Survival Skills

This evening Mike and I were watching one of those shows where they drop some poor host into a tough survival situation and tape him while he finds his way back to civilization without dying. It’s sort of morbid, but kind of interesting. I think that if anything happened the camera crew would rescue him.

In this show the guy was dropped into the Everglades in Florida. He was wandering around the swampland and eventually he found a sort of clearing. He wanted to cross the clearing, but it was filled with alligators. He paused to brainstorm ways to cross the channel without encountering the alligators.

“Slingshot!” Mike suggested to the screen.

“Catapult!” I offered.

“Snake ladder,” Mike said, his voice expressing authoritative finality. Clearly, in his mind, a ladder made of snakes is the best way to cross an alligator-filled swamp clearing.

Eventually the guy opted to climb this tree that had fallen across the channel, kind of making a bridge. I would have liked to have seen a snake ladder, though.

Domestic Goddess

I start my part-time job on Friday. For right now, it's extremely part time...as in, less than 10 hours a week. But the one thing you can count on with personal care is that the hours you start with are never the hours you end with, so I'm really hoping that I get more hours eventually.

In the meantime, I've spent the past two days cleaning. Yesterday was dishes and then laundry and then more dishes and then sweeping and then GUESS WHAT! DISHES! We have literally no counter space in our kitchen, so when we dry dishes we can only dry as many as we can stuff into our small drying rack. And that's not very many. Usually people spend a day doing loads of laundry, but I spend it doing loads of dishes.

Today I walked down to the hardware store to get more cleaning supplies, including Pine-Sol (I think lemon-scented Pine-Sol is hilarious), Lime-Away, Mr. Clean Magic Erasers, and a bucket. I marched back to the house and set up Claude* to clean the living room while I scrubbed the bathroom. I dusted the living room and did my final set of dishes (a few big pots and bowls). I mopped the bathroom and kitchen, and then attacked the shower with the Lime-Away. I pulled the bed away from the wall and cleaned up everything that fell beneath it...pieces of paper, Chap-Stik, pens, socks, and nail clippers. I also vacuumed clumps of hair from Cider who frequently sleeps under there, and then vacuumed the whole room. I used the Pine-Sol water from my mop bucket to rinse out our garbage can, and then sprayed the can out with a hose. I even went through the big plastic boxes I keep under the bed and weeded through them, tossing stuff from college and grad school that was no longer nostalgic.

It was exhausting.

Part of the reason for my cleaning is because I've been at home these past two days, and I feel like I should be pulling my weight. The other reason is that my friend Alec and his fiance, Elaine, are coming over this weekend. We rarely see them because they live in Ohio, but they're in Wisconsin for a wedding so they're going to come by on Saturday. I'm not sure if they're going to spend much time in our apartment - heck, for all I know we may even meet somewhere and not even enter this place at all - but I want it to look nice in case they do.

Alec and Elaine have been over here once before, and the place was a wreck. I hadn't had much time to clean lately so it was sort of messy, and just before we arrived Lucky had decided to relieve himself in the middle of the floor. Maybe the litterbox was occupied, or maybe he was trying to make a statement, but either way letting people into your dimly-lit, cruddy, freshly-shat-upon living room doesn't make the best impression. This was especially daunting because Elaine strikes me as the type of person who is somehow...better than normal. Not snobby at all, or stuck-up, but the type of person who is effortlessly neat, whose nylons never run and whose hems never unravel, whose hair stays in place by magic and who could never afford to lose five pounds. Granted, most of what I know about Elaine comes from Alec, who is totally smitten, but still. Qualities like, "effortlessly neat," "perfectly slim," or "collected" never apply to me. So this time even though I'm not sure they'll come over, it'll be nice to know that if they do this place won't look like a complete hovel.

As I was cleaning I realized that this is how my mom spent her days. She worked as a nurse on the weekends, but during the week it was all cleaning, cooking, baking, and running around with us kids. I don't know how she did it. Tonight when Mike got home I asked him to take me out to eat, partially because I hadn't left the house much at all, but also because I couldn't bear to dirty and wash another fucking dish. Seriously. I don't know how stay-at-home-moms do this day in and day out.

Tomorrow I have more laundry (bed linens this time, incuding the comforter), another round of vacuuming, and some final tidying up. By the end I'll hopefully have more respect for this apartment, more respect for myself, more respect for the hard work my mom did in keeping her household, and lots of respect for the fact that the next time I embark on a major cleaning expidition I'm going to damn well ask Mike to help. I'm no domestic goddess...I can't do this stuff alone.





* Claude is my Roomba

Plans!

I have a pretty dumb idea, but I really want to go through with it anyway.

The photo to my right is a bunch of jewelry that I own. On the right is the locket that I described in a previous entry...the Valentine's Day present that Mike's mom got me with the hopes that Mike would give it to me and pass it off as his own idea. The ring in the gray box is actually my real engagement ring. The sapphire ring is one that Mike and I chose together afterwards...the ring in the box is what Mike was holding when he actually popped the question. It's too big for me to wear on any of my fingers, so it's stayed in its box. The tie tack was my grandfather's, and the two necklaces belonged to my grandmother. I got them after they died.

I would love to combine these things together somehow. I like the locket, but I'd love to make it more sentimental. Right now it just has a cheap purple crystal in the center, and I'd love to have it replaced by the opal from the tie tack or one of the pearls from the necklaces. I'd also love to have the ring involved somehow. If it could be melted down and have the back plated with the gold, or have it line the edges of the halves of the locket. I think that combining this locket with a funny story behind it with my sentimental engagement ring and my grandparents' jewelry would make something that would be really special to me.

