Three Coats

In a world of unintentional housewifery, one must continuously find a way to procrastinate and avoid the actual housework. Today, my prescribed housework was supposed to be folding the clothes. Now, I LOVE clothes, I love shopping for clothes, I love skimming through magazines looking at clothes, I love skimming through catalogues dreaming of what I would buy if I had the money, I even try my hand at making my own clothes from time to time. However, I HATE washing, drying and folding clothes. Now, my darling husband and I have worked out several chores that we split into parts, he takes care of one bit, I the other. This is how we handle clothes. Our laundry room is in our basement and currently hard for me to access (long story, another time – another frustrated procrastination based post), so the hubby carries the dirty laundry downstairs, puts through the wash cycle, the dry cycle and then moves all the laundry back upstairs for me to fold. This is a great system that I think is more in my favor than his, but we won’t tell him that. So what is my gripe about laundry, considering it is made so easy for me? The fact that he will go two months with only doing his work clothes and underwear (don’t be grossed, I have enough garments to last two months without cause to launder anything) and will pull straight from the dryer his sartorial needs for the day every morning. That is until he runs out of socks or I ask for my stuff to be washed. Then it is like a marathon. Before I know it, I have twelve, 12!!!!, loads of laundry to fold. Do you have any idea how overwhelming that can be? There are times the clean laundry is dumped on our couch and left to grow and multiply as he just plows through load after load of laundry.

So, after forcing myself to shake, straighten, smooth, and square-off two-dozen tee shirts, I need a break.

There are two baskets of clean laundry in our bedroom, located prominently in front of our closet that is so disorganized and cluttered I can not currently close the doors. 

The hubby has asked me for a week now if today is the day I will fold the clothes and everyday for the last week I found one suitable distraction or another to legitimately postpone or otherwise prevent me from having to do this dreaded chore. Today, I had no easy out, so I had to make one. And I found it in three delicious coats of ‘artist’s sapphire’ blue nail polish. You can not possibly fold clothes with wet nails and to properly manicure one’s nails can take hours from start to finish – finish being three coats of nail polish thoroughly dried and sealed with top coat.

So, our undies may still be forming wrinkles next to his work shirt, lying next to my workout pants, on top of our spring comforter and it may take me an extra shake to de-wrinkle his khakis, but my nails are three coats of exquisitely sapphire blue, the shade of the evening sky just as the first star comes out to play. 

Sink

In the world of icky housekeeping, few things get as gross as a dirty sink. It is actually a HUGE pet peeve of mine to see a dirty sink, but I am married. What does being married have to do with a dirty sink? Everything.
My wonderful, loving husband will cook every now and again, which for most women would be a real treat, right?, well not for me. This is because he uses a different utensil for everything. Peas get their own spoon, so does the boiling pasta, the cream sauce and the sauteed chicken. Sounds kosher, which I (and my colon) would happily tolerate, if he didn't promptly deposit each utensil into the sink after one turn, one flip or one stir, just to pull out a fresh utensil for the next culinary action. So, after one of his escapades around our 36 square foot galley kitchen, I am left with a sink full of dishes. I have had some married girlfriends say they split the dinner time chores, one cooks the other cleans up, but I ALWAYS clean up, whether I stirred the pot or not.
So, sometimes, in disregard of my delicate sensibilities and in spite of myself, I go on sink strike. The dirty dishes seem to multiply at night, like gremlins, with even a single drop of water. Frustrated, I make sweeping and unrealistic declarations like "I am never touching a dish again!" or "I don't care about the trees it will kill or the money it will cost, we are going purely paper plate!" or "We are never cooking again - it is raw fruit and veggies and tuna out of the can for the rest of our lives!". Obviously, I love trees, so I don't even buy paper plates and to never touch a dish is just plain ridiculous and to only eat raw fruit and veggies and tuna would be too healthy a lifestyle to maintain for more than just a few exasperated hours. But, I strike anyway. But what boggles my mind is how the dishes continue to bubble up from the sink when I strike from cooking too! How in holy housekeeping heaven and hell can there be a dirty dish when I haven't cooked in four days?! (Avoiding cooking, by the way, is an art form I will cover another time.)
So, my kitchen sink, the centerpiece in my tiny kitchen has been breeding dirty dishes for a couple of weeks now. I get the sink clean and within minutes it is as though the drain spews forth a used pot or plate with stuck-on cheese from the nachos the hubby made two nights ago. Like the devil himself (or the hubby for the realists) waits, silently and patiently, until I have cleared the sink, then like mission impossible stealthily deposits into the freshly polished stainless steel sink, the dish he hid under the bed because he knows I hate dirty dishes around the house MORE than I hate a dirty sink.
The sink, something I need to complete tasks as mundane as prepare a pot of coffee and as necessary as cleaning our fresh veggies, is perpetually filled with something slimy and smelly and sticky (how can something be slimy and sticky?!?! ewww!!). I admit, I am bad at this housekeeping business, but this just makes everything stink - literally!

