Related? Unrelated?

Weird Thing Number 1: Yesterday, for the first time in probably a year (or more?), i scrubbed the kitchen floor behind the garbage can/recycling/broom&dustpan area. Yes, this may seem gross, but it was really not very dirty! The floor in my kitchen is dark slate tile, so i can never tell when it needs soap, anyway... i guess you could say i was avoiding that corner. Forever.
But yeah! On a whim, there i was, scrubbing away. It felt good, real good. My floor was fucking sparkling. Cut to two hours later, and i was making dinner (we had breakfast for dinner: omelet, fruit, muffins, tea). At the end, had a bunch of fruit scraps on the cutting board. Went to toss them into the trash, and-oops!-wouldn't you know it: 75 percent of them went tumbling over the side of the trash can, all over the wall and into a great big pile on the (fucking sparkling) floor behind it. Now, has this ever happened to me before? No. Sometimes my aim is off when i go to throw a zucchini end in there or something, but usually i undershoot and it falls where i can see it, so i pick it up. No problem. But this time they went all over the newly clean floor that i had just spent 20 minutes scrubbing back to life. Why? Seriously. Why.

Weird Thing Number 2: The day before that, Nat mentioned how funky our tea kettle was looking. It's all rusty and corroded, what gives? The only explanation i could think of was that it was a cheap-o thing ($20 or so) and we had been using it for nigh on 6 years. And, we have an electric stove right now and i am convinced that those things are pure evil. Plus, we have disgusting hard water down here at the tail end of the Colorado River, so a couple of times i have had to boil vinegar in the thing to get the crust of lime off of the inside. No big. But yeah, the teapot was looking a little haggard, i'll admit it. Trusty little thing, it has served us well! The very next morning, after i made coffee, i put the tea kettle back on the range and forgot to turn off the damn stovetop. I'm sure i'm not the first person to do this, nor was that the first time that i have made that particular mistake. (in any case, i certainly never did this when i had a gas stove, damn you evil electric ranges!!) Um, half an hour later? Yeah. i walked into the kitchen. it felt really weirdly warm, and something smelled funny. Right away i knew. Shit- the tea kettle. Turned off the stove as fast as i could, but it was too late. The kettle has been super-heated for so long that the plastic on the handle had begun to melt, from the inside, sending a screw loose, where it was practically seared to the bottom of the kettle on the inside. The whole removable whistling spout-topper thingy was melted and had fallen apart as well. Wow, i sure did a number on it this time. So guess where it went? In the trash. Now i am back to boiling water in a little pot, which is mostly annoying only for the pure fact that i have exactly three pots, two small and one medium, which i often use all at once. Now one is sort of out of the game... drat!

But the weird part about this is: Why did that happen right after Nat said something about it? Seriously! What is the phenomenon that connects these things, or is there none? Is it sort of like Murphy's Law? Or how when you know you are carrying an expensive vase, it makes you nervous, and therefore more likely to drop it? Or is it more along the lines of imbuing an object with abstract energy (just go with me here)? For instance, i used to work at a stained glass store that was located a hundred feet from the railroad tracks. All of our nice, blown-glass gift items (perfume bottles, paperweights, etc.) would sit on the shelves collecting dust, because a few times a day the whole building would rattle and send a fine sifting down. We also had plenty of other work to do besides selling objets d'art, so often they would sit in the same arrangement on their shelves for weeks at a time. Sales would slow down, but the minute you walked around and paid some attention to them, just moved them around a little bit, rearranged them, they would fly out the door! Sell like hotcakes! It was as if people had never seen these things before! i often felt like King (Queen?) Midas.

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