Category Archives: household

Would have baked a cake

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I’m baking a cake for my son’s birthday party tomorrow. Now, today was a busy day and I had to do a lot of shopping, so when I was making the list, I considered picking up a box o’ cake mix and making one from that.

I didn’t.

This isn’t a “go me, look at what a good Mommy I am” moment. The cake I am making probably won’t taste much different from a mix. It’s your incredibly basic chocolate cake that I’d be perfectly comfortable talking a ten year old through making. The reason I didn’t buy the boxed mix was nothing more than looking in my pantry, realizing I had everything I needed to make a cake anyway and figuring it was stupid to spend the money, plus the knowledge that in terms of time, it would have been six of one, or a half a dozen of the other. If I hadn’t had all the ingredients, it might have been a box o’ cake.

I would have felt no guilt about that, either.

It did get me to thinking, though, about how we perceive the effort involved in making a meal as well as a book I’d read recently.

When researchers watched thirty-two two-income families cook dinner for four days, here’s what they saw: It took people an average of fifty-two minutes from the time they opened the refrigerator door to the time they sat down at the table, whether they used a box kit like Hamburger Helper or cooked everything from scratch. The only difference was that meals cooked from scratch required about ten minutes more active time— minutes spent chopping and sautéing, for example— than box mixes.

McMillan, Tracie (2012-02-21). The American Way of Eating (pp. 211-212). Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

While it’s partially a matter of perception, she goes on to say something else that’s a really interesting point:

Box meals don’t save us time any more than going out to eat does, and they don’t even save us money. What they do instead is remove the need to have to come up with a plan for dinner, something that’s easy when you’re a skilled cook— and bafflingly difficult when you’re not. The real convenience behind these convenience foods isn’t time or money, but that they remove one more bit of stress from our day.

McMillan, Tracie (2012-02-21). The American Way of Eating (p. 212). Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

It’s why I, who am definitely a skilled cook, considered choosing a box mix for a cake when preparing for a party. It wasn’t that it was going to save me time, really. What it meant was that I wouldn’t have to go to the trouble to look up a recipe for the materials I already had on hand. (My smartphone has become my cookbook. What can I say?)

Though one thing Ms. McMillan may not have considered (and this is probably because as she mentions in her book, kitchen skills played no real part in her childhood or growing up years) is that even skilled cooks will order out or have an easy go-to when tired or stressed. There are ways to avoid it if one knows how, of course. Meal planning, shopping to a list, planning meals based on likelihood of how busy one will be on a particular day – all of these things are necessary to being able to have cooking be less of a stressful chore and more of a pleasant routine. And this isn’t a skill that’s generally taught, even in home ec classes these days.

Five Principles, or How Do You Keep Your House So Clean?

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I used to boggle at my mother being able to keep her house as neatly as she does. I always rather had visions of her spending hours sneaking in cleaning when I was at school, or during the summer, when I was at friends’ houses or summer jobs. It had to be that way, because keeping my room neat was such a damn ordeal! When I moved out, I found trying to keep a neat house totally overwhelming, and wished I had the energy to spend those hours and hours cleaning that I thought my mother put in. In the last few years I’ve learned this wasn’t really so. Most of the cleaning I actually saw her doing was the work that was getting done.

My house is quite as neat and clean as hers is these days. No, I don’t spend a great deal of time on the house. Know why? I don’t bloody well have the time to spend hours cleaning. If it took that kind of time, neatness simply wouldn’t happen. Call it an average of 15-20 minutes a day doing actual cleaning, and tack on a few minutes for clutter patrol.

What Mom Really Tried to Teach Me (And I Didn’t Listen)

My mother really did try to teach me to keep a clean house. No, it wasn’t Housewife Training, but more Grownup Training. She tried to teach my brother the same thing, after all. She grew up with someone who kept house the way I used to – let the clutter and mess get so overwhelming that it’s intolerable and/or embarrassing, then spend an effort worthy of the Augean stables only to be worn out and not really into doing any more housework for a long period of time. Mom, who actually learned from that nonsense, did things differently when she became mistress of her own home.

