Occasional Photo: Boxes

This is what the whole house looks like.

Equal Work at Home

My husband is awesome with my daughter (he’s at a birthday party with her while I’m home getting over a cold) and helping out with the housework. Our most frequent around-the-house disagreement is that I don’t let him cook supper enough. It’s a wonderful problem to have.

And it’s apparently not the norm. This article on parenting.com (which says that the study was representative) surveyed 1000 mothers and found that they are angry as hell because their husbands don’t help out enough. There’s no comparison data showing how it’s changed over the years; I’d be interested in seeing that because so many studies show that the hours men spend doing housework has increased over the years. I wonder if women are angrier now because we’ve been told that our husbands are supposed to be helping out more? Or are we less angry because we are getting more help?

I had an interesting conversation with a colleague once who claimed that the chores men typically do around the house are the ones they’re interested in and women do everything else. Is that part of the anger? That in order to get husbands to help out we don’t make them do the unappealing stuff? And then all women do is the stuff they don’t like? That’s not a good recipe for happiness.

And what the hell do the husbands think about all of this? Do they agree? Has anyone asked them how angry they are and why?

Part of me wonders how much of this is about different meanings of the word “clean.” One of the first things every person who shares an apartment learns is that a lot of roommate disagreements come from different cleanliness standards. Learning to adjust to someone else’s idea of clean is one of the hardest things to do. (And learning that if you ask someone to clean the sink and they don’t do as good a job as you, you have to accept that — the sink is cleaner than it used to be after all and you didn’t have to scrub it yourself.)

I feel like there’s a people-mangement lesson to be found in there, along with a happy marriage lesson.

It’s All Too Much

It’s All Too Much was a quick read. I think I read the whole thing (or the bulk of it — it’s been a couple of months) on a Saturday afternoon. There were no big revelations in it: if you have too much stuff, it can get in the way of you living your life. You keep stuff because of the life you want to have not because of the life you do have, and to a degree that’s all right, but you can’t let it get in the way of your relationships or let it get out of control.

What it is good at is motivation. The Sunday after I started reading it (perhaps after reading that stuff you don’t use = trash and why would you want to live with trash bit) I cleaned out my closet and bathroom cabinet. I was still feeling slightly disdainful of the book — why had I wasted my time reading it if it wasn’t going to tell me anything new, hey wait, did I just fill up ten bags full of stuff I don’t need and finally manage to go through all of my mom’s sewing stuff to figure out what I had and what I’d use? Yes, in fact I had. I haven’t missed any of the stuff since, either.

I might need to get it out of the library again to motivate me to tackle the office.

It’s All Too Much: Recommended

Occasional Photo: Christmas Tree

The best fake Christmas trees revel in their fakeness. This is my favorite of the two we own. It’s small enough to fit on the kitchen counter, which is fine by me.

My Garden, or the Ecosystem at Work

The garden this year was supposed to help feed us. Alas, it hasn’t worked out so well just yet. The only thing that’s grown to a harvest point (other than the herbs) is the arugula. And that managed to need to be harvested the week my daughter had pneumonia and my husband was out of town on a business trip. Needless to say, it went to seed, and we didn’t eat a leaf.

However, I let it keep going, mostly out of laziness (let’s be honest). But then it turned into a science experiment. A lot of bees made honey from the nectar in those flowers. (And now my daughter won’t go outside in the backyard because she’s convinced there’s a bee hiding in the plants that we just haven’t found yet.) It’s been about a month since they’ve stopped flowering, and I’ve been letting the hose drip some water over the plants to see how long it takes to make seeds.

It takes about a month. The birds arrived to eat some seeds this morning. Perhaps I need to harvest those and plant a second round of the arugula. Maybe we’ll eat some this time.

Ten Minute Post

I think I’m going to keep up this ten-minutes-to-write-a-post thing, at least until I get some idea about what to write about.

Eight minutes.

So, what’s going on today? Other than the fire causing lots of smoke? Not much. Peggy Noonan is both kind of awesome and kind of offensive. I called my brother a chicken after reading that article.

Seven minutes.

I had an idea last night, while I was nowhere near the computer to write about extreme domesticity. When I get sick (like last Tuesday) I tend to gravitate towards books like A Year in Provence, Julie & Julia, and Little Heathens. I used to think that it was travel books that made me feel better, but in fact it’s actually books about people doing insane things all in the name of good living. (Although Millie in Little Heathens was just born into rural Iowa and grew up during the depression — she was simply doing it to live, not for luxury’s sake.) I haven’t the foggiest idea why someone else’s borderline obsession cooking or housekeeping or building a new life in a foreign country actually helps me feel better when I’m sick or depressed but it does. Particularly when some of my favorite books are also about how people choose to leave places to grow. (The Dive from Clausen’s Pier, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay [sort of], and Doctor Who [TV, yes, but still damn good stories].)

The idea of extreme domesticity also amuses me.

Damn. Out of time. Have to come up with a point or conclusion some other time.

This Old House: Minus The Toxins

Real estate agent Amy Levin bought a historic, three-story house in Washington, D.C., more than a year ago, gutted it and rebuilt it. But it wasn’t your standard renovation. Levin used as many environmentally friendly, nontoxic and recycled materials as she could find, and she’s seeking what is known as LEED platinum certification from the U.S. Green Building Council.

- npr.org

I heard this on the radio last week. Interesting.

But It’s A Good Story!

I’m such a sucker for stories like this one.

In these times of mortgage crisis and credit card debt, of people living over their heads and losing their homes, it may be instructive to visit David and Gina Giffels, proud owners of an exquisitely renovated 1913 Tudor house, with six fireplaces, a solarium and a billiards room, which is well within their means, in part because they paid $65,000.

