Christopher Street

Welcome, Lori, to 2003

So, right after I write about how nothing ever happens, something happened.

We got HD.

Now, I know what you're thinking. *Lori* doesn't have HD? The TiVoGoddess herself has been plodding around, watching TV like it's 1989?

Well, yes.

Here's the thing. When HD first came out, there just weren't enough channels to justify the hassle. And then, later, I required a DVR. And those early DVRs couldn't really record all that much HD before they were ALL full up. And then TiVo got out of the DirecTV/HD business. And then...

And then, I got fed up with TiVo. And no longer give a rat's patootie if my DVR has that goofy dude on the front.

So. I have a shiny new DVR that records 100 hours of HD. Not a lot...I wish that it recorded twice that. But we kept the 400+ hour TiVo, and that can serve to record all of the non-critical stuff. It will probably be fine.

I will say this. I have historically derided HD. I have said things like "How pretty does TV need to BE?" and "I grew up with an antenna that was 100 feet from the house and had to be turned with a wrench...as long as I can recognize basic human shapes, I'm good." Even earlier this week, I said to John that we would be able to maximize our storage space by continuing to record non-essentials in SD. Again, I said, how pretty does Wheel of Fortune need to be?

Well, last night I watched Wheel of Fortune in HD and it is pretty.

Damn pretty.

Kind of addictively pretty.

<--- off to look at terabyte hard drives. :)

My Boring Sixth Life

I said a long time ago that I think of my life as having six parts. The first part has me at home with my parents, a cute, bright kid at first and then, later, a miserable, snarkfest of a teenager who wanted to belong almost as desperately as she didn't.

Part two finds me at college, living in the dorm, with my parents continuing to deposit my allowance into my checking account, and picking up my laundry every week. I was not quite grown.

Part three finds me with my first job, my first apartment, my first laundry basket. Still in school, and living a nomadic, quasi-bohemian existence, I managed to work almost enough hours every month to pay my phone bill.

Part four has me mostly grown, living on my own, far away from home. I worked three jobs, and took four buses and three trains every weekday to get to two of them. The third job I walked to.

Part five is when I fled that miserable, public-transit-filled existence and came back home, moved in with my brother, went to Grad school and experienced more drama--not to mention more cheap wine--that one would think could be crammed into 3 years. Part five has many, many stories...but not all of them are mine to tell, and the whole thing makes no sense without all the stories, taken together. So, you may not find out much about part five. That's OK. Many of you lived it with me. :)

This brings us to part six.

Part six is big, and sprawling. It covers the past 17 years. Parts 1-5 cover the 25 that came before.

Part six is also largely boring. Nothing really happens. I mean, yes, I get up, I go to work and things happen there, funny things, awful things, sad things. Things that I won't write about and, really, you don't care about. Then I come home, and I make dinner, or we go to dinner, or John makes dinner, and we watch Jeopardy, and I read or knit or nap on the sofa. Sometimes there's some TV in there. Sometimes, if we go out to dinner, we also get custard, or go to Borders. Sometimes, we venture to the mall. Not often, though.

Then I feed the cats and go to bed. Mondays and Thursdays the trash goes out.

The next morning, it all starts again.

Now, obviously *sometimes* things happen. Sometimes, we get a new housekeeper, or I learn to make socks. Sometimes, I make a fabulous scarf, or my guy wins American Idol. Sometimes we see an Imax movie. Sometimes it's Christmas.

But for the most part, you now are intimately acquainted with part six of my life.

It is my favorite part.

Okay, so maybe the roses were a little much

So, I mentioned yesterday that I have a new housekeeper. She started yesterday, and so yesterday cleaned my house for the first time.

Now, let me say a couple things. First, I don't clean. When I do, it's usually not well. However, I recently had a party for my husband's birthday, and I hired *professional* cleaners to come and clean--TWICE--in the two weeks before the party.

Granted, there was a party after the cleaning, and that party likely caused the house to have *some* dirt that wasn't there immediately post-cleaning. But still. I still paid these *professional* cleaners OVER THREE HUNDRED DOLLARS to clean my house. Twice.

So, the new housekeeper comes yesterday, and she cleans.

And cleans.

And cleans.

And cleans.

She cleaned, non-stop, for 6 and 1/2 hours. SIX AND A HALF HOURS. She spent SIX and ONE HALF hours, cleaning a house that had been professionally cleaned twice already in the past three weeks.

I know that I seem like a broken record here...but the mind boggles.

And she found dirt. Oh, yes, she did. 14 filthy rags worth of dirt. Yes, I counted them as they went into the washing machine last night. 14. Filthy. Rags. I believe that she may have cleaned things that have never been cleaned, all the way back to the dawn of time. It's possible that she slid through a wormhole and cleaned the Ark. The messy rooms, the ones with the goats.