Now obviously I'm not a jeweler, so someone would have to do this for me. That's the stumbling block...when people bring in jewelry to combine or reset, usually it's really valuable stuff. This is, well, not. The locket is sterling silver, the ring is thin, and the necklaces and tie tack...who knows. I think the opal is fake, and I have no idea about the pearls. Not exactly heirloom quality here.

Recently my sister took a ring of hers to a jeweler. It was a little garnet in the shape of a heart, and the band was sterling silver. Two of the prongs had worn down and the stone was getting loose, so she was inquiring how much it would be to replace them. The jeweler just kept saying, "It's not worth it, the repairs would cost more than the ring. Just buy a new ring." Unfortunately the ring was something my grandmother had given her the ring as a Christmas gift just before my grandma died, so she couldn't just get a new one.

Eventually my sister convinced the jeweler that the sentimental value was important too and he fixed the ring, but I'm not sure I could convince someone to do a more major overhaul on my locket. It would be a lot of work with little to show at the end.

Maybe I'll take out an ad in Craigslist and see if someone would be able to do this for me. I think it would be pretty neat.

Addressing

I saw a question in Dear Abby’s column the other day about addressing formal correspondence to married couples. If the woman is a doctor and the man is not, then it’s addressed as Mr. Joe and Dr. Helen Smith. If it’s the reverse, it’s Dr. and Mrs. Joe Smith. Otherwise, it’s Mr. and Mrs. Joe Smith.

This irritates me because apparently the only way to get my name onto my own addresses is to get a PhD. Meanwhile Mike gets his name on there just by virtue of having a Y chromosome.

I guess I’m hard to please when it comes to things being addressed to me. Most of the mail that comes to both me and Mike is addressed as “Mike and Christine Blind.” That’s fine. One of my friends who knows about my pet peeve sent me a Christmas card addressed to “Mrs. & Mr. Christine Blind,” which made me laugh. Shortly after my marriage my mom mailed me something and addressed to “Mrs. Blind.” I called her up and said that since we’ve known each other for over 26 years now it would be okay for her to be on a first-name basis with me.

But the formal invites…ugh. I’ve always hated those. When I was single I’d getting wedding invitations addressed to “Miss Christine Jones.” Even when I was in my twenties. That bugged me because I had already graduated to “Ms.” on all my professional documents. “Miss” seems so…elementary school. On wedding invitations I also felt like it was a personal slight, like it emphasized that they were getting married and I wasn’t. It seemed akin to writing, “Christine Jones and guest (don’t worry, you’ll find one someday, dear, there are plenty of fish in the sea).”

Now I have to tag behind Mike on all our formal letters. Even on the invitation we recently got to my cousin’s wedding it was Mr. & Mrs. Michael Blind. It wasn’t even his cousin. He had barely even met her! And yet, his name was first.

I do understand that on formal invitations you just follow formal rules, so I don’t get offended at individuals who send me letters. I’m annoyed at the norms we all follow. Maybe I’ll start a letter-writing campaign to get people to change the rules. I’ll start with Ms. Dear Abby.

Weekend Recap

It's been a busy, busy weekend.

On Friday Mike and I went to Pizza Hut. Since I had won our Cubs/Brewers bet I got to choose where we ate. It turns out that Pizza Hut is much more of a family restaurant than I remembered...as in, kids running all over the place. I used to eat out once in awhile when I was a kid, and my parents never let us run around like that. I don't mind eating with kids around, but this time the constant commotion and activity sort of ruined the evening.

Yesterday I drove out to Fort Atkinson for my friend Jen's baby shower. She's due at the end of July, but this is the first time I saw her pregnant...she lives on the other side of the state. But her in-laws live in the central part, so it was sort of halfway for each of us. It was nice to see her again, even though I spent more time driving than sitting at her shower.

I had to leave the shower early because I had to go to my cousin's wedding reception that evening. I was there from 5:30 to 9, which was the amount of time she spent at my reception. Still, I felt guilty leaving just as the dancing started.

I saw my sister at the wedding too, with her fiance. She doesn't have any new tattoos, but she has started stretching her earlobes. Her goal os to have her ears accommodate a 00 gauge plug, which is about 3/8 of an inch across. I wanted to tell her that floppy earlobes won't look so hot when she's 40, but I figured it would be wasted breath.

Last night Mike went to a show, and in retrospect I wish I had gone with. Apparently he ran into a bunch of people from recently-made friends to people he knew in grade school. Now that the school year is over I'll hopefully be able to go out more. Having to get up at 5:30 AM kind of puts a damper on your nightlife.

Also, things I have made.


This is a bracelet that I really like. Unfortunately, I screwed up the pattern. This is why I shouldn't to beading while watching TV!


This is red aventurine and tiger's eye. I like the colors. The aventurine has a sort of flat red color on its own, but next to the tiger's eye it looks kind of peachy.


This is another lariat necklace. It's actually the same unfortunate length as the last one I made, but that's okay. I made this one to go with a black t-shirt with a higher neck, so it sits on the material just fine. I made the other one to go with a lower-necked dress, which is why it was frustrating to constantly have it flip over the edge of the dress.

Today I have church, and then laundry. Maybe I'll take a bike ride later, and tonight Mike and I are making dinner together. Then it's off to work on Monday for my last day of school.

Have a happy weekend!