Housewife Challenge

30 Day Challenge

 

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I have 7 tabs open on my laptop (other than this one and tumblr):

Judging by my subconscious hoarding of websites, my life is clearly a disaster that I assume I can solve in 30 days. It takes me 30 days just to put the vacuum cleaner back after I use it, you’d think I’d be more realistic with my goals. I need to get my life in order, I really do. I also need to get my writing in order. I think I saw something for NaNoWriMo once that I might try, probably another 30 day challenge.

I know the 30 day lists seem gimmicky and ridiculous and they probably are, but the whole deal with the challenges thing for me is that I think it takes the thinking out of it which is really my biggest hurdle in life. The thinking. Also the clutter. And the procrastination. And the internet.

I started writing this on April 1st but I stopped because it felt like I was trying to subconsciously pull an April Fool’s joke on myself. It’s now April 27. lol.

I really need to get organized though because we’re moving in exactly 2 months and I am not packing 37 broken crayons, my bag of scrap fabric, the shoes that the sole fell off of three years ago, and whatever that thing is behind the sofa that I don’t want to touch but I’m hoping is a sock. So as much as I want to do the splits, I think a 30 day declutter challenge is probably a better way to spend a month. I have not given up on the splits though, so don’t put the Mary Lou Retton leotard away just yet.

I need to make this short because my husband is dragging me with him to our storage unit to get rid of stuff so I’ll probably be crying about stuffed animals, a broken bass guitar, and baby clothes in about 15 minutes. Wish me luck.

Ghost Eye for the Alive Guy

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I sat down to pee last night and I got hit in the head by my son’s plastic, Halloween sickle that was propped up behind the bathroom door. That’s how Death is going to take me. Not slicin’ and dicin’ like some garden variety Freddy Krueger, the Grim Reaper is too sophisticated for such dramatics. He’s just going to jump scare me into a heart-attack on the toilet. Like Elvis.

Now, if I would have met my eternal demise then and there, we would be in quite a pickle. The obvious, number one reason being no pants. I probably want to be wearing pants when I die. Secondly, my bathroom is a disaster. Like biohazard zone disaster. I should probably take some Scrubbing Bubbles to the sink soon and like, a flame torch to the rest of it. I can’t be found naked and slumped over in a truck-stop resembling bathroom. It’s embarrassing. Not only for me, but future generations that have to relive the humiliation in stories told and retold ’round the campfire in vivid detail.

I’m going to need a cleaner. Like a personal assistant but like super loyal that will take care of all of my indiscretions before the news teams and nosy neighbors arrive to find all my photoshops of Prince as a ghost in purple undies. This might be hard to coordinate though because, as my super loyal personal assistant life restorer, you’d have to be on call for like, ever because I don’t plan on ever dying. I’m going to be like one of those Twilight vampires with the glittery skin that live well into their 1,000s. The easy thing to do would be to just keep my life together while I’m alive, yes, but let’s be honest, this is not a skill I currently have on my resume.

Now that I think about the logistics of this, someone call up TLC, this is a show idea! I need either Theresa Caputo or Zak Bagans to team up with like, Oprah and the What Not to Wear team to come in with a camera crew and sort me out. They can help me throw away my underwear with the holes in them, sort through my emails, vacuum, make friends with current ghosts already in the building, etc.

I base a lot of my knowledge of the afterlife on what I’ve seen in the movies, mostly Ghost and Beetlejuice and here’s the thing, once you’re a ghost, you’re stuck in the clothes you died in. I don’t make the rules. So do we want comfort or haute couture? Like, do I have to walk around in Gucci the rest of my life? Is this why you see so many ghosts in ballgowns? Or am I okay haunting the halls in my sweatpants? Dying on the toilet will still be a problem, but that’s what you hope your family is for. Emily Dickinson’s family published her poems after she died, I’m just trying to get mine to agree to pull up my pants.

This could be my new life path. Live in a way that won’t embarrass me when I die. Although, what kind of life is that boring nonsense? Maybe I would have a better shot if I live my life preparing those around me for my embarrassing ghost phase. Like openly weeping in the hallway at various times throughout the day and adding photoshopped pictures of Prince to my email signatures.

Just please, someone’s gotta pull up my pants if I’m on the toilet.

 

 

 

Sent from my

The Purge

It sounds like a horror movie and to be honest, it feels like one. Does throwing things away expunge the soul of everything holding us down? Does it release the heavy? The “sin” of sloth?