She also did things that have left me a bit gobsmacked. To wit:

5. She removed the bottom cushions from the sofa and the chair and vacuumed under them. I know this because she flipped the cushions (one side has a small stain), and because she retrieved 5 packages of rolaids soft chews from the chair. Score! (I know that that's where they came from, because I vaguely remember one night looking for the remote in the chair cushions, and finding a package of rolaids and thinking...hmmm...there are rolaids in the chair. That's interesting. Of course, being me, I put them back.)

4. She very carefully organized the basket in the guest bathroom. This is the basket that holds soaps and lotions liberated from hotels all over the country. It's a bit of a hot mess, and I just keep getting more soaps...but she very carefully extricated the body lotions, and lined them up next to the basket, and then reorganized what was left. Extraordinary.

3. She left the cats' water cup alone. I was concerned about this, because to the untrained eye, it just looks like a purple plastic cup sitting in the bedroom. But it is the only thing that Zoe ever wants to drink out of. We call it the vessel, as in "the human will fill the vessel with the liquid now." If I were cleaning my house, I would have thrown it away. I was prepared for her to throw it away. I do have other plastic cups that I had prepared to push into service. But she must have picked it up, vacuumed, and then replaced it. She must have animals.

2. She cleaned my hairbrush. I know. I can't actually wrap my mind around that one either.

1. On the toilet paper rolls, she made roses. Out of the end sheets. Of toilet paper. Roses. On my toilet paper. On the three active rolls in the three bathrooms, and also on the two spare rolls in the guest bath.

Okay, so maybe the roses were a little much. :)

Don't gotta live like that no more

I sometimes think that when I go public with things, things that I want to do, or be...that I might have a better shot at actually doing them...or being them. It doesn't always work. I famously announced in this very blog that I would learn to knit socks in 2004. And, then, you know, I didn't. I did later, but that hardly counts.

However, in that spirit, here's my testimony. :)

I live my life in a state of barely controlled chaos. Dishes are rarely caught up. Laundry is never done, until I run out of underwear. When you have as much underwear as I have, that means that laundry can pile up for weeks on end. When I do do laundry, I rarely put it away, because my closet is so jammed with clothes that I don't wear that there's no place to put the clothes that I do wear. Cat food dishes get washed only when there are no more dishes to feed the cats on...and even then, I must say, it's not out of the question to feed them on paper plates until I get around to cleaning theirs. I put gas in my car only after the gas light comes on, and even then, frequently only buy enough to get me where I am going, a habit which makes my mom nuts.

Now, the thing is, this level of chaos makes me have anxiety. I am constantly afraid that the toilet will back up, and a plumber will need to come into the house, and I will be mortified.

However, for the 25 years since I moved out of my parent's house, this anxiety has not kept the house clean.

This is not to say that it is never clean. We have had services, off and on, over the years, and they certainly do a pretty good job of imposing order on my chaos. But as soon as they...move to alaska, or have some sort of freaky brain operation, or get themselves fired for any number of infractions, the chaos, barely suppressed, breaks free.

Two years ago, we forced order on the chaos, and I promised myself that I would persevere. I was so calm, so at peace in my very tidy, very organized house, that the 30 minutes per day (and $200 per month for the cleaning service) seemed to be a trivial investment in a lifetime of serenity.

I told myself, every day, that my life could be different. That I could be that girl, the one with the clean house. I told myself every day that I don't gotta live like that no more.

That last is a quote from Jason Mewes, Jay to Kevin Smith's Silent Bob. As a recovering heroin addict, Jason tells himself that every day when he wakes up and faces a smack-free life. I am not doing drugs today because I don't gotta live like that no more.

I am doing the dishes because I don't gotta live like that no more.

Two years ago, sadly, it did not stick. My life spiraled--again--out of control. An angry vortex of undone laundry, and dirty dishes, and junkmail and an empty gas tank. I would occasionally look at the dis-order and think...man, I should do something about this. I should...just...well, I could start by...or maybe, I could dig out that cleaning schedule...and then I could...

I became fatigued just thinking about it.

But now, once again, we have pulled out of the abyss. My laundry? Completely done. My closet? Totally organized. Clothes I don't wear? Given to charity. Seven lawn bags full. My dishes? Caught up? Cat plates? All clean, except for the ones that are currently being eaten off of. Mail? Sorted. Yarn? Organized into clear plastic boxes. Gas tank? FULL. And there is a very stern new housekeeper, and she will force me to keep up with it.

Apparently, I don't gotta live like that no more.

Hello.

So, I blogged a lot for a while, and a little for a lot longer. And then I decided that I loved facebook way better than blogging anyway...and I thought that I was better at it. So I stopped blogging entirely.

But, see, the thing with facebook is that it's not terribly permanent...it's very much of the now. And that's a problem when I'm trying to *find* that picture that I posted on Serena's page two months ago...can't search, have to just...look. And look. And look.

So, since I already have this fancy blog, I thought that it might make some sense to post things here that I might ever want to see again. :) So, I'm back? A little?

Heh.