In my 5/20 posting “More new things”, I reported on replacing some thin, cheap, and ugly plastic plates, plates that I had just endured for years, with wheat straw dinner plates — 4 deep plates and 6 flat plates — which are sturdy, unbreakable, lightweight, microwave-safe, and attractive (in a variety of muted colors).
So pleased was I with these with these that on 5/22 I ordered 5 small plates and an assortment of bowls: 6 huge ones, 8 cereal bowls, and 5 small bowls. These arrived yesterday, 5/23, and required me to reduce 7 cardboard boxes to small pieces that will go into the recycling bin. For this I used my trusty box cutter, which I have become quite adept at wielding; I am now a skilled down-breaker of cardboard boxes.
Yesterday, I managed to return all the old (heavy and eminently breakable) bowls to their original places in my kitchen cabinets — a task that, now that I am 5′7″ rather than my original 5′10″, and disabled, required stretching to painful limits and handling the bowls with great care. But I did it, without breaking any bowls or parts of my body. The new bowls are nothing like the old ones in style, but they’re charming in their own way, plus easy to use.
That left drinking vessels: glasses, mugs, and cups. These are all regrettably heavy, but the cups and mugs have handles; the glasses were carefully selected to have flared rims; ordinary straight-sided glasses are hell for me to use, since I have to grasp and hold them using thumb and forefinger, whose muscles barely work for me, and then painfully, but a lip gives me some support.
I knew ahead of time that plastic glasses, including the wheat straw composites, are almost all straight-sided. Nobody does flared rims, apparently, but there are companies that make fairly tall glasses with handles — one that offers good-looking 17-oz. glasses with handles, but they wouldn’t arrive until mid-July; they weren’t so damn wonderful that I’d wait six weeks for delivery, so I crossed them off my shopping list. Went for 8 13.5-oz mugs with handles (I use mugs for lots of things, including as small urinal-substitutes — I need to have urinals to hand all over the place, and there’s no reason they all have to look like medical equipment), and 4 15-oz. cups with handles, which I hope can serve in place of tall glasses.
Everything arrives tomorrow or Friday. I see more cardboard break-down in my future. Meanwhile, I’m washing glasses, cups, and mugs, and putting them back on the shelves they came from. Hard work for me, but there’s something especially satisfying about washing glassware in hot soapy water, rinsing it, and then drying it with a dishcloth so that it gleams. Maybe I was a dishwasher in a diner in a previous life.
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