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Tradition and the Madras Egg

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Like many children, I always looked forward to dying eggs at Easter time.  My mother, father, brother and I would gather around in the kitchen, each of us “in charge” of gathering some piece of equipment.  We had Corelle ware when I was a youngster, and as Mom bought most of her household goods during her “green phase”, the cups we had were the standard white with the green floral pattern around the edges.

Mom would carefully measure out the vinegar and boil the water in each cup, letting my brother and I drop the little dye tablets into the mixture.  The tablets would fizz for a bit, and then the perfect white insides of each cup would have this liquid of the most beautiful and vibrant color.  To this day, there’s something about that image that just plain makes me happy.

We would save the wire hoops that came in each kit from year to year, so each cup got its own hoop so as not to mix the colors and muddy the eggs.  My brother and I would ponder each white boiled egg carefully, trying to decide exactly what effect we wanted to produce. Should we write our names in the clear wax crayon on the egg?  Should we dye the egg, write something on it in the crayon, then dye it another color for a more layered effect? One year Mom made a baby chick out of one of her yellow-dyed eggs.  I was very young, and not very neat-handed and envied her ability to do something so clever and cute.

My father also shared that admiring envy of my mother’s ability to do little artistically clever things with almost anything.  He, himself, is not particularly an artist for all that he appreciates beauty and while he joined in the egg decoration for the fun of it, he never expected that he would create an artistic tradition that has endured nearly four decades.

One year, he decided he was going to dye an egg in several colors — green on one side, blue at an end, yellow on another side.  He was careful to go light on the dye, so that each color was a light pastel.  In looking at it, the egg reminded him of a coat of madras cloth he was especially fond of as a very young man.  So, with great pride, he dubbed the egg the Madras Egg.

It was lovely, and all the more because he’d done something beautiful.  We all decided that the Madras Egg was the egg we’d leave for the Easter Bunny, as it was so pretty.

Every year after that, the egg for the Easter Bunny was the Madras Egg.

Now, I have a household of my own and a nearly grown son.  We still color eggs because it is so fun.  We don’t always use the color kits, sometimes preferring just to use food coloring, vinegar and water for our dyes.  My son almost always starts with a solid yellow egg, bright and happy, because yellow is his favorite color.  My artist husband likes to try for a new effect, or something clever and memorable.  Every year, I’ve made a Madras Egg in honor of my own childhood memories.  But this year, we have the tradition going into its third generation as my son also made a Madras Egg of his very own.

Clean All the Things

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I am not particularly neat by nature or general habit.

I am neat by taste. I like order. You can see the conflict, yes?

I do have some habits to take care of this adapted from Flylady. We do have a slightly different approach, but the goals are similar. We’re messy packrats who really would prefer to live in a neat home, and frankly made a pig’s ear out of the attempt for most of our lives.

Part of what I do is daily routine. (Make my bed the minute I get up, make sure the kitchen is cleaned up once a day, etc.)

Part of what the household does is weekly routine. Clean All the Things. (Declutter, dust, vacuum, change bedsheets, give hard floors a quick damp mop). Depending on how bad things are, this can take from 20 minutes to an hour. It’s not enough for white glove inspections, but it keeps the house from degenerating into chaos, and getting used to piles of clutter in corners to the point where we don’t even “see” them as we climb over them. I’ve lived like that and I didn’t feel good with it. Hence the change.

This week was definitely a 20 minute week, especially as my son and I did a very thorough Clean All the Things last week.

In fact, so much so that when I commented it was time to Clean All the Things, my son objected, saying the house wasn’t very messy. (It wasn’t). I said that he was right. The house wasn’t all that messy, so if we did Clean All the Things, it wouldn’t take very long. Neither would it next week. Stuff wouldn’t pile up. He still disagreed.

We took a vote1, and his father and I carried by a 2/3 majority, so All the Things got Cleaned.

