Hate

Oh my gosh.  I hate my oven.  I loathe it.  I want it to die.  It’s already half-dead.

I’m making a pork loin roast.  I know damned well how to cook it.  350 degrees, 30 minutes per pound.  So imagine my surprise when I pulled my roast out of the oven and noticed that the top of it was STILL RAW.  The bottom was overcooked.

So now, half an hour after my side dishes (cheddar broccoli rice and sauteed green beans) were done, I’m still fucking with the roast.  I think another 15 minutes ought to do it.

There is no valid reason that this oven should suck so much.  It’s only three years old.

Gah.

U R DOING IT WRONG

I’ve been thinking a lot in the last 36 hours.  In fact, I’ve been so deep in thought that I can’t remember whether I took the Excedrin I’d planned to take at 3:00.  I’m becoming my mother.

Yesterday I learned that a close friend of mine received something of a windfall.  During her family’s Christmas gathering, her husband’s grandfather gave each of his children and grandchildren a check for $10,000.  This isn’t the first time he’s ever done it, but it is the first time he’s done it since my friend entered the picture.

It’s a real blessing for them, especially right now.  When they married, my friend lost state benefits including food stamps and a daycare subsidy for her toddler.  After paying for daycare, they found that her job was netting very little.  Once they accounted for the hassle of getting the household up at dawn, juggling one car between two employed adults, eating out more often because they were both tired, and other little “costs of employment,” they decided that my friend would quit her job and stay home with her daughter.  Long story short, they are broke, and $10,000 made a world of difference for them.

They are spending it wisely.  They are going to pay a school debt that my friend owes, catch up on some back taxes that her husband owes, and hire a lawyer to see about reducing the amount of child support her husband has to pay.  He currently pays twice as much as the standard 20%, meaning that his newly-married ex-wife pays the mortgage on her nice new home with his money while he lives in a shabby and seriously ghetto apartment complex. They are also going to put down a rental deposit on a duplex or townhouse (and finance a move), have a proper Christmas, and “pay it forward” by gifting $500 to someone who really needs it.  I think that’s great.

I spent some time thinking about what I would do with $10,000.  I probably wouldn’t pay my own back taxes, because $10,000 wouldn’t cover it once the fines and penalties are added.  But I have plenty of other expenses.  I’d catch up my own school debt and pay for a semester of community college.  I’d pay off my student loan entirely, which would eat up about a quarter of the money — but would enable me to get financial aid, including loans, in the future.  I would get a cheap but reliable car.  I would get either new glasses, or contacts, or both.  I would buy new socks, because it turns out that I only have one pair of matching socks at this point.  I lived in freaking Missouri the last time I bought socks.  I would buy underwear and bras and earrings.  I would buy some books.  I’d file bankruptcy, so that I can attempt to start over again.

Of course, no one is going to give me $10,000.  It’s really just mental masturbation.

When I think about excess amounts of money, my mind invariably wanders to Allison, someone I knew when I was a child.  We were in the same third-grade class, but that’s about all we had in common.  Allison, though not really pretty, was extremely well-groomed.  She got perms regularly and her hair was always fixed in a barette with a bow on it.  Her mother made the barettes, and gave me one for my tenth birthday. 

I went to Allison’s house exactly one time, and I doubt I will ever forget it.  When my dad pulled into her driveway, I was already in awe.  Allison lived in the nicest neighborhood in our city.  It would be considered upper middle class even by Dallas standards.  Six of the houses in my neighborhood would have easily fit into her one house.  And it was during Christmas break, so the house was decorated.  It was absolutely beautiful.  Her parents weren’t there, and Allison’s 16-year-old sister was watching us.  She made lunch for us — whatever we wanted!   The idea of being able to pick anything I wanted from a well-stocked kitchen was a bit overwhelming for me.

In addition to the twenty-foot Christmas tree in their foyer, there were other fresh Christmas trees throughout the house.  The living room, the den, Allison’s basement playroom… And one beautifully-decorated three-foot tree in Allison’s perfect bedroom.  At the time, I was amazed that she had her own telephone and television.  Looking back, I can see the amount of not just money, but also TIME, that Allison’s mother put into giving her children a nice life. 

Allison wasn’t spoiled and she wasn’t mean.  She showed up to school every day in lovely and undoubtedly expensive clothes, but it would never have crossed her mind to make fun of what someone else was wearing.  She was raised well in every sense of the word, and though I only ever met her mother once, I have continued to admire her for the nearly 20 years it’s been since I last saw Allison. 

In short, I feel as though I am living life WRONG.  Sometimes it flashes through my head, lolcat-style: “U R DOING IT WRONG.”

