I Cleaned My Bathroom with Cheese (And Other Recent Mistakes)

Update!  

Since the posting of this piece earlier this afternoon, more mistakes have been made. Skip to the bottom for the new developments.

This is one of those “kids, don’t try this at home” types of posts.

I’m fairly clumsy and fairly easily distracted.  It’s not a great combination.  I could write a daily post about the things I’ve bumped into and the things I’ve accidentally thrown in the trash can and the things I’ve mistyped in a text message.  (See below for examples of recent texts to my husband.)  But that would not be news.  Lately, though, my errors in judgment and/or attention have risen to an entirely new level. 

Cheese is the New Vinegar

For instance, yesterday I was cleaning my house.  I usually clean my house on Mondays.  It gives me a concrete purpose for the beginning of my week and provides a mostly-sanitary, temporarily-pet-hair-free(ish) space in which to work.  During a break from cleaning, I sat down at the table to have a snack.  Rather than using a plate, I put my cheese cubes and crackers on a paper towel.  (Once you’ve cleaned your kitchen it is blasphemy to place a dirty dish in the sink without a damn good reason and cheese does not qualify as a damn good reason.  In extreme cases, it is also acceptable to drink straight from the faucet so as to not use a glass.)  When I was finished with my hearty snack, it was time to clean the bathroom.  Now, I know that I threw a paper towel in the trash can and tore a new one off the roll to wipe down the bathroom counter.  What I am unclear about is the order in which I did those things.  All I know for sure is that a couple of minutes later, I was smearing my bathroom counter with a mixture of Clorox and cheddar.   Combining bleach and cheese does not produce any dangerous chemical reactions, but it does create a memorable aroma and leaves a waxy finish on surfaces.  I don’t recommend it.

Café au Lait with 100 Volts on the Side, Please

You know how as kids we’re always told not to cross our eyes or walk barefoot across parking lots or stick our fingers in power outlets?  Well, it turns out that last one is sound advice.  I waited until I was thirty-six years old to prove it though. 

Last week I was at my favorite coffee shop chatting about writing with a friend of mine. (I shall not mention the name of the favorite coffee shop here in case this story deters people from going there.  It shouldn’t.  I fully believe that I am the one to blame for what happened, not anything in the favorite coffee shop.)  I had my laptop plugged into one of their power strips.  When it was time to go, I tried to unplug it, but it wouldn’t come loose.  I kept pulling on it, but was not giving it my entire attention because I was also deeply engaged in conversation with my friend at the time.  Finally, thinking only of dislodging the stuck device and not what exactly the stuck device was, I slid my left index finger between the plug and the power strip to separate them.  And, predictably for anyone paying attention, I got a shock. 

It only lasted a second, but in that second my index finger felt very hot and a pulse of pain ran up my left arm to my elbow.  Then everything in that vicinity tingled and buzzed for a few minutes while my heart pounded from both the electrical jolt and the panic that I might be about to die.  My friend was kind enough not to laugh at me or scold me for my stupidity and we sat a while longer, as I calmed down and we waited to see if I had contracted any new super powers.  (Unfortunately, no.)

I survived the incident.  And now I can say from experience that our parents were right about this one.  Keep your fingers out of outlets.

In Life, We Have to Make Choices

My right shoulder is slightly damaged.  About three years ago, I slipped in the shower and injured it, and ever since, certain movements make it hurt.  My yoga teacher knows about it and helps me modify exercises in class.  One day she asked me if I had ever tried “Golden Milk”.  My response-- Um, no.  That sounds sort of gross.

Well, it’s not gross.  It’s a simple yogi recipe to help treat joint pain.  Water, milk, cardamom, turmeric, almond oil—easy to make and (in my opinion) yummy to drink.  She gave me the recipe and suggested I drink a cup each night before bed to see if it helped my shoulder.

So I did.

For a week straight, I drank my Golden Milk every night, like a good girl.  The following Monday, I made it all the way through my yoga class without any pain in my shoulder.  !  And then, to my surprise, I realized I couldn’t button my jeans.  ?  As if that were not strange enough, the bathroom scale seemed to be in on the joke too, confirming what my jeans were telling me.  In short, I was fat.

How can this be? I sobbed to myself.  What have I done?  I took a mental journey through recent dietary transgressions.  An ice cream here, a piece of chocolate there, but nothing out of the ordinary.  Why, then, had my body betrayed me like this?

I racked my brain for any recent changes in my life and came up with… the Golden Milk.  So I took a closer look at the recipe.  The water, the 1% milk, and the spices couldn’t be to blame, but what about that almond oil?  I took a look at the nutrition info.  A serving size is one tablespoon.  Calories = 130.  Calories from fat = 130.  OH.  The recipe called for two tablespoons.  And (to make matters worse and once again my fault) I had incorrectly copied the recipe onto my notecard as THREE tablespoons. 