I talk a lot about the mundane keeping up of stuff, I know. It’s something I never learned as a child. Not that no-one tried to teach me, mind. It’s just that it was really difficult for me to learn, and I didn’t even really see the value of it. I was into epics, for pity’s sake! Heroic effort, I could value, and get into. Moderate, patient, long-term effort? Not so much. It’s why being able to keep my house clean on a regular basis was such a victory for me and one I still reflect on a great deal.

Now, my pleasure centers still light up at the intensity of effort stuff, and I think that’s okay. I can pour everything into the few hours I’m in front of a class. That’s not hurting anything. In fact, it’s good. But then I need to go home and be patiently moderate about studying for the next class, writing the handouts, and dealing with the other aspects of my life.

I think the theme of this year is going to be learning to be moderately immoderate.

Though I swear, I thought you were supposed to have everything sorted out by the time you were in your forties?2 Goodness knows, my grandparents seemed to in their own minds. I wish I could ask them what they were working on personally (if anything) when they were my age. My parents had my brother and I to deal with. NO-ONE could possibly feel like everything was sorted with us as children. We were kinda challenging to rear.

 

1 Unlike many homes, that vote was not fake. If 2 out of the three of us voted not to Clean All the Things, None of the Things would have been Cleaned.

2 At least, it’s what I used to think at sixteen. Yes, I know, in many ways I’m mentally still a teenager. Stop laughing at me. It’s not nice to laugh at people who can’t help it.

Decorating for Halloween

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My husband and I have been talking about doing some sort of yard decorating for Halloween since… oh gosh, since we got married, I suppose.

Other than pumpkins, we really never have.

This year, our son decided he was too old for trick-or-treating,  and asked what we were going to do for Halloween. I asked him if there were some parties he wanted to go to or anything like that, or if he had any suggestions.  He didn’t have any ideas, so I asked if he’d like to make some tombstones with goofy sayings on them like Disney’s Haunted Mansion.  He was enthusiastic.  So, when I put it to his father, of course we got an enthusiastic yes as well.

This was goofy, but fun.  We got some foamboard, Peter cut them into shape, we all painted them gray, Peter did the layout and outlines, then Samuel and I painted, coloring very nicely in the lines.

Garbage Bowl

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I don’t watch Rachel Ray. I don’t watch television. But in noodling around the Internet, I did come across the concept of using a garbage bowl while cooking.  No, it wasn’t Rachel, but a chef.

Even though when I saw the idea and lights came on, angels sang choirs of hosannas and I realized it Made My Kitchen Complete, it’s a stupidly simple concept. Have one or two large bowls[1] on the counter beside you to throw scraps and garbage in while you’re cooking. When you’re done, dump everything from the bowl into the garbage. Clean the bowl. Simple, easy and so goofily obvious that I’m amazed that in nearly 30 years of cooking I never thought of it.

I was making spaghetti tonight and used one. Friends, this really does streamline not only cooking, but cleanup. My trash can really won’t “go” anywhere but across the kitchen, and yes, I’m a “clean as you go” cook[2].  So, this method saves me a lot of steps, and interestingly enough, makes clutter containment while cooking much easier.  Even though I’m hardly a professionally-trained chef, I do ascribe to the mise en place philosophy of cooking.  I do not like a mess while I’m making a meal.

I think this would actually be a great technique to teach kids when cooking, as one of the big issues with kids in the kitchen is mess!  Teach ‘em this, and at least some is contained.

So, my faithful readers, do you use a garbage bowl?  Where did you hear of the concept?  How much do you like it?

[1] I think Rachel Ray markets some, but at $15 for a damn plastic bowl, I think that’s useless.  I have LOTS of large bowls, so just haul out a couple (or only one if you’re not saving anything for stock) and use them.

[2] The rest of my household, however, is not.  Instead a CLEAN UP OR DIE sign in my household, I’ve chosen to pick my battles and let this be a Designated Control Freak issue.  It makes household harmony easier to attain.

Whose Job is the Housework?

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“The guys just don’t feel the same way we do about the house. They don’t have the guilt that eats away at them.” Flylady in an answer to a letter about the Husband’s clutter.

