Last night's excitement had to do with the garbage disposer.

We had had Chinese food one night a couple of nights ago--Sunday? Maybe. We hadn't eaten it all, and it was in the refrigerator, and I'd taken lunch from it a couple of times, and there was enough left last night to mix up the leftover lo mein and some fried rice and make my dinner out of it.

There was also a complete container of steamed white rice that we hadn't even touched. I'd kept it, thinking maybe I'd eat some of it later, but didn't. So it was pretty much a brick of rice by that time.

And as heavy as a brick, too, so I didn't really want to just put it into the trash. I thought I'd put it down the garbage disposer. It's just rice, what could it hurt?

I shoved it down there, and turned on the water, and turned on the disposer, and it ground around for awhile, and then the water stopped going down the drain, and it just swirled. I tried turning it on and off a couple of times, but it seemed evident that I was going to have to do something else. I couldn't really imagine what the deal was, since it was just rice, but I put my shoes on and found a sweatshirt and went out to the hardware store for Drano.

Some heavy duty SUPER MAX DRANO or something. I put the whole bottle down there, waited fifteen minutes, and nothing at all happened.

Bob wasn't home; I had really wanted to take care of it before he got home, so he didn't have to deal with it (and so I didn't have to admit I'd done something dumb. But who would have thought rice would cause such a problem?

Well, Bob did, apparently. He called and told me he was on his way home, and I told him my rice/garbage disposer saga, and he said--and it makes sense--that rice expands (of course), and the combination of all that rice and all that water had probably gummed up the intakes (outtakes?) on the disposer and it wasn't letting any water through.

So he came home, took a look, I bailed out the sink using a measuring cup and a turkey baster, and then we just left it alone for an hour or so, and he said maybe the Drano would dissolve the rice gluing things together, and we tried it later in the evening, and voila! everything was fine.

I imagine I'll remember that next time, or at least I hope I do.