housework and such Archives | Page 2 of 2
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Thursday, May 27, 2004
lazy me
Google hits in the "I don't think I really want to know" category: "pictures of 0utie belly butt0ns" (I get this one ALL THE TIME) and "whack 'i cried'". (note: almost all the google hits I get, especially the strange ones, are during the night.)
And with that said there's really nothing else today except that I am so amazingly lazy that sometimes I surprise even myself. I haven't even made my bed today. I'll walk into my room to get something and think, hmm, I should make that, and rather than spend the, what, two minutes involved, I just walk out again. Ditto with the laundry piled in baskets and the hairbrush that's been lying on the floor right next to my computer desk since last night. Maybe it's a disease. We took this week off school for sanity reasons (mine), since we have had NO down time in a long time and our weekends and evenings are pretty much insanely packed with stuff from two weekends ago until, I dunno, 2014. Approximately. And it's as if having a school vacation is throwing me back into my own school days, when vacation meant Doing Only Those Things I Expressly Wanted To Do Or Which Were Required To Sustain Life. Like, eat, breathe, read, talk on the phone, and go for walks. Pretty much it. If I'd had Internet access then... I shudder to think.
Friday, May 21, 2004
pop quiz
I should be in bed now. I really should. I've been busting my butt cleaning all day, and dealing with the stress of getting the kids to clean, and I'm totally exhausted. But here is a little pop quiz before I crash. The subject is "What Will Rachel Learn From Her Experiences Today?"
- If I keep my house clean all the time, it won't be so stressful when I'm going to have guests.
- Hospitality sucks and should be left to people who don't have two of their own personal Tasmanian devils to mess up the house.
- Children should have no toys and only two sets of clothing (one to wear and one to wash), and should sleep in Navy-style bunks in the hall closet, because then cleaning their rooms would be really easy.
*that is so NOT a politically-correct book. Animals bothering us? Kill 'em. Animals with usable skins? Kill 'em. Animals good to eat? Kill 'em. Animals interesting to study? Kill a few. Animal/plant/area that could be useful? Conquer its wildness with our wits and abilities. Really it's all very refreshing. --------
Friday, April 16, 2004
anything's better than cleaning out the fridge
I am procrastinating. (so what else is new?) Soon I will have to actually open the containers I've just pulled out of the refrigerator, and pour the contents into a bucket and empty it into the compost. But I need to gather my courage about me first. (or just wait and hope that T will do it for me... hem...). At least we finally have a microscope -- the budget didn't expand to fit a new one after all, all those months ago (hmm! was that the last time I cleaned out the fridge? couldn't be...), but we did find a serviceable one at a yard sale for A DOLLAR (high five for my bargain-hunting abilities, right?) and we've been wasting a lot of time today looking at everything from aquarium water (lots of swimmy things) to potato scrapings (lots of bulbous, teardrop-shaped cells) under it. So I'll have to gather some samples from the refrigerator scraps too. Hey, wow, maybe this will be a viable excuse for me not to clean it out so often -- as if, what, every two months is often? -- it's scientific research. Homeschoolers can get away with anything. ;-)
Oh my goodness, I think that's a record even for me. FOUR parenthetical statements in one sentence. I think I need to cut back; that's got to be bad for my health.
Among the horror-movie props that were in the refrigerator, I found four tiny cartons of grape juice, which had been there long enough that the sides were bulging out a little. We get these from the neighbor ladies, who get them from Meals On Wheels. They started giving my kids their juice months ago, I think because they are diabetic but I'm not sure. Anyway, by the time we discovered that none of us likes grape juice, they were already in the habit of giving them to us, and pretty soon we reached the point where we couldn't tell them we didn't like it without hurting their feelings. So now the whole family is complicit in this little white lie, wherein we thank the elderly ladies for the juice and then bring it home and either stow it in the refrigerator until it swells, or just pour it directly down the sink. I don't see as much gray area in life as a lot of people do, but lying to old ladies to spare their feelings is definitely a small area of haze on my otherwise pretty-much-black-and-white moral code.