Oh boy…

Here’s the problem.  Do you know why men don’t feel guilty if the house looks like shit?  It’s because quite often they feel it’s the woman’s job to clean the house.  You can’t feel guilty about something you feel isn’t your responsibility!

Now, as it happens, I am the one who takes charge of how the house looks.  There are several reasons, and yes, one of the reasons is that I’m the one who cares the most about it and I’ve made some life choices that give me the time.  But you know what?  If I had something else I was doing that I considered important[1], I would consider that the important thing to do.  I will, have and do react incredibly badly to the automatic assumption that having a uterus means that I’m the one who should automagically be in charge of how the house looks.  Lack of help cleaning up after dinner would have me quite disinclined to cook another single meal.   I haven’t the slightest problem with asking people to pick up after themselves, and consistent refusal to do so is definitely a relationship-killer with me.

But the guilt thing?  Friends, that’s some sexist socialization there.  Partnerships and equitability are one thing, but you wouldn’t establish a business partnership with the relationship  and responsibilities unexamined.  Why shoot yourself in the foot with your life partners?

[1] A book deadline, for instance, would mean that instead of me doing the lion’s share of the household chores, we’d be splitting housework up in thirds Or There Would Be Serious Trouble.

 

Disposable?

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I’m not a big fan of disposable stuff in general. No, it’s not some tree-hugger thing, though I’m totally fine with things I do being less wasteful or polluting.

It’s a money-saver.  I don’t use paper towels.  I have cleaning cloths made of old towels.  They’re not just cut up old towels, though.   You take an old towel, cut it in eighths. Then you sew a zig-zag stitch all around the edges to prevent fraying and sew the long ends together into a loose tube.  Depending on how you fold it, this gives you more cleaning surface per cloth, so you don’t go through as many cleaning.  I’ve preferred those for years.  They last a long time, and you can just toss them in with the regular laundry with no problem.  (I don’t use bleach or bleach-based products in cleaning.  You would have to handle them with more care in terms of laundry if you did).

But I always associated cloth napkins with formal dinners until I went to visit a friend in Portland a few years ago.   In the kitchen, there was a basket of clean, folded napkins in cheerful colors and patterns.  I remember seeing it and having to restrain myself from smacking my forehead at the casual sensibleness of cloth napkins.  You buy a set once, then you’re all good for napkins for many years.  They’re so small that it’s insignificant in terms of extra laundry and for me they wouldn’t really cost any extra to acquire.  I mean, I sew.  I’ve always got fabric lying around, so it’s not even as if it would have cost anything for me to have some.  But if you buy paper ones, you’re buying napkins about once a month or so.

I made a set of sixteen.  Since I usually do a load of darks about every two to three days (my napkins are dark burgundy), that’s more than enough.  We never really run out.

What really gets me to thinking about it, though, is how often disposable products are pushed.  The Swiffer Wet-Jet not only needs those disposable pads (well, okay, I use my cleaning cloths with mine, and just attach them with some old hair ties) and the special bottles of cleaner (and I just have a spray bottle of all purpose cleaner to squirt the floor down well), but then there’s the dispoable dusting rags, toilet wands and what have you.  This stuff is silly and wasteful.  It’s not even safer in terms of germs.  If you’re really concerned, use a disinfectant cleaner, spray the surface and let it air dry.  Do you do that? No, of course not.  So don’t be silly about germs and disposable cleaning products.

Drinking the FlyLady Kool-Aid

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I think I’m developing a bit of a split personality about having drunk the Flylady Kool-aid.

On the one hand, I really do like the system quite a bit.   Between the routines, the decluttering and the missions I get in the email, the house looks nice and runs smoothly.  Anyone could walk in right at this second and I would not be embarrassed about how the house looks.

On the other hand, I’m tired of reading testimonials about how a product has changed someone’s life on a site about decluttering.  I’m sorry, but “buy more stuff” is seldom a good solution to a clutter problem, especially when clutter and hoarding problems are usually related to problems with shopping too much in the first place!