I never thought the kitchen sink could be such a thorn in my side.

Dirty Dishes! But its not like I am unfamiliar with the dish soap and sponge - they are there!

Fifteen glorious minutes of a clean sink. Ah, I can happily and easily prepare a dinner in this sink!

Eighteen minutes in - the hubby came home and walked into the kitchen. When he walked out, the sink had spewed again. It never ends.

Contagious

Normally when you think of something contagious you think of a cold or the flu or in funny circumstances, a yawn. (As a self-proclaimed prude (not really) and married woman, we will not enter into the world of STD's in this conversation. Cause, well that's complicated.) Anyway, contagious is as contagious does, I guess. So, like a communicable foot fungus, LAZINESS is catching and it does not. let. go.
This was the weekend celebration of our country's 235th birthday. On Saturday I spent time with my family and my over-exerted and worked-to-the-bone husband came home from work early (his choice to go in at all) and stayed home. On Sunday, I woke at an unspeakable hour for a Sunday morning, truly, 6:30 am on a Sunday should be spent snuggled into a pillow, raced to see my brother and his family before they returned home two and a half hours away and my still-recovering husband stayed home and rested. When I returned from my early morning escapades, he was still in bed. The only justification was that it was still before 11 am on his day off. By 1:30 pm we were up and hungry. So, as always when the hubby gets hungry I start strategizing my way out of standing in front of the stove. I offered to get us a not-fast-food-for-once lunch if he promised to help clean the mess he made. It was a deal. So I came home with his Philly cheese steak purchased no where near Philly to find him, what else, laying on the couch pursuing his obsession. He ate, he drank, he claimed a belly ache climbed back onto the couch, snuggled with the puppies (who are no longer puppies) and they all were snoring within three minutes. So, in such situations I advocate loud noises and bright lights for torturous negotiations. In his brief two minutes of lucidity, we agreed, I would let him relax all day BUT we had to work his last day off. So, here I am 11 pm on the Fourth of July, the day off he got gratis because the federal government shuts down, with a mess in the sink - from where who knows because I haven't cooked in three days, three bags of trash ready to be walked to the dumpster, pants on the floor, shoes at the door and dogs snoring on the sofas and the hubby in bed waiting for the fireworks to end so he can walk the dogs; and I am just too DONE to load the dishwasher.
Happy Birthday, America!

Great!

So, by now I have established that I am a bad housewife or at least a lazy housewife. The dishes have regenerated in my sink, the dishwasher needs to be emptied again, the dirty laundry has begun to multiply, dust bunnies have morphed into dust ponies and my sheets are still mismatched.
Some people fight their ineptitudes, and I usually do myself, choosing to happily follow the plot of second-rate  movies by working and working harder to improve from my underdog self into a champion. I would consider myself (and so would my BFF) a formidable opponent to Danica Patrick, I can out-parallel-park my hubby who works on and handles cars for a living, I can change a baby's diaper one handed and I can navigate my overly cluttered, shoe strewn, pant littered, book scattered and dog distributed floor in the dark with my eyes closed! I am not a quitter and I work hard to improve upon skills - usually. You see, it is important to improve upon oneself, but I think it is also important to recognize that you can't be perfect and sometimes you must embrace your imperfections and limitations as those facets of yourself that make you unique, lovable and human. So, I embrace the fact that my housekeeping skills are abysmal and harrowing, because I know I can't be good at everything and I don't need to be.
So I am not a good housekeeper, but, I am a good customer. No, I am a GREAT customer, as evidenced by the hand-written-in-marker thank you note (complete with hearts) I received from a certain customer service rep with a delicious southern drawl, who graciously assisted me in my procrastination project. Take that better-than-me-housewives!

Procrastination

There comes a time in everyone's life when one faces a task he or she just does not want to do. Some work hard and quickly to accomplish the task and move on; and some procrastinate. I procrastinate. It is something I am good at, if one could be good at procrastination. I even like to say the word - procrastination. Procrastination. It is fun to say and fun to do, until you can do it no longer. But being that I am an unintentional housewife and, though my husband threatens to fire me, I can't really lose this job - no matter how hard I try, the only indication that I can procrastinate no longer is a phone call from my mother saying she is stopping by. I have received no such phone call, so I procrastinate.

Today, I had errands to run, calls to make, clothes to fold, dinner to cook and floors to sweep. I brilliantly plotted out my day and made the first (and as it turns out only) phone call. I needed to return shoes from my favorite online retailer Zappos.com. Expecting courteous (which I received - I LOVE Zappos!) though expedient service, imagine how pleasantly surprised I was that the customer service rep was friendly, funny and TALKATIVE! He made it so wonderfully easy to procrastinate and avoid the three piles of dirty laundry on my floor, as I curled on the couch and laughed at his silly jokes. I won't admit just how long of a conversation we had, but I will be forever grateful to the chap who signed me up for VIP service, convinced me to apply for a job cross-country and provided me with company and interesting conversation while I avoided all chores around the house today.

