My Questionable Cleaning Style

Kitchen Horror!

My lovely Motel 6 bedroom

I have made a hideous mess of my kitchen while elevating our bedroom to "cleanest ever" status.  
If you are asking yourself what a cake dish and two punch bowls were doing in the bedroom in the first place, you don't know me well.

Last week four of my all-time favorite friends came to visit and the first couple arrived six hours before I expected them.  The sheets were in the dryer and I was at the tail-end of my weekly kombucha bottling session so the kitchen was a wreck, but other than that things weren't as gruesome as they could have been. These were "self-cleaning" guests and after a week of fun - including Indian cooking lessons - they departed, leaving the house cleaner than they found it.  I must mention that the guys prepared all the meals and cleaned up afterward too. I swear, I could soooo love communal living!

Learning in Santhoshi's Kitchen.  Yum.

Guess which guest chef is left-handed?

Maybe depression at their departure inspired the current cleaning binge?

Yesterday I ripped everything out of all the closets, cabinets and drawers of the master bath and bedroom and took everything that didn't belong to the kitchen. It took all day but I knew Jerry was going to work late so I had extra time to get everything straightened back up.  What I forgot to factor in was that Kate was coming over.

"Oh my God, what happened here?" was her entry line.  Things only deteriorated from there.  Before the evening was over, I had emptied drawers and shelves in the kitchen too.  When Jerry got home, he didn't even comment.  He's used to these upheavals and knows that they usually abate on the third day.  It also helped that he could see that the boudoir was Holiday Inn clean.  

Vanilla in its infancy

Today I got up to face the explosion in the kitchen and ended up arranging my spices which led directly to infusing vodka with vanilla beans.  When I was done with that, I whipped up a batch of my homemade deodorant and made laundry soap - all in a kitchen that would have caused social services to remove my child from the home had they had occasion to visit.   (She's twenty-six.  I wonder where they would place her?)  Then, instead of picking it all up, I decided to write this blog.

I am currently taking an online course called:  Focus and Concentration.  I wonder if they have a money-back guarantee?  

www.StillSwimmingUpstream.com

Focus, Focus!

My friend the "Frau of Focus" called me, the "Disorganized Ditz," on Sunday afternoon, just to catch up on family news.  During the course of the conversation, it came out that she has not only decided what she is going to make for Thanksgiving, but she has also written menus for the entire weekend and has started assembling ingredients for various dishes in her butler's pantry.

Next she casually lets slip that she has already set the table for Thanksgiving.  I did mention that this was Sunday, right?

It will come as no surprise that she has also started decorating her house for Christmas.

My world is a little more casual than hers.  I have a vague idea about what we will be eating on Thursday and after that things get a little more nebulous.  Pretty much anybody who wanders in and expects to eat at my house this weekend will be holding a paper plate, of that I am certain.  

If this were a contest, I would have conceded years ago but there's one tiny area where we might be able to shine this year.  My friend lives up north and it's been snowy there lately so she probably hasn't gotten her exterior lighting up yet.  Weeks ago, Jerry put up itsy bitsy white twinkle lights on our deck and under our patio umbrella.  I'm planning on keeping them up all year but to assuage my ego, just for today I'm calling them Christmas lights.

I'm not gonna say that I envy The Frau's organizational skills (although I do).  Instead, I'm just gonna say "Happy Valentine's Day, Renée!"

www.StillSwimmingUpstream.com

  

Deep Thoughts

This evening, Jerry had a thought that he felt was profound, so he repeated it to me two or three times.  He said he thinks I need to hear something at least twice and sometimes the third time's the charm.  I feel that this need to repeat himself is borne of the fact that he himself doesn't listen to anything I say until at least the third go-round.

Would you buy a used car from
this man?

Quote from Jerry Zimmerman:


"All sorts of people have all sorts of opinions about all sorts of things."


Thank-you very much dear Jerry for this insight.  Perhaps I ought to wage a write-in campaign for you for President this fall.  You're sounding more and more like a politician every day.

"How can people take
me seriously when I'm
wearing a clown hat?"

Meanwhile, I'm having trouble focusing on the magazine article I'm reading entitled, "Focus."