If life is choices, then I have consistently made the wrong ones.

How do you unravel nine years of bad choices?

Lazy Saturday

This is a pretty calm, peaceful day. 

I’m feeling mostly better except for a little residual congestion and fatigue, which is mild enough to not drive me insane.  I imagine a heavy dose of Claritin-D will help with both.

My only agenda item for this evening is baking another batch of oatmeal cookies, this time without chocolate chips because neither the man nor the child like chocolate chips (WEIRDOS).  I’m happy to do it, though, because I like holiday baking.

The Cowboys are playing their last home game in Texas Stadium.  Next season, they’ll play in what I call “the spaceship.”  I call it that because it looks like a spaceship.  I’ll post a picture if I ever remember to take one.  Not that I really care about this anyway.

Emerging

I have a really fun idea for everyone to try at home.

1. Send your significant other out of town on business for a week, then head out of state to visit your family.  Leave your house in the incapable and slightly grimy hands of one obsessive-compulsive weirdo who collects garbage and two nineteen year old slobs.

2. Come back five days later with the flu, and hide under a pile of blankets for a week.

3. Assume your significant other also gets the flu.  Or that he never does any housework any damned way.  Or both.

4. Emerge from your blankets and look around.  Notice the bags of garbage sitting in your dining room and be grateful that it’s in bags (most of it, anyway).  Check out the dirty dishes overflowing from the sink, the half-empty dishes on what seems like every available surface, the papers and various other nonsense strewn everywhere.  Take in the unidentifiable odor.  Notice that the caulk around your toilet is, again, yellow.  Briefly wonder how the roommates wiped their asses while you were out of town, because you know they were out of toilet paper until you came back.  Remember that every bit of laundry you own, including all bedding, needs to be washed.

5.  Smoke way too many cigarettes in hopes that you will die of cancer NOW so that you don’t have to clean up after these fucking assholes.

Who You Is?

Last night I went to CVS on a mission to find things that would make the man feel better.  This was not an altruistic mission because it wasn’t my idea and I didn’t completely want to.  In fact, I was angry that I was going out of my way to help him when he didn’t do a damn thing to help me.  But something brightened my day (or night, as it were).

A little black boy, probably four or MAYBE five years old, walked up to me and asked: “Who you is?”

I told him my name and he said “oh, hi!” and darted off.

This is completely un-PC and probably will make someone somewhere mad, but I just have to say that I LOVE little black boys.  They are the greatest.  There’s something spunky and humorous about them that steals my heart.  I want to take them home and feed them dinner.

Line-Item Update

I’m still sick. 

Now the man is sick, and he is the world’s biggest baby when sick.  Bring you hot apple cider?  Why don’t YOU BRING ME HOT APPLE CIDER!?!?!??!!!!??????!?!?

The economy sucks but at least gas is cheap.

I have no Christmas tree.

I’ve been getting my “Christmas fix” from HGTV & The Food Network.

Roommates A & C have moved out.

Thank heavens for that.  They were really behaving badly towards the end.

Roommate B is just as much of a choad as he ever was.

I have devoured the first two books in the Twilight series.

I also saw the movie.

I can’t read the third until I haul my ass over to my friend’s house to borrow it, which will be sometime after I am no longer contagious.

I could use a shower.  And my house could use a cleaning.  And so could my laundry.

I am apparently a “grass is always greener” type of person.  I missed the man while I was in Missouri.  Now that I’m back in Texas, I miss my family.

I am currently obsessed with hot cocoa.  Yes, the kind you can get twelve packets of for a dollar.  Preferably with marshmallows and McCormick Cocoa Chile Blend.

Holiday Cheer Plus News About Mucus

I spent last week with my family in Missouri, which was nice.  Then I came back to the male-inhabited pigsty where I currently live, which wasn’t nice.  Two of the males are moving out (including one newly-acquired male) in the middle of next week, so I plan to ignore all housekeeping tasks until that happens.  This fits in quite conveniently with my schedule, which is crammed full of tasks like “cough until your stomach hurts” and “blow nose repetitively OR choke on postnasal drip (or both).”  I am hella sick and the medicine, while noticeable, isn’t making it better.

For your holiday entertainment:

Slacker.

Wow.  Not only did I not finish my list in one day, but I haven’t finished it in the majority of a week!  In fact, I stopped on Monday night and have made not one iota of progress since then.  I AM AWESOME!

But, once my headache subsides, I am going to pick the list back up and try again.  The house MUST get super-clean because during the next three to five days, I am going to do something super-fun: I am going to decorate for Christmas.  I don’t really have *that* much stuff, but I am going to put up a tree and decorate it, set out some candles, etc.  Since it will annoy one of my roommates (who pisses me off me on a daily basis and tries to screw us out of money), I am going to do everything in my power to Christmas the shit out of our house.

