My Kingdom for a...Corkscrew!

One of the difficult things about housesitting is you never know where anything is. In the kitchen, for instance. Like a corkscrew, for example. I mean, just as an illustration of sorts.

Imagine you are planning a nice quiet evening at home. You are going to watch a movie and have a glass of, say, Black Opal shiraz from Australia, which you'd bought at (naturally) Trader Joe's, with this very sort of evening in mind. A lovely idea, no? I thought so too.

Then last night I began looking for the corkscrew.

Now, I am not exactly what you'd call renowned at finding things. (I am what you'd call notorious for losing them, but that's another story--lots of other stories, actually.) But in this case I absolutely ransacked every imaginable drawer and cupboard and nook and cranny looking for that corkscrew, which I knew must exist because my friends had bottles of wine on the kitchen counter, and one of them was even open, proving the existence of the corkscrew! But where!! I couldn't have found it if my life depended on it, and to be honest, I am a person of such one-track mindedness that it began to seem like, in fact, my life did depend on it.

I looked everywhere, I really did. I even looked inside the coffee container, and while it isn't particularly surprising that I didn't find it there, I really did expect it to turn up somewhere. I mean, it had to be here! But after about a half hour of looking, I had to admit defeat (though not very graciously).

I considered trying to open the bottle with my teeth, but it seemed unlikely. Someone suggested breaking the neck of the bottle, but that sounded dangerous. Another suggestion involved somehow pressing the cork down into the bottle, but I didn't think I had the strength for that, at least not without breaking the cork into little pieces, and if I have a pet peeve (if! I just made myself laugh out loud), it's little pieces of cork floating around in my glass of wine. Yuck.

So in the end I was resigned to drinking from my friends' open bottle of some sort of red wine that turned my lips and teeth purple. Mmmmm!

But the experience did make me think. I mean, a corkscrew is absolutely irreplaceable among kitchen implements, for its purpose. If you don't have a corkscrew, you really have a problem. Other things you can improvise--you know, like use a knife if you can't find a bottle opener, or something like that. But no corkscrew! Oh, then you're...well, screwed. Ha.

Another friend suggested I get one of those little corkscrews you attach to your keychain. I think I will. "Hi, my name is grackyfrogg, and while I'm not an alcoholic, I like wine so much that I carry around this little corkscrew everywhere I go because I become an obsessively raging monster when I badly want a glass of wine and can't find a corkscrew. Not that it happens often or anything! Because it doesn't! I'm not an alcoholic, remember! I just like to know I have a corkscrew when I need it, ok!"

Hmmm.