It is true, this was 12 years ago here in Akron, as the city was struggling to come out of its Rust Belt doldrums, and at the time the house was not so exquisite. It was, in fact, as the couple learned only at the closing, about to be condemned. There were large holes in the roof, various furry woodland animals in residence, a barely functional heating and plumbing system. The roof over the master bedroom leaked so badly that the previous owner had placed 55 aluminum baking pans on the floor to catch the rain. Passers-by, glimpsing the house through trees and brush, assumed it was deserted.

Things I’ll Be Doing This Weekend

Because it’s Labor Day weekend, everyone has to ask, “Any big plans this weekend?” This happens to be the only weekend between the beginning of August and the beginning of October that we *don’t* have any formal plans (although a birthday party is sneaking in at the last minute). This is going to be my only opportunity to do the any of the following for the next month, so I’m taking it. I’m going to:

• Cook about five different kinds of soups for lunches over the next month
• Bake bread (q: Has anyone out there ever tried to freeze already-risen but unbaked bread dough? Does it work?)
• Clean the house
• Iron my shirts
• Wash all the dirty clothes, instead of just the ones we’ll need in the following week
• Find a book I want to read *
• Answer my personal email
• Watch a movie

All of which is terribly domestic, but that’s ok.

* I’ve been having the worst problem finding something that I don’t want to put down after the first thirty pages. Except for Sandman (which is really good, but it’s a comic book so I’m not sure it really counts, but it’s written by Neil Gaiman whose stuff I really like…).

100 Reasons To Get Rid Of It

A list of 100 reasons to get rid of your stuff, including:

• People burn 55 minutes a day looking for things.
• 80 percent of what we own we never use.
• It hasn’t been used in over a year.
• And what’s the worst that can happen if you throw it out?

I remember reading once that spring cleaning used to be a religious ritual, and priests would bless a house to help drive out any remaining evil spirits that your cleaning hadn’t gotten rid of.

Parallel Processes

If I ever get the money, I am soooo putting three washing machines and three dryers into my house. I’m so sick of doing one load of laundry at a time, and having it take up the entire damn day.

Home Comforts

I’ve been using this book for almost a year as a reference. It’s useful. It’s helped me figure out what the right routines are, what I should do weekly and, most importantly, what I can blow off.

I’m not quite sure why I decided to read (sometimes skim) the entire 800 page book. I guess I thought that having more background information might improve my ability to run the apartment.

Truthfully, another reason is that as a part of staying home, I’ve cast my role as that of cost-cutter. Just like a company, a household has both revenue and costs. To build equity, you need to both bring in money and cut your costs. Since I’m doing very little to bring in revenue, I need to cut as many costs as possible. Home Comforts doesn’t have an explicit cost-cutting anything, but it does help you learn how to run a house more efficiently, which should lead to savings. If you make a list of meals for the weeks, and then base your grocery list on that, no only do you only go to the store once, you spend less money, waste less food, save time and you don’t worry about it again all week long. (Well, this was something I learned from my mother whilst growing up, but it was nice to see it confirmed.) So I’m running the apartment more efficiently in the hopes that it will help us cut costs.

I also approve of her matter-of-fact attitude. She understands that no one likes spending huge amounts of time cleaning or cooking and one of the ideas that she pushes – and I agree with – is that routines make it go faster (as you get more practice you do things faster and more efficiently) and put it into the background. She points out ways to streamline many tasks, and doesn’t approve of frills for their own sake. Frills need maintenance and the cost-benefit trade-off often isn’t worth it.

The book offers both a breadth and depth of housekeeping subjects, going deeply into make materials including cloth, stone, ceramics and wood. She answers what makes the different types of cloth, how ceramics are made, what types of materials are good for what uses and why. She’s not afraid to use equations, both arithmetic and chemical, to explain how things such as luminosity are measured or how glass cleaners work and how to make your own.

The apartment? Is cleaner than ever, for spending about the same amount of time on it. Not to mention that I now know about the evils of dust mites (eeewwwwww). Home Comforts is thorough, practical and useful.

Home Comforts: Highly Recommended

Originally published on degelau.com.

Work Smarter, not Harder

Software should be efficient. Businesses should be efficient. And, because I don’t like it very much, I also think that housework should be efficient.*

The problem is that I’m just not good enough at housework to also be efficient at it. I didn’t really learn how to properly keep a house clean until I moved to Atlanta and got pregnant (then, deciding not to look for work so I could stay home with the kid meant I had the time). My theory was that, if I did it enough, I’d get better at it. So I followed Cheryl Mendelson’s recommendation to do a basic housecleaning once a week.

Now that there’s a toddler involved, I’m lucky if the house gets cleaned once a month. I’d like to go back to once per week, but I really need two hours with no one else in the house making it messy behind me. At least that’s what I think. I keep hatching plots to get the house clean other ways, most notably by cleaning in the evenings, which just never seems to take off. Probably because I like having those couple of hours of downtime everyday. And there’s always other stuff that comes up.

I could throw money at the problem by hiring a housekeeper, but I’d really rather not. I’m still convinced I can do this, I just have to figure out how… I think it’s going to eventually involve doing a time trade with my husband: you take the kid to the park for two hours on Saturday mornings while I clean, and I’ll take her out for a different set of two hours during the weekend so you can get some work done.

*Just so we’re all clear: efficiency is the largest amount of work done in the least amount of time. You can also call it productivity, as many folks do when measuring people (as opposed to processes or software). But don’t measure it like the US Government does: GDP per worker. That doesn’t take time into account which, to my mind, is a big component of efficiency. You need to measure it as: GDP per hour worked. But the government likes the first measure because the US always tops the head of that list. If you use the second measure, France tops the list.