I know two types of people, those that throw everything out, including yearbooks and old math tests from 1994 senior year without ever looking back, and then there are the hoarders. Not one of them seems particularly happy and as much as we all lie to ourselves about it, everyone is either a tosser or a keeper.

I’m a keeper. Probably not in like the relationship sense if we’re basing anything on my poor, unfortunate husband’s defeated eye rolls and sighs, but a keeper in like the “keeping the napkin I was holding the time that Prince (yeah, that Prince) sat next to me at a cafe at Universal City Walk that they’ll find under a rat carcass in the hallway when I’ve been forcibly removed from my home by Human Services or a reality show” sense. My husband is the thrower-out type. I’m surprised he hasn’t tossed me. It’s because he’s a saint.

I do not want to be a hoarder. I don’t. I see Pinterest, I am aware of the “freedom from clutter”, the Scandinavian Chic, the lie that is the Shipping Crate home. It doesn’t work for me because Pinterest hasn’t told me where to put my Prince napkin and my homework from that Italian class I took in college 20 years ago. Because what if I remember how to read in Italian, Pinterest? What good would that be if I’ve thrown away all those verb conjugations? I’d be sitting on my faux fur, white rug, backdropped by my exposed brick living room wall with nothing to read.  I also have children which means that carpet wouldn’t stay white for long. In my living room, there are currently three bins overflowing with Rock Em Sock Em Robots, torn comic books, every Lego magazine that has ever been mailed to us, a broken, plastic dreidel, trains, cars, baby toys (no babies here), broken army men, a blue and white Dodgers’ wig (it’s cursed, that’s a different post), A Tim Salmon bobblehead, and a karate belt (we’re not in karate). There’s art projects and homework papers and little notes that say “i LOvE YOU mOM”. I can’t throw that away. And yet somehow I was able to condense a huge bin of every piece of schoolwork my 4th grader ever brought home into an easy to manage folder yesterday. And if I think about all his handprints and backwards letters and spelling tests that are in the trash can now, I’ll cry. So I have to pretend that they don’t exist anymore and that’s a lot of stress. How do the Pinterest people relax and just live??

Tossers?? How do you live?? Have you no souls?

On the opposite end, I’m tired of moving no less than seven shopping bags of old fabric scraps and half-finished sewing projects every time I need to use my desk and I’m pretty sure that less stuff would give the cat hair less area to cling to. Who knows though, it tumbles down the hallway regardless.

I promised the husband that I would clean out these toy bins before the kids get home from school. I have done nothing but toggle back and forth from tumblr and this post while yelling at the cat to stop scratching the couch since 8 am.

But I’m on a quest. To de-stuff my life. It won’t be Pinterest pretty (unless someone knows of a Pinterest board that can help). Just note that I have been attempting The Purge since at LEAST 2013 blogspot days which doesn’t bode too well for me.   I think what I really need is a Roomba.

How powerful is a Roomba? Like if it found a dead rat, hypothetically, could it remove it before the reality show people bring my mom into this?

Housewifing 101: “Ladylike Exercises” (part 2)

part 1

I’m supposed to be doing the daily exercise thing as soon as I wake up in the morning. “Only 5 minutes a day!” but I woke up this morning cold and annoyed at the cat so my first thoughts were things like, “I’m going to feed you to pigeons, cat.”, not looking at my neighbors from my open window while dancing an Irish jig because I need the “open air”. Although now that I think of the bar I could raise around here by kicking my own buttcheeks while I stare down a groggy-eyed neighbor who was just woken up by Riverdance, the morning jigs take on a whole new importance.

I haven’t done the exercises yet, though. I’ve thought about doing them, or rather, how I’m not doing them while I sip my coffee and judge people on social media before the kids wake up and demand their breakfasts. I should do them, if only for the power-play on unsuspecting neighbors and the added bonus “concerned look” from my husband.

I haven’t been sitting around on my comfy pants laurels, though, so give me a break. I have regularly been walking around the neighborhood with my nurse friend (I take a nurse in case I die) on her days off, or when she forgets how much I embarrassed us on our last walk, and yesterday I went on a hike through the Malibu hills (or are they mountains? I’m from Colorado so everything else is hills. Deal with it, hills) anyway, we were hiking with the Cub Scouts and it was a thing and I demand exercise credit and possibly an award for it.

