Yes, I have issues.

After being in my apartment for seven weeks now, I decided I to see what this big beige box in my kitchen was for. I've been using it as a candle holder and propping both Christmas cards I've received on it (thanks Kara & Kerry!). The big beige box I'm referring to looks something like this

but it's beige, and newer, and not found on a webserver down under.

Yes, I'll freely admit to being absolutely helpless and hopeless in the kitchen. I make great instant oatmeal, toast, and am the master of scrambled eggs and omelets in a microwave.

That's about as far as it goes.

Oh, and I'm make a mean bowl of cereal, too. And yeah, I took a home-ec cooking class in 8th grade. Our greatest accomplishment was making lasagna soup ... we forgot to put a noodle on the bottom ... if you've ever done that, you soon realize what a vital piece of the pasta puzzle that bottom noodle is.

So other than taking out the trash and doing the dishes, microwave omelets and other breakfast foods are about the extent of my kitchen wizardry.

So I pull out the frying pan, pull out the sauce pan, pull out a couple of other things I wanna use, and get the food out I'm trying to heat up. For the record: Ham and pirogies ... just had a taste for both of them. So I put the water in the pan, turned on the burner and figured I'll give this whole cooking in something other than the microwave thing a try. So I waited for the water to boil to put the pirogies in.

Yes, I know, a watched pot never boils.

But so does an unheated one.

Yeah, after about 15 minutes of glancing over at the pan from the living room and wondering why it's not boiling yet, I finally get up and walk over to the stove. Hmmm, burner's not hot (electric stove). Maybe it's not working.

So I try another. No heat.

And another. No heat.

Fourth and final attempt ... no heat.

Hmmmm.

Turns out the damn thing wasn't plugged in.

And it only took me seven weeks to figure that out.

Yeah ... perhaps rather than Statistics and Ethics next quarter, I should look into something practical ... like Cooking for Morons.

For the record, I did take the Christmas cards off the stove before I started cooking ... and after I got the stove plugged in, the ham and pirogies were pretty tasty!