I’m feeling all Domestic POWERHOUSE today. Oh yeah, I’ve gone beyond DIVA. In the past 24 hours, I have used not one, not two, but THREE small appliances in my kitchen; the crock pot is currently working on a soup for dinner, I made myself a smoothie with my blender, and I made, uh, toast in my toaster last night. I don’t use a single one of those appliances every day so today I’m all “WATCH YOUR BACK, MARTHA STEWART.”

The soup simmering in the crock pot is a variation on this chicken tortilla soup, a go-to meal when I don’t know what else to make. If you click through you’ll note that the recipe calls for 2 cloves of minced garlic. Normally, I’d just use a couple small spoonfuls of the minced garlic you can buy in a jar, but this time? I actually minced my own garlic, from real, whole cloves of garlic, using my own little knife and cutting board. However. If you mince your own garlic at home? It doesn’t matter how good it smells as you cut it, DON’T PUT IT IN YOUR MOUTH. You’ll burn a hole right through your tongue, I swear. (Martha didn’t tell you THAT, did she?)

So after I got the soup simmering away, I threw some stuff into my blender: six or seven ice cubes, half a banana, a cup of plain nonfat yogurt, about 3/4 cup of fresh blueberries, 1/4 tsp vanilla extract, a wee drizzle of honey, and a splash of milk. I think next time I’ll save the banana to mix with strawberries, but overall I feel like I did something good for myself.

Last night I got the munchies and went through the kitchen cabinets and the refrigerator looking for a snack. I didn’t find anything interesting and after pouring myself a glass of lemonade I stood in front of the wall next to the refrigerator and started idly picking at an edge of wallpaper that was sticking out. Before I knew it, I had all the wallpaper in the kitchen down - well, the TOP LAYER of it anyway. When we moved in, the kitchen looked like this:

We knew before we decided to buy the house that the neutral-ish looking wallpaper there on the walls was really just a quick cover-up for a floral wallpaper beneath it. The photos in the real estate listing on the internet showed the floral wallpaper, and when we looked at the house we could see some edges of the neutral wallpaper lifting away. Whoever put that paper up there took a roll of wallpaper, tore it into pieces, and randomly glued them this way and that to cover the flowery stuff. They did the same thing in other rooms: it’s covering more flowery wallpaper in the downstairs bathroom, and it’s covering a yellowy wallpaper with ducks on it in what we’re using as a library right now.

So anyway, I took down the neutral wallpaper. It was really easy, I think they used the same adhesive you’d find on a post-it. And my kitchen, unfortunately, now looks like this:

So then I made toast in the toaster to celebrate, but now I have to go to Lowe’s to find something to help remove this flowery crap. The End.