Yep.  For seven days straight, I willingly drank 390 calories of fat right before bed.  Awesome. 

I could have reduced the amount of almond oil back to  two tablespoons.  I could have reduced the doses of Golden Milk to every few days, but I didn’t.  I just gave up the whole thing altogether.  In life, we have to make choices, and between skinny and pain-free, I choose skinny.  Maybe that makes me a shallow person, but… my jeans fit me again, so at least I am a happy, jeans-wearing shallow person.  Who cleans her bathroom with cheese.

(Sigh.)

Update!  

More mistakes have been made.  Cause seems to be genetics.

I posted this piece to my blog at 2:ooPM.  By 2:15PM, I was being pulled over by a policeman.  It seems that I have been driving around with an expired inspection sticker for two months.  The cop gave me a ticket.  By 2:45PM, I was dutifully pulling into a service shop to get my car inspected.  By 3:00PM, I was learning that my car could not pass inspection because I have my husband's insurance in my glove compartment and he (apparently) has mine in his.  I am very very grateful to Officer S. for not noticing that fact when he looked at my insurance.  Whew!

While I was wasting time waiting for an inspection that wasn't happening, I received an email from my dad, who had read my blog post.  He first expressed his deep concern at my having been shocked.  Then he proceeded to describe to me in detail all the times he has electrocuted himself.  Then he went on to tell me about the time he accidentally mopped the floor of a cafe with parmesan cheese because he mistook the green can for Comet.  I'm not sure if I felt more relief or embarrassment to learn that I am not the first member of my family to try to clean something with cheese.  ?

Looking forward to a better tomorrow.

Things I Think About While Bathing Dragons

I just finished bathing my husband's dragons.  (Don't look for symbolism or euphemism or any other hidden ism in that statement.  It is what it is.  See photos for confirmation.) 

 

There are things they don't tell you about marriage.  Like the fact that once you are married you will have to periodically do things like bathe your husband's dragons because they have been sitting on top of the bookcase in the living room for two years collecting an inch of dust and the dust has become so thick that small pieces have actually broken off and floated down in the gentle current of the fan so that you can no longer ignore the dust five feet above your head and you will ask your tall husband to take the dragons down and he will, but then he will ask you to bathe them.  No one warned me about that.  Then again, I am not sure that warning would really apply to that many wives.  Maybe the warning is something more general like, "You will have to deal with the stuff your husband owns" or "Your husband will at some point ask you to clean something that you have never cleaned before" in which case I do think, actually, that someone told me those things, and I just ignored them.  Or at least I just never pictured dragons.

I like my husband's dragons. 

I do.  I'm serious.  How can I convince you that I am not lying about liking my husband's dragons? 

How about this... I got him a new one recently.  It's small, but it has two heads, so that makes it cooler than bigger dragons with one head.  Here he is eating a fake cockroach with one of his heads. 

(Note I said FAKE.  We may have spiders and scorpions and cats and dogs and dragons and occasionally even an armadillo at our house but we do NOT have cockroaches.  EVER.  And I love that about this house.  Come to think of it, why don't we?  We don't exterminate... and we let our house get pretty dirty... and there are obviously cracks big enough for scorpions to get in so I am sure they are big enough for cockroaches too... Hmm.  Ok, I am still glad that we don't have cockroaches, but now I am slightly afraid that we have something bigger and scarier that EATS cockroaches.  Hang on while I google....... Huh.  It turns out that cockroaches actually have many enemies.  Apparently we could have wasps, birds, bats, or "other small animals" keeping our cockroach population at bay.  Hmm.  Also of note, if you want to read a sad CNN article about a guy who died after winning a cockroach-eating contest, click here.) 

Exhibit A - Dragons

(top of bookcase)

Exhibit B - Krusty

(left of bookcase)

But back to my point (the second one, not the one about things they don't tell you before marriage), I like my husband's dragons.  They go well with my Krusty the Clown doll (who suspiciously ends up in the background of a LOT of my pictures) and my Muppets and my various fortune-telling paraphernalia.  And by "goes with" I don't mean that they actually have anything in common, because they don't, I more mean "doesn't go with", as in "nothing in our house goes with anything else".  I like that. 

When the hubby and I got married, we did the whole registry thing, so yes, we have matching dishes (unless you count mugs-- I sort of have a mug-buying problem, but I do use them all-- I choose my mug each morning based on my mood), and we have matching towels, mostly, except for the blue ones that got bleach on them and turned pink (who knew blue towels would turn pink?!) and the random ones that I use to wrap my hair up in when it is drying because they are smaller), and we have... um... ???  What else did we register for?  I feel like it was a whole big deal at the time and now I can't think of anything else.  Uh... ladles?  I think we have matching ladles. 

