And they said it couldn't be done.

I have been cooking for myself and a few unfortunate others since 1970, the year I left home for university. That is, uh, let's see � 35 years. Yep, 35 years. And still the culinary nightmares continue.

It's not so much that I can't cook, it's that I don't particularly enjoy cooking. Most of the time I'm cooking I'm chafing, thinking about other things I could be doing. Put a recipe in front of me that says, "Sweat onions for 30 minutes" and all I can think is, "Well, there's 30 minutes of my life I'm not getting back."

Yet, I will dump compost, soil, bone meal and blood meal into a wheelbarrow and joyously spend 30 minutes mixing them all together to create the perfect potting mix. I know. In theory this is as tedious as sweating onions. But for me the first is an obligation, the second pure fun. This makes no sense at all.

My latest culinary feat?

I burned soup.

Wait. Let me say that again. I. Burned. Soup. You might think that it would be nigh on impossible to burn a liquid substance such as soup but you would be so very, very wrong.

One of my neighbours is home from the hospital after an operation and I decided that I would make her a big pot o' soup. I think we can all agree that nothing says, "That organ they yanked out? I'm certain it was superfluous" quite like a pot o' home made soup.

I had several containers of Tom Yum soup stock ready to go in the freezer so I decided to haul them out and add some shrimp, scallops, tomato bits, mushrooms, pineapple bits, chopped scallions, chopped fresh coriander and some noodles.

It was the darned noodles that did me in.

The spousal unit and I have been nittering for years about his packrat tendencies. As I age, I find I want to be less and less encumbered by stuff. Meanwhile, I am married to a man who finds great joy in accumulating stuff. Aye, carumba.

Marriage is negotiation. I know that living in Shaker style austerity would be great for me but kill him. I have to make room for some pack ratage. But he also realizes that we are being pushed out of our tiny home by his stuff. He finally agreed this weekend that we could go through our 5,472 bookcases and do a little purging, take down a bookcase. Or two. Or three. We have some of his original university textbooks, for crying out loud.

Knowing his reluctance to part with anything, we agreed that I would go through the bookcases first and make piles of books I felt could go. He was free to re-comb the bookcases for additional discards and to also go through my cull piles to rescue anything he felt he simply could not live without.

I was in the middle of making the soup when he called me upstairs to bicker negotiate about some of the books I had chosen to purge. The discussion was long and involved and didn't end until he looked at me and said, "I smell something burning."

Uh oh.

I raced downstairs and the pot o' soup was billowing smoke. Seriously. Billowing. The noodles I had tossed in had soaked up most of the Tom Yum broth and then proceeded to meld with the bottom of the pan. I pulled it off the hot burner, used a wooden spoon to scrape aside the ever so thin layer of unburned soup on top and stared glumly at the pot bottom. The bottom which was coated with an impressive layer of Tom Yum charcoal.

Uh oh.

Despite the argument full and frank discussion with the spousal unit, and the sight of a very expensive stainless steel pot teetering on destruction, I still had a few tiny shreds of composure. Then our smoke alarm started to wail, which, of course, got on my very last nerve and pretty much consumed my few tiny shreds of composure.

Cue the spousal unit to enter the kitchen, stage left. He looked intently at the billowing pot and I realized that it was his pot, a soup pot he'd bought at great expense during our university days. Ah, yes, it wasn't enough that I had to put him through the distress of shedding stuff. No, it seemed what I also had to do was hurt one of his beloveds.

That is another side of the spousal unit. Not only does he accumulate stuff, he is very particular as to how his stuff is treated. You should watch him hand sharpen a chisel, knife or hand plane sometime�he has a range of Japanese whetstones that is truly impressive. The man takes care of things.

I braced myself for a nuclear smackdown. After all, we'd just been arguing about the books, the smoke detector was wailing (a great reminder that my absent-mindedness might have led to a fire) and there was his beloved soup pot well on the way to destruction.

"You burned soup," he said. And then he started to laugh. He laughed. My own relief made me laugh, too. Yep, two middle-aged people looking at a smoking soup pot, with a smoke alarm wailing, laughing their heads off.

After the pot cooled down he helped me scrape most of the Tom Yum charcoal off the bottom and after three soakings in vinegar, I managed to scour the rest off by hand. The pot will live to face another burning. Whew.

Sunday night we took 12 big boxes of books down to his mom's attic. We'll let family members go through them to take what they want and then sell the rest next year at our little community's summer garage sale. I can't begin to tell you how much less encumbered I feel just watching those books go out the door.

Hmmmm, wonder if I can persuade him to take a run through some of our cupboards?

--Marn

Mileage on the Marnometer: 1357.44 miles. Done. Now I can log me some of them there Road Runners, eh?

Goal for 2005: 1,250 miles - 2000 kilometers