cleaniness is next to godliness; or, why i wash my sheets each Christmas

I am the last of 5 children, so I had a fairly relaxed upbringing. Especially since #4 was a smelly, rambunctious boy who did a good job of wearing Mom out. By the time I was about 11 years old I was responsible for taking care of my own things: making my bed, vacuuming my room, doing my laundry. The only time I remember being directed about laundry was on Christmas Eve when my mom asked us to wash our sheets*. Imagine my surprise when, about 12 years later I noticed my friend's chore chart for her home, which included washing bed sheets every other week.

That's when I realized once a year was probably not an adequate target.

I'm now much more sensitive to the status of our sheets. If they feel just a bit matted and clammy then they are ripe for cleaning. If I can feel a little grit around my feet I know we've gone way too long.

It has made me wonder if there are other common household cleaning items that I am woefully ignorant about. What do most people consider the necessary chores for a house to feel livably clean? How often do people vacuum the main floor...under the the couch...in the closet? To explore this issue further, I've created a little survey below (if the survey looks funky through whatever format you're reading this - for example, on my blog the margins are way off, just follow this link instead).

In a follow-up post, I will run analyses and post results.






*I may mistakenly remember this as happening every year, but it may have only been once but stood out so much that I have expanded the memory.

Where the fishermen meet!

In my family, Saturdays always meant day trips in the family van. Which was no small thing (the van, I mean. We sported a 12-passenger Ford Club Wagon, like this one but baby blue and with curtains made of PVC piping and canvas).

One memorable trip was down the Lake Michigan coast of Wisconsin. Actually, I remember nothing about the trip, except that we stopped in Two Rivers, Wisconsin, for dinner. Mom really wanted a Saturday night fish boil, with fresh fish from the Great Lakes. Of course, none of us children remotely comprehended why this would be a better option than, say, McDonalds. But to a fresh fish boil we went.

And ended up at M&Ms, or perhaps MOMs -- the restaurant's logo was ambiguous, so we were never quite sure. Maybe we should have left when they sat us at a table that still had the previous diners' trash on and under it. But we didn't leave. After all, fish boil.

Mom ordered her fish and we all got something with fries. But even the fries weren't a safe bet. They had a distinct yeasty taste. Being in Wisconsin, there was a strong possibility that they were deep fried in beer. We added more ketchup, but the yeast taste got worse. Then we realized the ketchup bottle was marked with an expiration that pre-dated my birth.

It didn't help that I had ordered a kiddie-sized milkshake (we're a "I'll just start with a water" family, so I knew Mom and Dad wouldn't take a full shake well). The shake came in a shot glass-size paper cup that I managed to stretch out to 2 spoon fulls.

M&Ms/MOMs has always been something of a joke to us since. My family moved away from Wisconsin about 13 years ago, and (to their surprise and ours) my parents moved back about 2 years. In between, Dad was on a business trip there and ended up in Two Rivers. He bought a black logo truckers hat from M&Ms/MOMs for me.

And this weekend, I finally found the perfect venue to wear it at.

Demolition Derby! The Michigan state championship, no less, held at the Saline Fair. My friend Elizabeth invited us, and, as she says, if you haven't gone, you should go because "it's a lot more fun than it should be".

Some footage:


Generally, what happens at a demolition derby.


Note the dirt flying at us.


Captioning: "He's got the rear end shoved up in the sheet metal." And just which one of these cars might you be talking about, sir?


They also had a truck heat.


In my M&Ms/MOMs hat.

p.s. I actually found M&Ms/MOMs website, and confirmed the name. M&Ms Lunch and Catering. Catering?! Their slogan: "Come and eat where the fishermen meet!"

Aa-choo! Could you pass me a blanket?

My pink baby blanket was my greatest childhood defense against unreasonable and upsetting parents. Suggestions from Mom and Dad to turn off the TV after 4 straight hours of cartoons or clean up the kitchen after my attempt to create the ultimate chocolate chip cornbread cookie loaf (failed, need I say) sometimes offended my 7-year-old pride.

Times like these, I ran screaming upstairs to my bedroom and closed the door. Then I remembered that a good, hard slam is usually more effective, so I opened it and gave it a yank closed that left my ears ringing. I was still screaming, though, so I didn't notice too much.

Next in the routine was to lay down on my back on the bed and pound the wall with my feet in blue lace-trimmed socks. This angry perpendicular march pounded into my head just how mad I was. And when that wore off I got even more mad that no one answered my pounding and I had to keep going even though my hamstrings were getting tight.

Once I convinced myself that the soles of my feet were developing blisters, I performed a graceful decrescendo in my foot parade with all the dignity I could muster. It was part of the plan. Silence, I told myself, would speak more loudly to my parents, who would worry they had driven me to some unheard terror.

