Before this gets underway, I have to point out that I shamelessly took this post’s feature image of the guy with the snazzy oven mitts from a blog called Rebecca Grace Quilting.
I hereby admit that I also shamelessly lifted a picture from that blog, of the author/accomplished seamstress, Rebecca Grace. Rebecca seems like a very friendly person if you ask me:
At this point you’re probably wondering, “Just what the heck kind of an opening paragraph is this, even?”
There are some side effects of being semi-retired while your spouse is still working. One is that you get to spend more time in the kitchen: unless of course, you’re a lazy, spoiled bonehead. If you’re semi-retired but NOT a lazy, spoiled bonehead then you probably have at least a passing familiarity with oven mitts.
I might be a semi-retired bonehead but in my defense, I’m an industrious, relatively unspoiled, semi-retired bonehead. Therefore I’m pretty familiar with oven mitts.
Quite frankly, the status of the oven mitts in our kitchen was suboptimal. The only matched pair of right- and left-handed mitts we had was getting old and needed a good bath. We had a lone right-handed mitt which was actually in fairly decent shape. The palm side was covered with quilted, silvery material, sort of like a spacesuit. I don’t know what happened to the matching left-handed mitt. I think it caught on fire-unlike a spacesuit.
Alert readers may already know that we have a Bernese Mountain Dog named Sarge. Sarge was officially diagnosed with ridiculousness by a trainer we had work with him a few times when he was four months old. The trainer was being unemotional and very businesslike with Sarge but at one point she just had to turn away from him, grinning a little sheepishly, to say, “This dog is ridiculous.”
Given the suboptimal status of the oven mitts and given the continued ridiculousness of Sarge, I decided to see if I could dredge up a set of Bernese Mountain Dog-themed oven mitts as a stocking-stuffer for my wife.
Turns out there is a relatively unexplored universe of Bernese Mountain Dog-themed oven mitts out there. Who knew?
After extensive searching on Amazon, I decided on this one:
There was no mention of a left-handed mitt in the listing. I puzzled over this and finally convinced myself that each mitt probably had a Bernese Mountain Dog image on BOTH sides so that it could be used on either hand. (This attribute is called ambidexterity in case you were wondering.)
So I ordered two mitts.
A few days later I get a call from a friend of mine who lives in Kansas City, Kansas. I’ll call him Bob. (Not his real name.) “Bob” tells me that he has sent me a Christmas gift and when it arrives I’m not supposed to look at it and should instead just fire it under the Christmas tree.
A couple of more days go by and a smallish package arrives. I don’t even look at it and just fire it under the tree as instructed.
Time goes on.
About three or so weeks later I am still devoid of Bernese Mountain Dog-themed oven mitts. I don’t have a Bernese Mountain Dog-Themed Backup Gift Replacement Plan (BMD-TBGRP) and Christmas is getting closer by the second, so I call Amazon. I tell the Customer Service rep that I still haven’t received my oven mitts and he says they were delivered to my front door about three weeks ago. I say that I never got them so maybe somebody scoffed them off the front porch. He says it’s no problem and they will ship me a new pair free of charge.
Bonus round!
A few more days pass and a package containing the replacement oven mitts arrives! I experience mixed emotions when I unwrap them though: happiness since I no longer need a BMD-TBGRP and dismay because the mitts show no sign of ambidexterity and now I don’t know what the hell I’m going to do with two right-handed oven mitts.
I briefly ponder taking them to a retired plastic surgeon-turned seamstress who has repaired many items for me in the past including a Barney costume, an analog computer and a “I do all my own stunts” T-shirt.
I’m probably lying about the analog computer. And possibly the Barney outfit. But not the T-shirt.
Anyway, at this point I’m thinking that maybe somehow my seamstress friend can excise the image off one of the mitts and graft it on to the obverse side to make a matched set but I decide it’s probably going to cost the equivalent of like, four oven mitts, plus she let her medical license lapse when she retired.
I give up.
I’m still wondering what the hell I’m going to do with these mitts a few more days later when the doorbell rings. This delivery dude hands me a package which feels pretty much like a book. I suddenly know, deep in my bones and without looking, that this package is from Kansas City. The full significance of what has just transpired hits me and I race over to the Christmas tree, seize the parcel that arrived weeks ago and peer at the label maniacally. It’s from Amazon and I know with utter certainty that it contains the original two, supposedly stolen, oven mitts.
Sarge just felt terrible about the whole business. Samantha G, a charming woman at Amazon, had a good chuckle when she heard the whole story and then graciously issued me Return Authorizations for all four mitts. My wife was relieved that I had jettisoned the mitts. They just didn’t do it for her. I hope Rebecca Grace has forgiven me for using the images from her blog but I don’t feel too bad about the situation since her hubby set fire to a pair of her oven mitts: https://www.rebeccagracequilting.com/2017/09/in-which-my-husband-sets-my-oven-mitts.html
As for me, I’m wondering why we can now use AI to discover millions of potentially game-changing, heretofore undreamed of, crystal structures but we can’t bring ourselves to make left-handed Bernese Mountain Dog oven mitts.
Maybe Rebecca Grace can make me a pair next Christmas.
The Department of Lateral Thinking 
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