We are on the lookout for a pair of kittens. Well, I am, and the kids are, but I don't think we've fully convinced T yet. Which I suppose is just as well, since now that we want kitties, nobody is giving any away. T insists on being sensible and saying that we should wait until after our vacation this summer, because the poor beasties would be left here alone for two weeks with only the occasional house-sitting visit to cheer them. Darn man, has to be reasonable when I get all excited and illogical about something. ;-) I have been Pet-Free By Choice for so long that I feel like a bit of a traitor to the cause, caving in like this, but the kids have been seeming very interested in having something furry to pet -- fish aren't terribly cuddly, after all -- and a dog is out of the question right now. And I can just see them on their respective therapists' couches in thirty-odd years talking about us: KID: "No, we never, ever had a pet growing up. Mom and Dad just wouldn't let us. We couldn't afford it. We didn't have space. Too much trouble." THERAPIST: "INteresting. And how did that make you feel?"
Thursday, February 12, 2004
notes from Operation Sanitary Conditions
A few things I noted in my Restore My Home To Sanity organizational/cleaning buzz today:
1. If I ever smelled a misty breeze that smelled like Formula 409's "Misty Breeze" scent I would assume a terrorist attack had just occurred in my vicinity. What were they THINKING? It doesn't even smell bad in an ammoniac reeks-but-clean sort of way. It just reeks.
2. Oven cleaner + torn cuticle = pain so bad it makes me want to puke. They mean it with that "long gloves" thing.
3. Once you start a thorough cleaning job it's hard to stop. No, this is not a motivational doesn't-it-feel-good-to-get-it-done moment. It's just that, when one area's clean, it makes everything else look much, much worse. HOW did I live like this? There is -- there is CRUD under my stove! And between my stove and the counter! I will be up for the next three days going from one disaster to the next, I think.
Monday, January 19, 2004
paintball and procrastination
My New Experience For The Month was playing paintball on Saturday. I've only been watching/hearing about/spending money on my husband's paintball habit (well, it's money HE earns; I don't complain) since 1994; totally reasonable that it would be ten years before I joined him, right? It was... interesting. (which means, I sucked, but perhaps not as badly as I thought I would). As I kept repeating in the days leading up to Saturday (starting about Tuesday when T simply announced that It Was Time and that I would be trying paintball that weekend, no excuses), I do not sneak well. I am, well, like a galumphing ox or something -- I'm bulky enough that I can just dominate anything in my path (except for the corner posts on beds; they always win in their frequent confrontations with my thighs), so sneaking has never been an issue. The result of this lack of skill was that in the first FOUR of the six games played on Saturday, I did not fire a single shot before I got hit and went out of the game. Pathetic, no? By the fourth game I was sneaking a bit better, and even making and executing some bare-bones strategic plans (about as skilled as those I make and execute while playing chess, which is to say, a maximum of two turns ahead, and not very subtle), but stupid things kept getting me out before I shot at anyone. Even in the last two games, I never did take anyone out or capture the flag or otherwise cover myself in glory, but I did have a decent time. The area where we played is basically a hanging valley on the side of a steep hill, and I did enough hill-walking to make my legs very, very angry with me the next day. I admitted to T that I was glad he'd convinced (coerced!) me to do it, which of course meant that today he had to go buy me a paintball gun. Hmm. At least it's a used one.
And today, aside from a shopping trip to the valley, I filed papers. I hate filing, I really really do. This is how badly I hate it: Anytime I encounter a piece of paper which should be filed away (credit card or bank statements, phone bills, doctor bills, insurance paperwork, stuff like that) I toss it into a drawer in our filing cabinet. When the heap of paper is so enormous that the drawer can't shut properly, I file the papers neatly and in order in their proper folders in the other drawers of the cabinet. As I work down through the stack, it's like an archaeological dig: I'll encounter stuff from this month, then last month, and so on, until at the bottom I finally find out how long it's been since my last filing-drudgery day (in this case, it was apparently sometime in October 2002). And always as I'm going to all this work, I wonder, what are the possibilities that I will EVER need, oh, say, more than 2% of this paperwork? But you know if I threw any of it out, I'd find out very quickly just exactly how necessary it was to keep it all, in some very unpleasant way.
