Homemaking: April 2004 Archives

Everybody has their incantations to make the weather get cooler: they get waxed, they wash the car, they make reservations at a beach cottage. Not in this household. In this household there is one tried and true method of making the weather take a turn for the worse: I make ice.

Noel and I are not great consumers of ice. We tend to keep beverages in the fridge in the first place, and mostly we drink water from the tap. I don't like things too cold to taste, and either Noel agrees or he goes along with it because he's a big wuss. So it's rare that I pull out the ice trays and fill them; rare enough that it always involves a moment of wondering where it was that I stored them when we put them away last. Yes, we put them away, because while we have plenty of fridge space, our freezer space is limited to the over-fridge compartment which I fill up with loaves of bread, frozen vegetables, and ice cream.

Usually what happens when I make ice is that the weather immediately gets cold enough that ice seems ridiculous, and a week later, when I'm trying to stuff another pint of ice cream into the freezer that is packed to capacity, the ice trays come out, get emptied, and go into storage until the next time it's hot for a few days.

Anyway, it's been almost unbearably hot the last few days, and I was thinking I might not mind a nice iced soda, so I pulled out the ice trays, washed them, cleared a space for them in the freezer, and filled them up. At that moment, a nice cooling ocean breeze floated across the island, and the temperature dropped ten degrees and I'm not kidding or exaggerating. OK, so I knew an ocean breeze was expected this evening, but wow, I didn't know I could work magic like that.

But I have a plan, one that will probably change the course of history, perhaps even the climate of Northern California. When the ice I made set up, I put it in a freezer bag and stuffed it into a spare corner. There's no room for trays of ice, but a bag of ice can be squeezed in around other frozen items. So now we will have ice for a long time. Which means that either it will stay cold (it's the having ice that makes it happen) or it will not (it's the tray in the freezer, rather than the ice itself).

I will keep you informed.

I was just in the bedroom thinking, "Well, I've let the laundry pile up to a mound of epic proportions again," when it occurred to me to wonder what sort of an epic that would be. The mythical tale of The Lost Sock, the sweet interlude of the Shirt Behind the Dresser, the chanson of the Delicates Awaiting Enough for a Load.

Then I thought, maybe it's really just time for bed.

Both Noel and I have been feeling that familiar urge to purge in the last few weeks. He's eyeing a bunch of audio gear that he never uses; I'm eyeing things in the office and drawing studio that haven't been used and are not likely to be used in the next four years.

Today I found Karen Kingston's web page through a circuitous route, and came across this excerpt from her book, Clear Your Clutter with Feng Shui:

If you somehow get your life moving again, you will instinctively want to clear the clutter out of your home and make a fresh start. It will feel like the obvious thing to do.

I've been thinking about how to make things happen more smoothly and effectively (as I prepare to do some serious academic work for the first time in more than a decade; City College definitely does not count), and I think a nice flushing of the house systems might be a good thing. Maybe it's time to take all that ceramic ware and make the mosaic I've been saying I want to make. Then I can get rid of everything I didn't use in good conscience.

We've known about this trip to England for weeks. So why am I just finishing laundry now, less than twelve hours before we have to report to the security people for our obligatory Ayse-is-one-of-them-ay-rab-names extensive "random" search?

Because I'm a lousy planner, that's why.

I can work out detailed plans for art projects and programming projects, plan weekly newpaper pages for months in advance in my head, but getting my act together enough to have all the laundry done, folded, and ready to be packed for a trip is beyond me. I spent several hours this afternoon doing things like stacking Noel's empty boxes in one pile (instead of all over the house) and thinking, "I should really put that load of laundry in the washer" every few minutes. So why did I not do it?

On the other hand, I did an enormous number of other errands in the last few days (not everything I needed to do, but most things). I bought various things requested by friends in the UK (such as Thomas the Tank Engine toys), plus some gifts not requested. I cast a dozen objects from the molds I've made. I sprayed Roundup all over the weeds in the yard. I weeded three buckets full of weeds. I checked out the possibilities for laptops at the Apple store (decision: 17" Powerbook is much larger than I want a laptop computer to be; 15" is perfectly fine). I finished requesting all my transcripts for Calpoly, and preparing for my portfolio review (including reserving a room). I bought magazines to read on the plane. I brought back my library books on time. I brought copies of my transcripts to City College so they could perform a weird but valuable service known as "transcript review" that tells Calpoly whether I have taken enough distribution classes to be General Education certified. I studied for and took a calculus midterm. I developed 2 rolls of film and 25 images from those rolls of film. I bought a new bag of dog food so Rosie had enough food for dog camp. I started a new hobby (silkscreening). I read four web pages about blungers. I worked out a method for making molds of molds so I can have nice casting molds forever.

I've been a busy person over the last three days. But I still haven't managed to get the laundry done or pick up the dry cleaning (which has been ready and waiting for like two weeks now, if not longer). And it's after 11pm and we still haven't even started packing.