Don't Be So Defeatist, Dear

No new posts in a week?! Someone must have gone back to work full time this week. . . .

All winter long, I've posted three posts a week like clockwork to this here blargh, but then on Monday I worked my first eight hour day outside of the home in nearly seven months and before I knew it, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, even Friday  had all passed me by while Of Woods and Words sat in radio silence. Don't act like you're surprised.

I constantly overestimate my abilities and/or the amount of free time during the summer and then am always shocked when things start to fall to the wayside. On Thursday morning, for the first time in a long, long time, I woke up to a stack of dirty dishes next to the kitchen sink. To say it was a displeasing (nay, disappointing) sight would be to put things mildly. All week I've struggled to find the time to work my side jobs, exercise, clean and do just about anything else outside of work other than staring blankly ahead at the Netflix du jour each night.

It's easy to focus on all the things I can't do (start a batch of bagel during a down moment in my day, spend my lunch break catching up on blog reading, or ever find time to clean the bathroom, etc. etc.) with the return to full-time, out of the house employment. And when one's workplace is 43 degrees at the start of the work day and warms all the way up to 52 degrees after eight hours, one's mind does tend to stray to the melancholy. So although I may not really be wanting to see the good in the situation, I'm trying to keep my chin up, while the words of Lady Violet ring through my mind:

But enough about me.

In other news, the lake ice finally went out on Wednesday. That's just one day before the latest ice out date for the lake in recorded history. I was kind of hoping to break the record, but I guess the open water is kind of nice too. Andy and I got the dock in last night and on Thursday evening took a rather chilly boat ride around the lake.

I've been working towards the perfect golden, crispy potatoes for a while now. No variation of roasting them in the oven gets them quite the way I want them. Mel from Mel's Kitchen Cafe finally came to my rescue on Wednesday. Check out her golden skillet potatoes. Easy peasy and so, so good. Check that one off the bucket list. ;)

It's finally warm enough to put the seedlings outdoors. Unfortunately, it's also finally warm enough for chipmunks to be up to their rascally ways. Gardening fail #1 of 2013 is me leaving the seedlings outside all day while both Andy and I were away from the house. Goodbye two Brussels sprouts, a pepper, some cabbage, and several leaves from the eggplants and kohlrabi. Live and learn. Live and learn. I try to be calm about these sorts of things because hey - it's nature, but I would have been a little more forgiving about the whole plant massacre if the chipmunk had actually eaten the leaves and plants he chomped off. It's so very demoralizing to see the chopped off leaves wilting next to the maimed plants.

About the only thing I've managed to roll over successfully from my old "working from home" schedule this week is my running. I just wrapped up week 3 of this, my most recent running attempt, and next week, I face 6 minutes running, 2 minutes walking splits. On Wednesday night, we used the car's odometer to chart how far I've been going on my runs. Including the warm up and cool down, I've been covering about 3.4 miles on each run. Not too shabby and actually, I was kind of shocked by how far it was.

I hope you've all had a wonderful week and are filling your weekend with fulfilling and restorative activities. So far today I've caught up on all my cleaning chores (including the bathroom and washing floors!), made a batch of bread and put a corned venison (more on that later if it turns out well) in the Crock pot for supper.
   

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A True Story

The other day, Andy said, "You know, one of these days, we should really put some effort into straightening up around here."

And while I admit that we may have a bit of a mess/disaster issue on our hands when I am losing things - knitting needles . . . books - in the couch on a nightly basis (and we can't even blame children for the current state of our happy abode), my knee-jerk reaction to Andy's critique was, "It's fine. NBD." Who doesn't feel more at home in a home that looks like a tornado ripped through it?

Obviously, it could be way worse. Conversely, it could also be a lot better.

But like Scarlett O'Hara always said, I'll think about this mess in October.

Oh wait, Scarlett said "tomorrow," didn't she. . .

 

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Adultlike Wonder

When we're growing up, we're kind of told to enjoy it while it lasts. Pretty soon we all turn into big, bad adults and we drop the rosy-colored glasses. We cease to get excited about the little things, like getting to have a whole can of pop or finding exactly what we wanted under the Christmas time. We start to realize those creepy gray statues on the sidewalks are just street performers pandering for spare change. After a while, all that childlike wonder just sort of fades away. (To be fair, I still find the body paint coated street performers jaw dropping. Why would you do that to yourself?!)

