(What is the game of 'seven words'? See this entry for explanations, or to contribute potential words.)

I swung right, heading south, marveling at the darkness as the fog gobbled the neighborhood in front of me. The cars slid past, pointing their trumpet bells of light up and out, lighting little except the raindrops splattering their windshields.

A particularly strong storm front had chosen to spend the day in Alabama, filling ditches and flooding roads with more water than we could possibly find a use for. The sensible were inside, warm and dry, eating their dinners with vacuous TV stares. Those of us who were on our severalth day of life without a working dishwasher didn't exactly have much choice in the matter. In the kitchen, the cups and bowls had allied with the silverware and created a clanking, rattling army. Having staged a coup in the kitchen, they were growing restless for more space for their civilization, and had begun to cast longing looks at the fertile horizontal stretches of the living room.

The couch and loveseat tittered nervously about the possibility of a hostile takeover.

Given the option of washing the dishes or driving out in heavy rain and fog to buy groceries, I chose the only sensible option: dousing myself in rainwater on the way inside Publix. Sashimi for me, chicken tenders for Jeff, with a sneaked-in side item of rice pudding. Items, like cereal, that required few washable items and no pots and pans (which were all mostly dirty).

It hadn't been planned this way, of course, but the very nature of accidents means that you are unprepared for them. We'd only been on the East Coast for a week, but when we returned, we did very little cooking. Thus, the dishwasher, ignored and in a state of high dudgeon, chose to revolt. When, several days after we arrived home, I was ready to run the first load of dishes, it saw its chance to have its revenge.

Smart, it was; it knew that Jeff was out of town that night on a business trip. Realizing that the only thing between it and total house domination was one mechanically-uninclined domesticat, it seized its chance and went on a work stoppage.

I stopped the dishwasher, shrugged the incident off, and waited for the mechanically-inclined one to return home the next night. I turned on the rebellious machine and said, "Listen."

We stood there for a few moments. Nothing happened. I began to doubt myself and the noises I'd heard it make the night before. Right as I was about to say, "Well, maybe I imagined it - " it began again - the low growl of a motor refusing to work.

"Hrm. It'll have to wait until the weekend, until I've got time to pull it out and take a look at it."

Friday night, we called a truce with the dirty dishes; our don't-ask-don't-tell Valentine's night dinner policy was to ignore the growing kitchen dish hegemony while having [un-]frozen [and subsequently baked] pizza.

We were Valentine's Day pragmatists; we preferred to leave the hysterics of wartime love in the movies, where it belonged. We ate, determinedly oblivious to the brewing unrest in the kitchen. We stayed resolutely neutral on Saturday, choosing the neutrality of supermarket food over the thought of entering into open conflict with the growing kitchen hegemony.

On Sunday morning I stumbled into the kitchen, longing for nothing more than a bowl of oatmeal, only to realize that the last remaining clean bowls were being held hostage by the now-organized kitchen guerrilla army. They had used the cover of the Saturday night fog to form not just a government, but a full-fledged bureaucracy.

I was presented with a three-inch stack of paperwork to fill out before I could obtain a clean bowl.

I waited and planned, staging my counterattack while Jeff was in the throes of his Sunday afternoon nap. I plunged dishes - governments, bureaucracy, bureaucrats, protesters, and all - into the hottest, soapiest water I could stand...and began to scrub.

I am Amy, destroyer of worlds.

Today's word was prestidigitation (a show of skill or deceitful cleverness), suggested by Jody [the great Evil Oompa] and chosen by Noah Grey. Check in tomorrow for tomorrow's verbal exercise. Apologies for the delay in this entry, but I needed to take a few days to work on code things.