Filthy Windows

This morning my husband and I were eating breakfast and the sun was streaming through the living room windows. Calvin said, “Wow, the windows are filthy.” I looked. “Yeah, they are.”

Then he laughed and said, “We haven’t cleaned those windows in years.”

I said, “You’re right, we haven’t. But I have.”

Cal disbelieving, “You stand on the porch and clean the massive windows?”

Me, disbelieving his disbelief, “On a fairly frequent basis.”

Cal, “When do you do it?”

Me, “When you’re not here, obviously.”

Now I’m pondering making a list of everything I do during the day. How the laundry gets magically cleaned, folded/ironed, and put away. How the walls get washed. How the baseboards stay magically white, etc. It reminds me of the “self-cleaning fireplace” Cal used to think we have.

Coolest thing. My husband is now getting the window cleaner and rags. J

Preparing for the Holidays with a Seventeen Year Old Son

Here’s how you know (as if you could possibly be confused) that you’re preparing for the holidays with a seventeen year old son as your helper.

1. He surfs the wood floors with the new chair pads that he’s supposed to be putting on the chairs.

2. He makes the cranberry sauce with fresh cranberries because when you cook them, they explode.

3. You ask him to refill all the bathroom soap containers and he says, “That seems pretty menial.” Then, you casually mention that toilets need to be cleaned.

4. He’s eager to help because he’s gotten off school a day early to help.

5. He asks if he can choose music to listen to while you clean. You cringe and nod. Until Silent Night fills the air. Maybe Christmas music before Thanksgiving isn’t so bad. 

Games Closet

Yesterday, I announced to Matt and Jake that it was Clean-Out-the –Entry-Closet Day. Since our house was built in 1940, it has only one storage area. A walk-in entry closet. So you can imagine what happens. And you’ll understand why the boys’ smiles became tight and their eyes narrowed. Suddenly, they thought of chores they needed to do.

But to no avail. To understand the boys' chagrin, you need to know that the closet currently houses two sewing machines, three sleeping bags, three sewing boxes, a stereo, winter coats, baby books, boxes of CDs, a tripod, three boxes of piano music and games. Out of all those things, it was the games that the boys didn’t want to deal with.

We are game people. It’s a nice cheap way to spend time with your kids that isn’t mind numbing. Of course, there are the inevitable squabbles. But when the kids were little and they showed “unsportsmanlike behavior” we made them pay the “idolatry tax.” They lost money, points, whatever was valuable in the game because they were making winning an idol. It worked really well until we had an adult visitor, who was a bit “intense” and the kids told said visitor that he had to pay the “idolatry tax.”

Back to the closet. So, uh, we have a lot of games. A lot of games. After I culled the horde yesterday and made a Goodwill pile for the games we don’t like, we had one hundred games. (Cringe. I know that’s a lot of games. But we have four almost adult kids, so that’s a lot of birthdays and Christmases.)

The nastiest problem, besides fixing the boxes, is sorting the “orphaned pieces box.” Every game piece, card, faux money, dice, and timer that I find, which didn’t get put away, ends up in the OPB. And we didn’t empty the OPB last summer. So imagine 100 games and two years’ worth of orphaned pieces. Yep, there were enough Risk soldiers to form an army, enough dice to make Las Vegas happy, and enough faux money to pay off our mortgage.

But we got the whole closet, including the games, done in three hours. But I know that’s not why you’re reading this blog post, you want me to tell you what the top ten games are.

So here’s my list.

1.      Settlers of Catan. (This is my favorite. And it even makes it into the Screwing Up Time sequel.)

2.      Killer Bunnies and the Quest for the Magic Carrot. (I hate this game. But apparently, male high school, college and graduate students find this game addictive. I think it’s the cards: Ebola Virus, Kitchen Wisk, Terrible Misfortune card—a bunny pulls a pin out of a grenade because it would make lovely jewelry. Enough said.)

3.      Lost Victory. (Only Luke loves this game—it takes weeks to play. It’s a historical battle between the Russians and the Germans.)

4.      Set. (Ariel’s favorite game. It’s a Mensa game, and the only one who will play this with her is Jacob. I liked the game until Ariel began consistently doubling my score.)

5.      Quelf. (The boys think this game is hilarious. It involves barking like a dog and wrapping people in toilet paper. I don’t understand why this is fun.)

6.      Louis XIV. (You get to be a member of the Sun King’s court. There’s tons of intrigue, manipulation, influence peddling, and multiple ways to win. I love those domination games.)

7.      Guillotine. (You collect heads. Literally. Sorry. But I think it’s really fun.)

8.      Power Grid. (You build power plants across Germany, trying to dominate the industry and become cost efficient. Hmm. That sounds lame. But it’s fun.)

