Events of this weekend included: a marathon of The Office (plus the Christmas specials, which are the best episodes of all and not to be missed), my first experience with strawberry agua fresca, and a drive into San Francisco for Mitchell's ice cream. (They have deep dish apple pie ice cream! It has baked apples and pie crust in it. I have never been closer to Jesus.) And then frolicking on the beach.

And I mean frolicking: we built a sandcastle, called it Sandhenge, and did a dance around it involving a lot of leaping and twirling and people looking at us funny. (Jen and I tried to summon the tides with the power of our womanhood, but it didn't go over.) I also went swimming in the ocean, fully clothed, wearing jeans. It was just that the water felt so wonderfully cool and refreshing, I could not resist its lure. The drive home in wet, sandy jeans was... interesting.

I also went to the Berkeley Bowl for the first time--it's like a farmer's market, only in grocery store form. I lugged two big bags of produce and things to work this morning, and I have more stuff at home for healthy eating throughout the week. Including a mini-watermelon! How cute is that?

I also went to some garage sales and got the greatest table on earth for $15. (I talked her down from $25. Check me out, with the negotiating.) It's a very high, very long, very narrow table that fits perfectly against my wall.

I also got a papasan (is that how you spell it?) chair for $10, and it is great for curling up in and watching TV. Anyone who comes over and wants to watch TV has to squeeze in it with me, though. It's the snuggle chair, and it's the price you have to pay.

The long table, though, I have to tell you, has now pushed the decor in the room over the edge. This is the room with yellow walls and teal carpet, right? So what color table did I get? A nice neutral brown? Black, maybe? Ha! No! It's orange! Bright burnt orange! And there's a pink lamp sitting on it!

Jen says she's going to re-name it the Aneurism Room, and I think I'm going to have to stand behind that. At least for now, until I have a chance to paint the table. (I was thinking of painting the table and re-upholstering the chair in the same color. Probably bright pink would not be the way to stop the pain. And yet I'm tempted.)

Speaking of household disasters, there was an Incident involving my Refrigerator. You would think that since I don't have a kitchen right now, the tragicomic series of cooking disasters would be on hold. But you'd be wrong!

I had been using the refrigerator as temporary storage, not having a kitchen, and I had to go and buy an outlet adapter before I could plug in the fridge. This took me a little while, and on the day that I came home with the outlet adapter, my housemate had already emptied out the upstairs refrigerator and brought me all my food. (I guess she was tired of having it in there or something.) So I had to turn on the fridge immediately and put everything in there, lest it spoil.

Then American Idol came on, or something else distracty, and I sort of forgot about what I had done. Especially the part where I hadn't emptied out the refrigerator before turning it on and putting food in it.

Days passed. A foul and mysterious odor began to waft from the fridge. When I went to investigate this new development, I found a bag of broccoli that had not done well in the fridge, and I thought that was the source of the odor. So I threw it out, thinking the smell would clear up. But no. As disgusting as it smelled, it was only a source, not the source, of the aforementioned foul and mysterious odor.

In fact, the odor turned out to be coming from a plastic bag. A bag in which I had placed everything in the kitchen cabinet--such as spices, baking supplies, and condiments. A bag that I had put, with my typical housekeeping savvy, in the freezer.

There was an aerosol can of Pam that had, miraculously, not yet exploded. There were two bottles of oil in there that had frozen solid. There was a shaker full of pepper that had overturned. And most tragically, a glass bottle of apple cider vinegar that had exploded and coated everything in the freezer and refrigerator with its horrible smell.

Damage control involved washing the vinegar residue off as many food containers as possible, throwing away things (such as sugar) that had not survived the disaster, and congratulating myself on the extent of my domestic stupidity.

The sad coda to the whole enterprise was what I found at the bottom of this bag: my copy of Cooking for Dummies, reeking of vinegar and sprinkled with pepper, with its pages frozen together.