And now there's school stuff added into the mix. I use the same tried-and-true system with completed schoolwork as I do with other filing: pile it in a heap. A big, big heap, full of paragraphs written with many backward letters on newsprint paper with absurdly wide lines, and rough drafts of the Star Wars Episode VII script, and pages of addition facts and subtraction facts and multiplication facts, and preschool papers where the groups with more are circled and the groups with less are crossed out, and artwork of varying degrees of skill but universally unparallelled adorableness, and all manner of other early elementary educational stuff. I have the best intentions of filing this away consecutively by student, subject, and date, but the best I usually end up with is four folders for each school year: [LT] Art, [LT] Academic, [C] Art, and [C] Academic. And generally, there is, again, one big filing day per semester or so. blecch. Procrastination, thy name is Rachel.
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Sunday, January 04, 2004
the Christmas stuff HAS to come down tonight
Tonight has to be the night. This is the longest we've ever left the Christmas tree up. And it's not sentimentality that has it still up, it's just pure laziness. Well, on my part. T always claims that he wants me to do it while he's gone because it's "too sad" for him, but I always suspect that he's slyly trying to get out of helping undecorate. Well, it's January 4th, Christmas has been over for almost two weeks; sadness shouldn't be a problem anymore, sweetie. So tonight's the night. While we're at it I'll clean the living room very thoroughly and see if I can find our DVD remote control. I never realized how much I depend on it till we were watching "We Were Soldiers" last night and I wanted SO BADLY to turn on the subtitles during the whispering parts, and I couldn't (I fully need Miracle Ear. I swear. I used to insist, in the manner of crotchety old men, that it wasn't my hearing, that people just mumbled, but I have finally realized that it's me. If there's any background noise people have to enunciate carefully or I have to ask them to repeat. Yeah, I'm only 29, why do you ask?).
I think, like mom-on-roof, I should take a picture of what's under my couch, to make all of you laugh, before I clean it out. But wait, no, I don't think I could stand that kind of humiliation. And I need to clean out under the cushions as well. Children + couch + lazy mom = really horrifying stuff under the couch cushions. (HOW long has it been since we had Froot Loops in the house??)
I am going to helpfully get out the boxes for the decorations while T is still gone getting dinner. Aren't I a good wife? :-D
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Wednesday, November 26, 2003
keeping the panic at bay
I am in hearty denial about the sheer magnitude of the task that is before me in the next two days. Any time I allow a thought of Thanksgiving dinner, the preparation leading up to it, and the denouement of dirty dishes, cranky children, and leavetakings etc. to creep in around the edges of my mind, I feel the beginning of a wave-edge of sheer panic which prompts me to shut the door on that thought right quick before I'm enveloped by it and have a quick nervous breakdown.
I will instead focus on the positive:
- as soon as dinner's over the Christmas lights are getting turned on, assuming the weather's good and the men put them up as planned while the women work on dinner (please, PLEASE, God, no broken bones. Oh please. Thanksgiving Day was not good to us last year in this regard. T will not be playing in any football games, so that's helpful, but climbing around on the roof... just please, let this be the first Christmas since 1997 when he's uninjured and well. I'm begging here.)
- We'll listen to Christmas music while we clean up.
- We'll put the Christmas tree up on Friday.
- We finally bought icicle lights, now that garland lights are all the rage instead. (always a few steps behind the times, that's us).
hmm, noticing a theme... that was supposed to be good stuff about Thanksgiving. Must still be blocking that day out of fear of the aforementioned wave of panic.
Seriously, though, we will have a good time, I'm sure. Even though the whole family-reunion aspect of Thanksgiving is kind of lost on us because, hello, every single person who will be there is at the same church every Sunday morning, not to mention at my parents' house on an average of probably once a month for anything from a birthday party to an impromptu Sunday afternoon barbecue. And hopefully we'll be able to keep our minds on actually being thankful -- like, for instance, that nobody has any broken bones this year. (please God PLEASE).
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pausing for breath
I'm going to sit down and breathe for just a few minutes. I have a pumpkin pie in the oven, and a crust ready and waiting for the pecan pie that will go in after that. For something as sinfully delicious and calorie-laden as it is, pecan pie is alarmingly easy to make. Must forget, must forget.