But I think there's adultlike wonder too.

How else do you explain the sheer glee and excitement Andy and I experienced when we found this beauty waiting for us on the porch Wednesday?

Yep, a vacuum. 

(Okay, maybe there are some kids out there who get excited about vacuums, but I most definitely was not one of them.)

We ripped into the box and started pulling out attachments. "A pet brush," I squealed before I remembered we don't have any pets. Andy held up the carpet attachment, awe in his eyes. Setting down the carpet attachment, he preceded to brandish about the hardwood floor attachment.

After a few minutes of getting a bag in the vacuum and the hoses and all attached, Andy fired up the little vacuum. As the slightly beetle-esque appearing vacuum whirred into life, we smiled at each other.

So quiet. Such smooth action. And oh, the suction. It was a beautiful, beautiful thing. 

What with hauling fire wood into the cabin nearly every day during the winter months, there always seems to be a layer of crud on our floor. That layer of crud translates into a fine layer of dust on everything else. But no more. Just maybe, the vacuum means a clean cabin could become a reality instead of a goal.

Is it bad to get borderline ecstatic about a vacuum?

"Nah," a friend told me. "We adults get excited about new appliances and car washes. We're simple folks."

Come to think of it, I do feel downright giddy when all the dishes are washed and there's nothing molding in the fridge.

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The best investment you'll ever make . . .

Back in my college days, as the ever-muckraking news editor of the student newspaper, I had the chance to talk with the college president. We discussed a myriad of topics, including the rapidly rising cost of higher education. Is it really worth it, I wondered out loud. How could tuition prices climb by thousands of dollars every year? 

He admitted it was a lot money. (College tuition in the '00s consistently rose at a rate twice that of inflation.) Then he compared it to buying a house.

"Sure it's a lot of money up front," he said. "But you ultimately you realize: it's the best investment you'll ever make."

Considering that I now have a degree from a college that no one outside of northern Minnesota knows about, I think he might have been pulling my leg a little bit.

For instance:

At the end of last week, a home-owning friend called me up. "Um, what do you know about black mold?" she asked.

My mom called up before the latest snowfall. "If it snows and I have to shovel that driveway again, I swear . . . " she sputtered. .

And then last morning, Andy came home early to deal with the whole ice dam issue. 

Remember the ice dam on our roof that causes ice to drip down into our door frame? It flared up a couple weeks ago, but the cloudy mild days of late kept the dripping at bay. But yesterday dawned sunny and I woke up to the thunk, jiggle, and clunky sound of Andy attempting to open the frozen shut front door so he could leave for work. At mid-morning, when I open the door to check on the whole "inner door icicle" situation, the equivalent of a bucket of water rained down on me. I knew that morning shower was a waste of time!

Andy climbed onto the roof and started redirecting snow and ice.

I filled a couple thermos with hot water and threw them up on the roof to assist with the melting process.

I kept plugging away at my office work. Boots on. Ready to assist where necessary. In less than half an hour Andy had shoveled most of the snow off the roof and broken up a big portion of the ice. The icy drips coming from the door frame slowed and eventually, disappeared completely.

Oh a house. The best investment you'll ever make . . . but of what? Your time? Your worry?

Whatever we call our houses under our breath, at least they'll always be "Home Sweet Home."

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Wordless Wednesday: Bless This Mess

They say you have to give up on some things to be a successful writer. I have chosen to give up housekeeping.

The advent of working from home this winter has not only lead to major procrastination issues but two computers and one very crowded desk.

Who doesn't use plastic bins as their filing cabinets?

Not enough work space? Just utilize your extra bed!

All I have to say for myself is please . . . bless this mess!

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Anne of Green Gables Set Me Up for Domestic Failure

My mother did not raise my brother and I as slobs. We made our beds each morning. We were expected to vacuum every evening. Despite my mother's belief that our house was always dirty, we really grew up in a tidy, clean home.

In college, to stave off the omnipresent housekeeping battles among roommates, we established a cleaning schedule. Each week all the roommates alternated between cleaning the kitchen, vacuuming, cleaning the bathroom, and scrubbing the floors. Of course that left dishes as a free-for-all and as can be expected among a group of stressed out girls that did not go well.