On the other hand (yes, I know, three hands.  When do I ever follow a system without adding my own twist?  Get over it)  I’m all for people creating successful small businesses.  I do have a bit of a squick at the idea that she’s selling stuff to people with clutter problems, but only a small one. I mean, the woman sells cleaning cloths, for heaven’s sake.  I might have made my own out of old towels rather than bought some, but it’s a reusable product that’s genuinely useful.

I certainly don’t tell my family Flylady loves us and wants us to have a clean house.  (Yes, some of the testimonials posts have mothers saying that they’ve said this to their children.  I find that creepy as hell). I don’t don’t follow the system exactly.  I am wearing slippers, not shoes. I don’t “bless the house”.  I dust and vacuum.  I don’t put in 15 minutes of “loving movement”.  I work out!  I certainly don’t have some picture of a Cheerful Fairy with a fishing rod and tennis shoes shaking her finger at me on some household appliance.   I look at my schedule and think, “Yep, I need to empty the dishwasher.”

Certainly if all twee nonsense works, it works.  If you need all that to get organized enough to suit yourself, you need it.  I sympathize with needing tools.  My mother, for instance, does not need a notebook or a schedule to keep the house clean. She just does it.  She doesn’t need a battle plan for something as simple and obvious as housekeeping.

And that’s where I get really weirded out.  People will write the author of the Flylady site to argue with her about her system.

Why why why?

You don’t wanna wear shoes in the house, don’t.  If your life wasn’t changed by buying a feather duster, that’s just fine.  If you like spending one day a week cleaning the house from top to bottom rather than using routines, that’s your call.  If you don’t want to worry about having a clean house at all, whose damn life is it, anyway?

You don’t need Flylady’s permission.

Though, I am unsubbing from the list because I’ve got what works for me, and I’m not that into reading commercials.

Flying Solo

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I’ve been teaching my son to cook.  Tonight he made dinner by himself from a recipe, though he did have a bit of an issue with converting the rice recipe to more servings.

Still, the meal came out tasty.

But that’s not the story I wanted to tell.

See, I’ve been doing the Flylady system for awhile in my house.  Decluttering, Zone work, routines — all that smack.  It sounds goofy, but the house looks nice, so laugh all you want.

What’s even goofier is that I have a notebook for my household routines.  It’s a checklist of chores that need to happen every morning, early evening and before bed, as well as any zone work that needs to happen.  It’s a printout of a checklist in plastic sheet protectors, so I can just use dry-erase markers to check ‘em off and wipe ‘em off for the next day.  Laugh it up, but at least this means I get to detailed cleaning in each room.  I’m not naturally neat, and can ignore a pig sty for a long time (just ask my mother what it was like to raise me), so anything that works is really nothing short of a miracle.

I have it for myself, to keep me on track, but it’s on the counter in the kitchen because it also has the menu plan and the recipe book I’d written as a teaching tool for my son.

Tonight, the man of the house was cleaning up after dinner, and actually went through that checklist, sweeping the floor and things I don’t think are mentally part of washing the dishes in his eyes.

I hadn’t asked him to.  In fact, I’d assumed he hadn’t, didn’t look and just went to sweep the floor when he asked me if I’d looked at the checklist.  Since I do have the notebook mostly as a self-reminder, I didn’t give it a lot of thought.  Most of the kitchen cleanup had been done.  I just made coffee for tomorrow.

No, I don’t think a control journal (that’s what Flylady calls the household notebook), is going to make the household magic, and everyone will decide to be as concerned with keeping the house clean as the DCF.  It won’t.

And it doesn’t need to.

What is cool about it for my household is that it gives clear and rather impersonal guidelines for keeping the house clean and picked up.  Instead of a person constantly reminding, there’s this list that stays there all the time. Yeah, I know I wrote it.  That’s not the point.  It’s that what needs to be done and what gets done become impersonally clear at all times.

Now I’m lucky.  I live in a household of people that like to contribute.  I can’t imagine that if it were a household where people were upset with each other and didn’t mutually care about the condition of the home, nor mutually contributing to the pleasantness of the household that a control journal would do a damn bit of good.  So no, it’s not the magic a lot of Flylady testimonials like to put out there.

But it is a good tool.