9.      The Farming Game. (You are a farmer in Washington, trying to earn enough money from farming that you can quite your other job. This game was actually translated into Russian and given to Russian farmers when the farms were de-collectivized so they'd know what to expect.)

10.  Zeus on the Loose. (It involves Greek gods and goddesses and speedy addition and subtraction. Weird combo, but it works. Our dog Jezebel hates the Zeus character. One day, she finally got him. His head is now…mangled.)

What about you all? Any game recommendations?

Stress Cleaning

It’s exam time at our home. My college juniors are taking finals. I remember finals. (And I remember the professors, who on the last day of class, assigned papers due the day of our class final—I’m sure Dante would have reserved a place for them in his Inferno.) At any rate, the stress level in our house has risen. Ariel copes by studying until her eyes melt. Luke copes by watching the Yankees. I’m not sure how it helps. Does dialoguing on Raul Ibanez’s on base percentage distract you from the upcoming American Chemical Society’s exam for Physical Chemistry? (During the discussion, Matt reminds us that 82.01% of statistics are made up.)

I realize a lot of people take study breaks and watch television. This makes no sense to me. When I was in college, neither I nor any of my roommates watched TV. Of course, we didn’t have one in our apartment, so that makes a difference. We were a bunch of stress cleaners—so we’d burn off our nervous anxiety with work. It went something like this. I had an exam in Elizabethan literature and I had to memorize 50 sonnets—yes, 50. So I’d take a break and scrub the shower with a toothbrush. Death to mold and mildew. My roommate needed a break from Boolean Algebra—she mopped the bathroom and kitchen floors on her hands and knees. Another roommate had a nasty Econ exam, she vacuumed the floors, dusted every surface, and scrubbed the counters. Roommate #4 bleached everything. By the end of finals, our apartment was so clean you could eat off the floor. Probably even the toilet lid (though that’s too gross to contemplate), though all the bleach and ammonia might make your eyes water or poison you.

Why can’t my kids be stress cleaners? All I’m asking for is one, maybe two, stress cleaners. I’d really like that. What about you readers? What crazy things do you do to cope with stress?

Hate is a strong word, but I really hate cleaning the bathroom.

I woke up crabby today. The snow that floated in the air last night dried up and the flakes that actually touched the ground, didn’t stick. Okay, maybe I’m just really crabby because I woke up with a sinus headache—only I don’t have frontal sinuses so it’s one deep in my head and if gets infected, my brain will rot. And I can’t take decongestants—they make my heart beat way too fast. So I’m going to spend the day in front of a vaporizer, trying to melt scum out of my sinus.

Friday is also Clean the Bathroom Day. Which I hate. Does anyone know how to make bathroom cleaning fun? I make ironing, which also hate, fun by streaming a Netflix. Yesterday, I watched the first episode of Island at War. It was really good. But bathroom cleaning...the only thing good about it afterwards it smells like lemons. Maybe I need a soundtrack. A lot of writers have soundtracks for their novels—music that puts them in the mood to write or reminds them of their characters. Yeah, that’s it. I need a bathroom cleaning soundtrack.  For the shower I could play “Raindrops keep falling on my head.” Especially for the times, that I’m thinking about my novel and turn on the shower spigot instead of the bath spigot and get totally soaked. Yes, it has happened on more than one occasion.

For the tub, I could listen to “Splish, splash.” For the sink, How about the "Happy Working Song." Although rats and cockroaches aren't my usual cleaning buddies--I'll stick to my minions. Maybe I should try singing the "Happy Working Song" to them. Or not.




 For the toilet, which I really, really hate cleaning, I could play “Hate” by the Plain White Ts.



 Anyway, I hope these make your weekend cleaning more fun! I know they bring a smile to my face.

Walter Update

Today my chances of coming up with a creative post on something new and delightful are almost nil because I have post-migraine brain. Late Saturday night (i.e., early Sunday morning) a sort of neighbor called. She was upset about something. She didn’t want comfort or encouragement. She wanted to whine. Now if she were a friend, I’d have listened semi-patiently to her whine (even though it was the middle of the night). But I barely know this woman. If that wasn’t bad enough, she called back a second time to whine. It was the second call that gave me the prickle in my brain, which said, “Migraine.”

Anyway all that to say that today is a Walter update. (Click here if you don’t know/remember who Walter is.)  In the last Walter post, Cal had gotten a humane trap to put up in the attic for Walter. Ariel was very concerned because the trap had been in the attic for several days and she was worried that Walter was starving to death in the trap. Cal reminded her that we could still hear Walter playing in the attic so he wasn’t “caught.” But he went to check.