Eventually I heard dinner plates being set at the table, casseroles being pulled from the oven, and - most insulting - my siblings laughing at some joke they shared without me. Did they not understand the complete injustice committed against me? Wouldn't they be having more fun if I were down there with them? ... and wouldn't I?

I wanted to be down at dinner, like none of this had ever happened, but I wanted my family to feel guilty and amend their wrongs. In short, I had put myself in a fix. With an ingenuity attesting to my mental development at the time, I found the perfect solution. I would pull my pink baby blanket over my head, Cousin It style, and go downstairs. The blanket would be a strong visual signal to them that apologies were in order. But I would still get to eat dinner.

I don't know how many times I went through this routine before growing out of it, but even now there are times I wonder if I'm still wearing my pink baby blanket.

This afternoon I called Abe after work to see what he wanted to do tonight. After a brief conversation that led to no real conclusion, he suddenly seemed to get very short with me.

I immediately went on the defensive: "Great. I just call him to see how his day was, to show that I'm so excited to spend the evening together, to give him cheerful ending to his workday, and here he has the nerve to get upset because I'm interrupting his work or being indecisive about what to do tonight. It's not I knew he'd be in the middle of something. He didn't have to answer the phone. Maybe I wanted to decide what to do together, be considerate of his feelings and mood."

Of course, that was all a mental note. My actual conversation went something like. "Okay. ... Well. ... Yeah. ... Bye." (click).

Which was also what I said an hour later when Abe called to say that he was on his way home. Except maybe without the "Bye" on my end. After all, the nerve of him.

When he got home I was out on the front lawn reading a book. I was laying on a blanket, but I may as well have had it over my head. After a minute Abe said, "So, I think you may have thought I was mad at you earlier on the phone."

I looked up, somewhat surprised. He wasn't even going to give me a chance to pound my feet against the wall?

He continued, "You see, I was about to sneeze, so ... you know how it gets. My words, my breath, got really short. But I was just trying not to sneeze."

Hm.

That's why we could never do a long-distance relationship. He just doesn't do well over the phone.

the hello sandwich

Saying hello has never been instinctual for me. One of my goals when I started my job in February was to always greet my coworkers when I passed by their office or saw them in the hall. Still, 50% of the time I regress to the turtle smile - a flicker of eye contact while the corners of my mouth draw straight back to my ears and my lips press together tightly. The veins in my neck probably bulge a little, too, but I refuse to check that in a mirror. Either way, the turtle smile is not exactly a "top of the morning to you".

Sometimes saying hello is genuinely difficult. Two of my sisters and I discovered this while hiking at Zion's National Park a few years back. As the three of us marched single file down the one-way trail, passing or being passed by another hiker, the first person could say hello just fine. As could the last. But the middle one was stuck in the "hello sandwich". They couldn't greet right after the first person because it didn't give the other party a chance to reciprocate, but if they waited an appropriate space of time, they were cut off by the third person.

Solution? Turtle smile. And if the veins didn't bulge before, imagine what happens when you're huffing and puffing along the trail. No wonder so many people would ask just how much longer did they have to go?

You can see how all of this gets complicated when the other party has 3 people in it, too. It's like a Big Mac - the third bun wedged in the middle makes an already uncomfortable experience downright disastrous.

Another problematic greeting situation is the post-appropriate hello. Where you really should have said hello much sooner and are now in the awkward position of either ignoring someone indefinitely or admitting outright to your hello shyness.

Example.

I was at my bus stop near work the other day and saw someone I was sure I knew. But I couldn't for the life of my figure out how I knew this person, and I convinced myself that however I knew them, it was some very awkward context - like someone I had been in a group with in school but didn't get along with. We kept catching each other sneaking sideways glances, until the bus came. Saved!

Imagine my despair when he was at my stop again a few weeks later.

(conversation inside Erin's head)
Just say hello. Do it now, before it gets awkward. You can still say it, there's still time. If you don't do it now, you'll regret it. Just ... Oh, well. Now the greeting stage of social norms is over. You'll have to get his attention first if you want to say anything. Don't look now unless you're going to. You're looking! ...where's the bus?...

Eventually I decided to say hello. Just as I did, I suddenly remembered where I knew this person from, remembered his name, and realized that there wasn't anything awkward about how we knew each other. After I blurted out his name in a rush of desperate enthusiasm, the result was a good conversation, and vastly improved future encounters.

Which is what I told myself this morning, when I finally said hello to the person I've been standing next to at the bus stop near my house for the last 4 months. And which turned out to be true.