make his spaghetti. I don't even like the stuff, myself.

No good deed goes unpunished. I'm pretty sure if I think outside the box, in a convoluted manner, I can find a way that it was Hick's fault. In fact, I'm pretty sure HE'S the last person to use the pepper, on the chicken and dumplings I made him last week...