First of all, we get there, we’re not even walking yet, we’re just there in a big group and the bugs begin surrounding me like they can already smell my death, which is flattering considering we decided to meet in front of the bathrooms.

I smell worse than public bathrooms.

I’m trying to act cool like this doesn’t bother me as the Scout leaders start talking about safety.  They’re showing us these high resolution, charts and arty photographs and I’m standing here looking like Pigpen suddenly realizing that I still have no idea what poison oak looks like even though I’m right here looking at a picture of it.  Like I see it on those charts in all of its various forms and colors, but I promise I will be the one who will walk right into a whole patch because they’re pretty much like any other plant growing around. And here’s the thing with this crappy plant, from what I think I understand, you don’t even know you touched it for like days and then your skin sets itself on fire. Like is it shingles? Is it an angry demon? How would I ever know? This is why I avoid the outside. Bugs and poison. Maybe there is something to exercising inside in front of a screened window. I mentally note this as I slap away some flies that were hanging out and probably starting to lay their bug eggs on my calf. I should’ve gotten one of those beekeeper suits or something. In fact, maybe that’s just how I go outside from now on. I’ll just become “The bug suit lady” to the kids. Annoyingly, I did not have a suit on this journey and I did not know what plants were demons and I hoped that maybe my cloud of flies would protect me and I don’t wake up in a week clutching a bible.

But we did it. We hiked. My legs were shaky, the den leaders were picking up trash as they went and looking at me like it’s my turn next. Dude, I was lucky I could lift my leg to climb up the really steep path, the candy wrappers will not be picked up by me. You’ll have better luck thinking that a bird will get excited by the glint off the shiny wrapper, pick it up and fly it off to a trash bin than you do of me doing it.  I was also in my high-top Chuck Taylors because athletic shoes are super ugly and I will suffer for my fashion. Even if it means slipping off a cliff to my death. I did not slip and die but I felt like it could’ve happened at any given moment.

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This picture makes it appear that I am really tall, towering over all these men and children.

Anyway, I went outside. I did exercise. I worried that kids were going to fall off tall rocks, I got bit by bugs. I do not know what poison oak looks like, I am not tall. See, I do not feel the same sense of dread or general bug infestation from my living-room, so tomorrow, I jig.  And stare down the neighbors. It’s much more my speed.

Housewifing 101: “Ladylike Exercise” (part 1)

As soon as I saw the quote, “This practical handbook for the home […] offers advice that ranges from cleaning white gloves, making miniature table gardens and living-room pouffes to lady-like exercises ” on the back cover of this book, I knew a few things.

  1.  I would never be able to keep white gloves clean, so as classy as they would make my dinner sweatsuit, I’m glad they went out of fashion and I won’t have to lick liquid cheese off of them at a dinner party hoping no one notices the stain.
  2.  Everyone I know is getting miniature table gardens for Christmas whether they celebrate it or not.
  3. I don’t exercise and as much as I try to fool people, I don’t often get praised on my ladylike behavior, but since I walked like 6 miles today and my legs hurt really bad, AND because I finally found the “Lady-like exercises” portion of this book after laughing at the back cover for 3 days, that’s it. That’s the place I start on this blog challenge.

I know. I’m already late starting this even though I’ve had this planned out for like week now, but look, this wouldn’t be a proper “Amy challenge” if I didn’t procrastinate the whole thing and then roll up late and unshowered because I was investigating ghosts on the internet so, LET’S GO!

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Okay, this page already makes me uncomfortable because as much as I’m supposed to 100% LOVE my body, uh… my cellulite in those shorts is gonna already be a thing I don’t want to deal with. Problem 2, I don’t like feeling the back of my thighs touching anything that’s not soft pyjama material. Problem 3, am I being recruited into some kind of Army of Evil? It’s suspicious. Way too symmetrical. Problem 4, and maybe the biggest one, in that bottom picture, okay, I get to lay down, but now I have to think about waxing, not farting, and somehow preventing a wedgie that will inevitably have me never being able to face any of these people again in my life?? In one page, I’ve already broken the lady-like clause. We’ll see how this goes.

It’s 10:40 pm, I’m exhausted, and I’ve had wine and the first instruction is called “Irish Jig”. Oh, I misread, that’s the music I’m supposed to sumon. I’m also directed to kick myself in the buttcheek. And clap. Is this a prank?

Alright, this is going to start tomorrow because I need to sleep and then download the new Niall Horan album to get this party started.

Get ready!

part 2