ANYWAY, even though we registered for stuff and got new dishes and towels and bedding (BEDDING!  That's what it was!) we didn't REDO our whole lives or anything.  We moved my purple couches in with Hubby’s green couches and lived for a while in over-stuffed-living-room-semi-harmony until various events caused us to get rid of one piece of each set.  So we still have one green couch and one purple couch, except that the green couch was really ripped up from the cats (like... you could see the wood) so I patched all the corners with not-quite-the-same-green cloth because I couldn't be bothered to look more than one place and find the actual same color.  And we decorated the walls with Hubby’s samurai posters and my framed photos of my family and some cool paintings our friend made.  And of course my VCR tapes sit on the same shelf next to his blu-rays, etc. 

Christmas cards 

still displayed in May

What I'm getting at is we don’t live in a very grown-up house, and I’m ok with that.  Although, I tend to forget just exactly HOW un-grown-up our house is until I visit someone else’s and realize that all the colors in their living room go together and they have things like rugs and end tables and curtains and an acute lack of dragons.  I don’t know what other people think of our décor because not that many people really come to our house and those who do have been too polite to say things like, “What the heck is up with all the mismatched furniture and dragons and Muppets?”  But it doesn’t matter because I like our un-grown-up, dragon-infested, cockroach-free house.  I think it’s pretty awesome. 

And you gotta admit, those dragons look pretty darn good after they’ve had their bath.

Upon re-reading this, I realize that A) It is a lot longer than I realized, and B) It really has no point at all.  I fear that I have wasted your time.  Please accept my apologies in the form of this short video clip from The Princess Bride.

    

A Poetic Mess

There’s really no reason for this.

This mess I’m in, mostly literal, is all my fault.  I know how to be tidy.  When I’m a mess, it’s generally because I choose it.  97% of my time I go around washing things and wiping things and stacking things and straightening things… on bad days I do it over and over.  Right angles.  Line it up.  Must have order.  But then there’s that 3%. 

Once in a while, I make a mess.  A big one.  If you’re going to do something, do it right.  The floors become filthy, the dishes play Jenga in the sink, there is an unplanned haphazardness to the items on the coffee table.  Things lie where they fall.  Objects that seldom move suddenly change rooms.  At first, I am simply ignoring the mess.  And then I am appreciating it.  And then… I am actively contributing to the chaos.

We have entered the 3%.  Point of reference:  I have recently lost my desk.

I would like to point out, in my defense, that the wine glasses have accumulated
over the course of days and one of them actually only contained cranberry juice. 
Though, yes, that one that’s precariously perched on the edge of my desk
by the tape measure, is in fact half full (optimist!) of wine.

Eventually, of course, I will clean.  And it will be glorious.  Cleaning turns into cleaning out.  Straightening bookshelves turns into rearranging furniture.  Sometimes, I emerge from the mess into a brand new house.

But before I become the Goddess of Cleanliness and reclaim the home that is rightfully mine… I have to freak out a little bit.  It’s a natural part of the process.  I see the mess, finally truly see it for what it is, assess how much work it will take to remedy it (and then assess again more rationally) and then have a small panic attack.  What have I done?  How did I let this go on for so long?  Where is the cat?  Then I deal with my panic attack through avoidance.  And I use avoidance to create a bigger mess.

We have now entered the stage of avoidance.  Point of reference:  I just spent the last two hours pulling old college and teaching binders off my shelf and going through them, thus creating large slippery piles of paper on the floor.

Nicely done.

Ok, actually that is the same wine glass from the previous picture. 
Seriously.  It didn’t multiply—it migrated.  Get off my back!  Sheesh.

That larger pile over there by my flip flops consists of poems.  Extra copies of poems that I accumulated in college or during my teaching career.  And they’re good ones too.  And they do not deserve to sit in a dusty binder not being read by a woman who desperately needs to clean her house.

And so, I want to give them to you.  (Really.)

Send me an email at cariejuettner@gmail.com with the subject “I want a poem” and include your name and a mailing address.  Don’t tell me you would prefer to have the poem emailed to you—that’s not the offer.  These are pieces of paper that already physically exist in the universe and which need good homes.  If you give me your address, I will snail-mail you a poem (maybe two) and nothing else.  By agreeing to receive a poem you are not accidentally selling your soul to the Devil, joining a club, or signing up to receive newsletters.  I don’t have a newsletter.  Oh, and there will be cute stickers on the envelope.  And I will pay for the postage.  Even if you live in Antarctica.  What have you got to lose?

My cool friend Stine took this picture many a year ago.

There is no reason why I should have to let my house fall into “condemned” status before giving it a good cleaning, and there is no reason why I should have to give you a reason for wanting to send you some poetry.  But if you need one, April is National Poetry Month.  And let’s face it… you need a little poetry in your life.

Enough said.  If you need me, I’ll be licking envelopes and applying stickers.