Thank you, customer service guy with the super cute southern drawl and impeccable phone manners! Project procrastination complete for today! Dishes in sink, check, dirty laundry on floor, check, innards of the closet strewn about the floor as though an earthquake hit, check. Today, rather than perform mediocre housewifery, I excelled in procrastination,  and I owe it all to the thoughtful conversation of a complete stranger, and I am truly grateful.

Breakfast

I have been informed (by my mother, my step-father, my grandfather, my mother in law and my husband) that a primary responsibility of any decent housewife is to ensure that her husband has been fed at least three times a day. This often requires preparation of breakfast, a lunch to send with him to work, and a dinner upon his coming home.

The thirty-something-year-old man who can rebuild an engine, rewire the electrical wiring in the house, and install our very own reverse osmosis water system complete with secondary faucet, can not be trusted to fry his own bacon.

So this morning, after waking early to walk our dogs, I climbed back into a bed with mismatched sheets and a blanket two months over due for a trip around the washing machine, to lay next to the man I vowed to love for all eternity. When I woke for the second time in one morning I found my husband and two dogs piled on the couch, each with their head on a different decorative pillow. I was greeted not by "Good morning, dear" or "Goooood Moornnning, Wife-o-mine!" or even my personal favorite, "Good morning, Sleeping Beauty-bum"; but by "I'm hungry and thirsty. Can you make me pancakes and coffee?" followed by his trademark pouty lip and puppy dog eyes that put our actual puppy dogs' eyes to shame.

I truly dislike cooking. I do it because if I didn't I'd end up eating fried fast food every night and I am rather fond of my arteries. Pancakes I dislike most. Why? Because it is literally impossible to make pancakes NEATLY! I can't keep 700 square feet clean under normal circumstances, now I have to add to the equation a sloppy mixture that can not pour from a spouted measuring cup without finding itself on my counter, my floor or the top of my under-the-cabinet microwave that is three feet above my head? So, as always I strike up negotiations. After three minutes I agreed to run out for specialty bagels and cream cheese, would brew our cup-at-a-time coffee when I got back, if he would empty our dishwasher - so I could load it back up with the pile in the sink upon my return. So, as far as I am concerned I met my housewife breakfast obligation because at 1:30 pm breakfast was served.

Measurements

So, in true spirit of my inability to be a decent housewife, the house is a mess. It gets this way over time. Cluttered and disorganized, stuff - everything from junk mail to new non-perishable groceries to my latest nail polish color to the husband's shoes to the dogs' favorite chew toy - stuff, multiplies all over my countertops, floors and kitchen table. After a special month of cultivation, like the month of May, the stuff even migrates to my coffee table and couches. I am not a hoarder and I am not in denial of being a hoarder. Its just stuff literally propagates until the chaos of my tiny home affects my concentration and general disposition.

Two days ago I pondered. And I reflected. And I saw. The chaos of my countertops was the direct result of poor storage. My teeny tiny home is only 700 square feet and the builders apparently didn't think closet space a necessity. I had an epiphany. Storage. I needed to better organize my available storage space so that things didn't have to sit on my counter. If there was a place for everything, I could put everything in its place.

My brilliant solution began with a shopping spree. However, shopping as solution is rarely beneficial for me. Though shopping I went! Seven stores, YES! SEVEN stores, seven and a half hours later I had bargain shopped my way to apparatuses, gadgets, gizmos and shelving systems that were guaranteed to organize my space and therefore my life. Right? Well, not so much. I came home after shopping for the equivalent of a day shift, excited to get organizing. Excited to clean so I can clean more. I built one under-the-cabinet organizational unit, just to learn that the five other units I bought were going to be the same 3/4 of an inch too tall to fit in the cabinets. I built the cart on wheels only to learn that it was 1/2 an inch too tall with the wheels on and nearly impossible to move without the wheels on. It was after midnight, I was sweaty, tired and totally defeated, again. My effort was a huge quantifiable fail. There it was in my hand, a white rubberized metal mesh cabinet organizing reminder of just how bad a housewife I truly am. So, I balled. Actually, I wailed. I nearly threw myself onto the floor kicking and screaming in tantrum; I did, however, throw myself onto my bed kicking and screaming in tantrum - I was distraught, not demented.

My wonderful husband, when he finished laughing at my hysteria, calmly walked to me, put his strong arms around me and pulled me tight. He kissed my forehead firmly. He pulled back just far enough to look deeply into my eyes and asked "Why didn't you measure the cabinets first?"

First

So, as my first official post, I should explain, I have actually been unintentionally performing bad housewifery for almost two and a half years. I lost my job, along with thirty million other people at the end of 2008. After months of searching and no job insight, I went back to school, to make myself less marketable in a horribly competitive job market. So now, I am competing with Ph'D's for a cashier position at the local grocery market. So in between school and volunteering in my favorite arts, I have been attempting to morph into a half-decent housewife, biding my time while I wait for my resume to lure a prospective employer. And between you and me, half-decent housewifery is truly an ambition and holding very high standards for myself, because I am really bad it.