Getting into our attic is an athletic acheievment. There is no pull down ladder. Instead a wall in the pantry has a small “door in the wall.” You open the door, hoist yourself into opening, which doesn’t have a flat bottom but slopes toward the ceiling. Then you grab the ceiling rafters and pull yourself up. (This becomes important later on.)

So Cal went to check the trap. When we’d tried the humand trap the first time, we discovered that Walter had bumped the trap enough that the bait dish moved and he could pick it clean from outside the trap. This time, Cal wedged the trap so that Walter couldn’t bump it. (Yes, Walter has a very high IQ. We grow smart squirrels in Tennesssee.) Since Walter couldn’t bump the trap, he ignored it. The trap bait was untouched. So Cal moved the trap closer to Walter’s nest. Maybe the smell would overwhelm his squirrely wisdom.

When Cal was finished, he decided to leave the attic. Except there was a problem. Even though Cal told me that he was going into the attic, I forgot. In the meanwhile, I saw the open “door in the wall,” decided that one of the kids must have left it open (shame on them), and I shut it. And locked it. Fifteen minutes later, Cal was stuck in the netherworld of the attic chute. Eventually, I heard him kicking the door—he couldn’t reach it with his hands. He was very nice about it. He even smiled. But the smile was one of you-see-I’m-right-about-you and added weight to his You-clean-up-before-I-even-start complaint—I’ve been known to put his tools away before he starts a project. I’m very blessed in my choice of spouse. He even talked to crazed, whiney woman the second time she called. He was very nice, but I don’t think she’ll be calling to whine during the middle of the night any time soon.

If It’s Friday, It’s Clean-the-Bathroom Day

Sometimes I wonder if I was born in the wrong century.  Now don’t get me wrong, I love my laptop and I have no Luddite tendencies. (Well, only a few, and they only rear their ugly heads when I’m on hold with tech support.)

But I have a lot of Old World habits. My mother immigrated to the US with her parents, and they brought their old ways with them. I learned them. (Sociologists say that mothers enculturate their children. Sorry, Dad.)  Of course, some of these habits mystify my husband.  For example, I believe chocolate is near to a sacrament. It should be served on a fancy plate. Each square must be savored over a period of fifteen minutes, at least. He gobbles his chocolate and then wants mine—because, he thinks, I must not like it if it takes me that long to eat it. No, dear one, I like to let the chocolate melt on my tongue and take me to chocolate heaven. And, if you touch my chocolate, you may find yourself missing a few fingers.

But chocolate reverence isn’t the only Old World experience that impacts my family.  It’s Old World structure.  My grandmother has told me that when she was young everyone in her small town in South Holland did certain chores on certain days. For example, Monday morning was Scrub the Steps day.  So every housewife scrubbed the steps on Monday. (They scrubbed them on Thursday too—you’d better clean those steps before they get dirty). Now, granted, I don’t scrub my outside steps. At least, I wait until they get moss on them.

But every day of my week has assigned chores:

1. Monday is post-weekend tidying and house projects. Conveniently, most of our plumbing problems have occurred on Mondays.  For example, last Monday that bathroom pipe blew out. In my mind, time had already had been set-aside for the repair.  Not in Cal’s mind, however. He was planning to do taxes. But they got shoved aside in favor of a functioning bathroom.

2. Tuesday is writing day. (Not really a house chore, but since the kids have music lessons, classes, etc., I write while they learn. I have to redeem the time in some way.)

3. Wednesday is baking day. Matthew can’t digest gluten so I make him gluten-free bread—which is a bit like baking with different kinds of dust. The various “flours” like brown rice, tapioca, potato starch, and teff are all so fine that after baking, a layer of edible dust covers the kitchen surfaces. Since the kitchen is filthy already, it makes sense to bake everything on one day.

4. Thursday is ironing day, which isn’t so bad because I stream a Netflix movie. So it’s actually fun to iron 9 dress shirts and 9 dress pants and whatever else we’ve worn the previous 7 days.

5. Friday is clean-the-bathroom-and-master-bedroom-and-wash-bedding day. There's nothing like going to bed on Friday night in a pristine room with the scent of furniture polish and Pinesol clinging to the air. (Yeah, that mystifies Cal too.)

6. Saturday is clean-everything-else day and cook for Sunday. It’s also our WalMart date. The two of us go to WalMart and shop.  I realize that doesn’t sound like a “date,” but it’s all a matter of perspective—time with your husband without any interruptions is a date. Okay, WalMart has it’s own interruptions, especially at the beginning of the month when it gets swamped by the crazies.  But that’s another post.

Notice there’s no laundry day. That’s because with six adults and near adults, every day is laundry day.

So, am I the only one who lives by a chore schedule?  Fess up.