****H.t.N.N.E. *****

Focus

August is turning into September and the first cool breeze since I moved to the Cay in South Carolina is blowing. I opened all the windows to smell the fresh air and immediately I heard raucous birds calling to each other, crickets chirping, the buzzing waves of cicadas and the hum of some industrial strength mowing machine on the golf course which lies on the other side of our woods. It's amazing how loud it is inside my house! I have never had the pleasure of open windows here before because with the summer (that some say is the hottest they remember) came oppressive heat, humidity and air conditioning. As a rule, I am not crazy about air conditioning but rules are made to be broken. Even I can see its charm when summer heat is at its most brutal.

What a wonderful way to start the day! Open windows, gentle breezes, nature sounds. As I sat down to type, I heard some twigs snapping in the backyard. Maybe somebody is back there! I have a fertile imagination and so already I am mentally calling 9-1-1. About this time, I realized that I didn't know where my cell phone was which could impede my ability to make the aforementioned call, should I truly deem it necessary.

There's a lot to be said for land lines. One of their best features is that they are always in the same place and you know right where that place is. (Unless you buy a cordless model and then you'd have the same drama that I was facing.) We don't have a land line, so I was faced with the chore of finding my cell.

I went into the bedroom to search for my phone, realized that my bed wasn't made, grabbed a corner of the top sheet, yanked it halfway up the bed when I heard a "thunk" outside the window. I dropped what I was doing and looked out. There is a nut tree behind the house - I don't recognize what kind it is. The nuts look sort of like hickory only a little larger but they are not pecans. Anyway, nuts are dropping off the tree onto the deck below and making loud noises. Also there is a squirrel in the tree running up and down the trunk, probably looking to score a few of those nuts. That explains the noise. In thinking about the noise, I realized that I was supposed to be searching for my cell phone, so I turn around, left the bed unmade and started looking anew.

The first thing my eyes fell upon was some laundry, so I started picking that up. Then I remembered the cell phone and wandered off into the bathroom where I found more laundry, but no phone. Then I meandered into the guest bathroom to pick up the towel and put it with the other laundry.

I went to the basement bathroom, grabbed the towels and walked to the laundry room where I deposited all the laundry in the hamper. I then check out the new paint job in the lower level bedroom. I decided I really like the color we chose, felt satisfaction, basked in its glow, came back upstairs where I heard something outside again. I went back to the bedroom, realized I was hearing rain on the leaves, turned away from the window, saw the unmade bed, walked around to the other side, pulled the sheet up to the top, then remembered I was supposed to be looking for my cell phone. Next I went to the living room where I saw yesterday's paper on the sofa, so I gathered it up and took it to the recycling basket in the basement.

Back upstairs, I remembered I was searching for my cell phone, and I had been downstairs twice but neglected to check for it. I went downstairs for the third time and this time I actually looked around but saw no cell. Once more I came upstairs, looked in the bedroom yet again, still didn't find the phone but did notice that the bed wasn't made so I stopped and made it.

When I walked into the kitchen I saw my cell phone sitting directly behind the computer screen. I heaved a sigh of relief. I am no longer worried about a possible break-in, have found my phone and (added bonus) I have made the bed, taken the newspaper to be recycled and picked up the laundry. I settled in to type, put my fingers on the home row keys and realized that sometime during the massive search for my phone, I took my glasses off and don't know where I laid them down.

It is now noon.

Mystery solved

Dear Carol,

I thoroughly enjoyed the article you sent me from the Cincinnati Enquirer entitled "Ohio Mason's Labor of Love." "So Old-Fashioned they're Trendy," a history of Graeter's ice cream was on the opposite page and that was good reading, too. Oh, and the comics were on the back page so I read them as well. Across from the comics was the puzzle page - Sukoku, which I did until I got it right, then both the beginner's and advanced crossword puzzles and the cryptoquip. They were all fun!

It's eleven-thirty in the morning and I'm not dressed, the bed's not made and Jer's on his way home for a lunch that isn't ready, but the up side is that I finally figured out why my first-grade teacher never checked the "stays on-task while working independently" box on my report card. 

Mystery solved!

Love,
Chris