Roommate B plays piano and has agreed to regale us with Christmas tunes.  And I will be aggressively baking.  And there will be mistletoe, though I will stay far away from it!

It’s Impossible To Maintain Respect For Men After Thoroughly Cleaning A Bathroom

33 Lysol disinfectant wipes valiantly sacrificed their lives in my downstairs bathroom… Then I ran out.

OH NOES.

Let me explain.  This may be a difficult concept to understand if you aren’t a man or don’t live with a man… But if you meet one of those qualifiers, I encourage you to inspect the caulk that seals your commode to the floor.  Chances are, it’s at least a little yellow.  Well, I’ll let you in on a secret: CAULK IS NOT YELLOW.  URINE IS.

I don’t blame either myself (for my lackluster cleaning attempts thus far) or the man (for, hello, yellow caulk)… Because we’ve only lived here for two months, and it takes much longer than that for caulk to coat itself with this amount of piss/dirt/dust/grime.  And it’s not that the bathroom has never ever been cleaned… It’s just that cleaning the toilet bowl and mopping the floor don’t do a single thing for dirty, stained caulk.

So I’ve spent the last 1.5 hours in the bathroom floor, sitting on my ass, disinfecting every part of the toilet… and the caulk… and the floor… and the baseboards.  You could eat off of my bathroom floor right now, if you were so inclined.  Well, you could eat off HALF of my bathroom floor.  I didn’t get to the rest of it because I ran out of Lysol wipes.  In addition to the remainder of the downstairs bathroom, I also have the entire (larger and dirtier) upstairs bathroom to contend with.  This means I am going to need A LOT OF LYSOL WIPES.  Like maybe 100.

By the time I get done with the house, these assholes I live with are going to owe me something… Like maybe a week in Cabo.

Headline: Mentally Ill Woman Cleans Her House, OCD-Style

I am trying to get better at keeping a clean house.  I am also trying not to complain about doing it, because nobody likes a bitch and I am the Queen of Bitches while tackling tasks such as scraping mounds of old rice out of a bowl that my roommate left sitting out overnight.

Anyway, in the spirit of OCD, I present a list of items I am tackling today:

1) Unload/reload dishwasher

2) Wipe down counters in kitchen/clear clutter/take out garbage

3) Launder all bedding, including pillows & mattress pad

4) Downstairs bathroom: Put away miscellaneous items, sanitize sink, clean mirror, scrub toilet & add blue tab, clean baseboards, sweep/mop, take out trash

5) Finish all laundry, or as much as time permits (roommate needs washer/dryer this evening)

6) Drag laundry upstairs; hang/fold (this will be a monumental undertaking as I already have piles folded on the dining room table and laid out flat over chairs

7) Clear off dining table; dust table & chairs

Vacuum dining room

9) Clear off/organize/dust computer/desk/chair

10) Dust coffee/end tables, tv, tv stand

11) Vacuum living room & hallway; check furniture for cat hair and get that if needed

12) Make a pitcher of tea (hey, I like to throw in an easy one from time to time)

13) Fold/put away blankets & pillows in living room

14) Dust/clean washer and dryer, clean lint filter

15) Re-organize top shelf in laundry room

16) Change cat litter in laundry room (gross!)

17) Take garbage out of laundry room

18) Sweep/mop laundry room (I’m not so worried about the baseboards in there, though they could use work… I’m pretty sure none of the baseboards in this house have ever been cleaned and YOU KNOW HOW I FEEL ABOUT THAT)

19) Upstairs bathroom: Scrub shower & replace shower curtain, scrub toilet & add blue tab, disinfect sink, clean mirror, change cat litter, clean out cabinet, drag shelf & boxes of “bathroom stuff” in from garage, organize said stuff, clean baseboards, sweep/mop

20) Bedroom: Bring dishes downstairs (yes, there are half-empty glasses in my room… several of them), gather & take out trash, put away miscellaneous items, drag mattress upright & Febreze it), spray carpet freshener & vacuum, make bed with clean linens, polish dresser, install plug-in air freshener

I’m not putting it on my list, but I am also making dinner tonight: pork loin roast, baked potatoes, a vegetable of some sort.  It will actually be a comparatively simple dinner that can bake while I tackle other things.

Tomorrow’s list includes, at this point: job interview, dust blinds, wash windows (inside), clean window sills, disinfect doorknobs & light switch covers, tidy up outside areas.  And, realistically, some “overflow” from today’s list… Because that’s a hell of a lot of stuff to do in one day.