The point is, while I prefer a tidy house, I'm not the sort who's going get their knickers in a twist over a little dust and will go so far as to claim that a little dust strengthens the immune system. But oh are there times I wished my living space was just a little cleaner.

Let's take this past week for example. Andy is undertaking yet another project that involves cutting holes in the ceiling (installing a bathroom fan over the shower to help battle against the mildew problem) and that means the living room that was clean for about two minutes when we took out all the recycling last Tuesday, is again a pile of power tools and empty cardboard boxes. The rug by the couch is so dirty that I haven't done my knees exercises the last few mornings because I can't be bothered to vacuum. The kitchen counter seems coated with some mysteriously sticky substances that Mrs. Meyers' countertop spray can't penetrate. The bedroom basically looks like to went through a hurricane of dirty clothes.

When I first read Anne of Green Gables, I was an impressionable young adult. In the books, the characters are always overwhelmed with domestic duties: cooking, cleaning, etc. There is a particularly poignant scene where Anne expresses a desire to make sure every inch of the house is always spotless because while guests to the house would never know that cellar steps hadn't been swept or the attic dusted, she would know it wasn't clean. It seemed so admirable to set yourself up to such a high standard of cleanliness and deep down, I wanted to be like Anne. I wanted to be the perfectionist who knew there was no dust to be found in the house. 

But I can't do it. I just can't. 

I mean, do you know how often you're supposed to be washing your sheets?! At the risk of an over-share, let me just state that I feel lucky if I get the linens washed once a month around here. This morning I swept up a dust pan full of dust, hair, crushed tortilla chip particles, and goodness knows what else from our kitchen floor, which, for the record is about 12 square feet. I can almost feel the glare of Marilla Cuthbert (Anne's guardian) on me every day I walk through our front door.

With today's standard two income households, housekeeping seems like the most logical first thing to let slide. (After all, I can deal with a dirty house, I'm less tolerant of an empty stomach.) I could blame Anne of Green Gables for prompting me to set unattainable standards of cleanliness. But the truth is that Anne and I are from different eras. I don't spend every day cleaning and preparing meals. I spend my days out of the houses pursuing a paycheck. Even my days off involve more errands than cleaning. I should feel any range of emotions about the fact that I will not be Good Housekeeping's poster girl any time soon: guilty, disgusting, a failure. But for some reason, I don't.

Because let's be honest, even Anne, after she'd hunkered down with Dr. Gilbert Blythe, hired Susan, the housekeeper.

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Washing Baggies

We don’t do dishes as often as I might like here at the cabin, but when we do, there always seems to be load of little plastic baggies, accumulated from both our packed lunches, waiting to be washed. On any given day, you can come through the cabin front door and be greeted by at least three plastic baggies in the drying rack, draped over spatulas, the dish detergent bottle, or any other clean, vertical object in the general vicinity of the sink.

In my way of thinking there’s no reason to go through a box of 30 sandwich sized baggies in a month when I can wash a single baggy for weeks on end and drastically extend the life of the aforementioned box of baggies. But I have friends who think otherwise, and to be honest, I sometimes wonder if it’s really worth it. I mean, who doesn’t enjoy scrubbing encrusted peanut butter out from the inside of a baggy?

To be honest, I don’t think any one’s a great fan of washing out plastic baggies. (Kind of like water bottles, which both Andy and I pretend not to see on the counter top when we do dishes.) There’s just something not very pleasant about it. While washing the baggies works fine most of the time, sometimes I do end up eat nectarines or what have you  which taste mildly of dish detergent out of a washed baggy.

I also wonder if all this washing is really good for us. By washing the baggies over and over again, who knows what nasty plastic chemicals are breaking down in the dish water each time I wash them. Maybe the best thing is to fore go plastic baggies completely? But oh, that’s inconvenient. . . .

Where do you come down on the whole washing baggies issue? Waste of time? Or a waste, not to?

Will this little world of ours be saved by teeny acts like washing out and reusing plastic baggies?  I like to think so, because I have so very little to offer the world when it comes to patching up our environment. Without a great scientific brain, the only way I can change the world is by how I live my life. But as you might expect, the best way to go about that life is always a bit confused.

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