You know what part of pie-baking I hate the very most? That whole putting-foil-around-the-edge bit. They make it sound so easy, but dang, you've just spent ten minutes making the crust and fluting the edge and then you're trying to wrestle aluminum foil onto it in such a way that it a) doesn't cover the middle of the pie b) doesn't touch the filling of the pie (cause there's nothing like having the foil baked into the pie, oh yummy yummy) c) doesn't squish the neatly fluted edge and d) covers the edge completely so that you don't end up with blackened fluted crust. If you think that's easy and you've never tried it, you're wrong. And if you HAVE tried it and you think it's easy, tell me where you're located and I'll make a big messy raspberry in your direction (but not over my pies, no sirree). C has been "helping" me with the pies. This consists of cracking one egg and playing with the leftover piecrust dough à la playdough.
Things are mostly ready for tomorrow. I have to scour the bathroom a bit, and sweep/mop the kitchen floor, and sweep the rest of the floors, and empty the dishwasher to get it ready for a massive assault tomorrow. The roaster oven is sitting on the counter waiting (must remember not to use the microwave while it's on tomorrow; it throws the breaker in the little power strip it's plugged into), the turkey had darn well better be entirely thawed or I am going to have some SERIOUS issues, my cupboards are crammed with ingredients, and I have three kinds of ice cream (yeah, this weekend is just going to be fantabulous for my diet) in the freezer to have with the cherry Costco pie (hello Emily! You know, the best Costco pies are the pecan ones. I'd have bought one yesterday if I hadn't already bought pecans to make my own. mmm mmm good, and totally freaking enormous). I am as ready as can be expected for this point in time, but I do foresee a bit of a late night with the last-minute cleaning I have to do. At least the turkey doesn't need my attention till 9:30 a.m.
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Monday, November 24, 2003
Calgon, take me away!
OK, so it wasn't precisely Calgon, it was melon-scented kids' bubble bath (thank you C). But it was a nice, dim, hot candlelit bath, and I feel so-o-o-o much better. mmm. All melty and relaxed and tired.
Also (you are all strictly forbidden to cast this up to me at any time in the future, understand?), there is definitely something therapeutic about getting a job done. The kids' rooms are clean, I have a bunch of laundry folded and some put away, and, while it's not exactly ready for Thanksgiving dinner, the house is probably at a level where I wouldn't be ashamed if someone dropped by. Of course this means that nobody WILL drop by, they'll wait until there are dishes stacked on the counters and last night's cooking pots on the stove and a veritable explosion of toys, laundry, papers, and shoes all over the living room, and then they'll drop by. Especially my in-laws. Ack. Anyway. It feels better and clearer to have that done. But the bath was definitely the kicker, the catalyst between "it will take me twenty minutes to fall asleep and I'll wake up five or eight times in the night and in the morning my jaw will be sore from grinding my teeth" and "I will be asleep like a warm limp rag fewer than eleven seconds after I achieve a horizontal state." Speaking of which....
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Tuesday, November 11, 2003
housecleaning and related microscope thoughts
I have been feeling really un-diary-ish for the past couple of days. My keys never turned up and we're buying new ones. I went on a cleaning fest yesterday (yes, my house is so bad that realizing that people are coming over for Thanksgiving in two weeks was enough to send me into a cleaning panic) -- the kids and I cleaned their rooms and washed windows and windowsills and cleaned off the MOUNTAIN of stuff on our counter -- mostly T's stuff. Today I have a lot more cleaning ahead of me. It just never ends.
On a somewhat-related note, did you know that if you make espresso and then forget to take the grounds out and leave them in the machine for, oh, about a month or two (honestly, I do not even remember the last time I made espresso, and they'd been there since then), you get a lot of very interesting-looking powdery black mold in and on your little espresso grounds filter thing? It made me wish I had a microscope, honestly; we are finally getting one "for school" (and for my curious mind which always wants to see things magnified; even the torn edge of masking tape looks very interesting under a microscope, did you know that? me, a nerd?) but it hasn't arrived yet, and the interesting mold sample is already multiplying merrily on its way to the local wastewater treatment facility. Oh well, when you clean out your refrigerator as infrequently as I do you know you'll come across more mold eventually. ;-)
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