Category: museum of tsuris

Housecleaning: The Story of One Friday Morning

The house has gotten rather disgusting, what with one thing and another: we’ve had almost two straight weeks of serious domestic chaos (meaning, Life as We Know It has forced me to focus on things other than doing the bare minimum of household-maintenance, and as a result while we’ve always had clean underwear, the state of the house otherwise got to near-revolting — no, scratch that. It got pretty gross). The sky was gray and the air damp: it felt like rain. If it was going to be a grim, depressing-looking day, I might as well stay in and make the most of a few hours of uninterrupted time here. I knew that there were dust bunnies on the stairs and I knew that the bathtub was all scummy and I knew that I needed to do laundry again (again!) so as soon as I packed my daughter off to school this morning I said, “OK, Let’s Do This.”

I began, as I often do, by clearing the countertop at the bathroom sink we use the most. I took care of that, including dusting the lightbulbs above the mirror there. Then I scrubbed the bathtub. I decided to leave the third floor alone this week — I did it quite thoroughly two weeks ago, and the only person who uses it really is my husband, and if he’s not happy with it, he can either take care of it himself or wait for me to have the intestinal fortitude to deal with it. The last time I cleaned the bathroom up there, I discovered the sink wasn’t draining right, and had to spend about thirty minutes dealing with the clogged drain, which wasn’t my idea of fun. So I’m happy to put that off for a little while.

Once the second floor bathroom was tackled, it was time to vacuum. I carried the vacuum cleaner upstairs and plugged it in and then looked into my daughter’s room. She has a big rug in her room and the cats love to claw at it and roll around on it, which is fine — it’s not a fancy rug, just a thing we got at Ikea about a decade ago; it can be trashed by the cats and none of us will mind.
Thing was, my daughter’s room was such a goddamned mess I couldn’t just vacuum: I had to straighten up a bit before I could vacuum. I hate this. Now, I am not what you’d call a minimalist, in my approach to life: I have a lot of stuff, and I like having it around. It drives my husband nuts. Unfortunately, my daughter seems to have inherited my tendencies, and elaborated upon them: not only does she have a lot of stuff and want it around, she likes to have it around on the floor, and is not fazed by things like little tiny snips of paper being scattered all over the place. Little peel-off-sticker-backs are all over the floor in my daughter’s room, all the time. Little scraps of paper from the time she decided it would be fun to cut out paper dolls. Little rocks. Little shells. Little THINGS. All over the place.
So this is a room that really needs vacuuming, but the thing is, there are also piles of books all over the place, and stuffed animals, and maybe some socks that were supposed to make it into the laundry basket but didn’t, in addition to the precious little shells, which, if I vacuum them up, there will be hell to pay, because those little shells are IMPORTANT. I can’t say it’s chaos, really, but it is a mess. However, it is my job to corral this mess a little once in a while, and I accept that. (I don’t do total room overhauls anymore: my daughter’s old enough to do this. But vacuuming isn’t something she can do yet — she can’t even lift the machine — so, I bite the bullet periodically.) I made the bed (which is a mattress on the floor — you need to have the bed neat in order to vacuum correctly)and did some cursory straightening up enough that I could do the rug, and I vacuumed the rug and also did the closet floor. I have no idea what she does that causes the pillows to leak feathers like this, but there were a lot of feathers around; there were also about 2 cups of little paper snips and some ponytail holders (I rescued those), in addition to the anticipated general schmutz.

It was as I went to vacuum over by the side of the bed that I noticed the wadded up tissue on the floor. “Jeez,” I thought, “can’t she even throw her used Kleenex away?” I picked up the Kleenex, and that was when I noticed the cat puke.

It had been there for a while.

I don’t know if it was there last night, when I was reading to my daughter, the usual bedtime session.

I assume it was there when I went in this morning to say “Good morning, want some breakfast?” She was, at that moment, snuggling with Roger the cat, who seemed perfectly content, and probably hadn’t just recently thrown up.

Usually, when a cat throws up — and it happens pretty often, because, you know, CATS — I either know about it immediately and clean it up immediately, or whoever is first to discover it cleans it up immediately, unless the discoverer is my daughter, who is, for whatever reason, scared to clean it up. I find this annoying, because she’s perfectly capable of using paper towels, but, ok: she is, I give her credit, very good at coming to get me, saying, “The cat gakked,” and she will bring me paper towels and vinegar or whatever I need to clean up the mess.

This was a case where it’s like she tried to get brave and start to clean up the gak, but something happened and her nerves got the best of her so she thought, “I’ll just put this tissue on top and IT’LL BE FINE.”

I’ll tell you: I had to use two rags to clean this mess up. (Don’t worry, they went straight into the washing machine with some bleach, they’re right as rain now.)

But I cleaned it up, muttering to myself, and then I continued vacuuming. I did the bedroom as thoroughly as I could, all things considered; I moved down the staircase (my god, how cat fur will accumulate in the corners of the steps!); I tackled the first floor of the house (Meow Mix crumbs make a very satisfying noise when you vacuum them up). I did the front entryway, and even did the stairs to the basement (which is, truly, cat fur central — and, lucky me, I discovered more cat puke in the basement, in the process, so now that’s taken care of as well).

I ran a load of whites, I ran the dishwasher, I organized the recycling to go out. I dealt with the nasty tubs of leftover food in the fridge that really needed to just face their trash dumpster fate (this happens even to me) and readied the trash to go out. By two p.m., the sun had fought its way through the gray, and the air felt clear and dry. I’ve opened all the windows I can; the house is as clean as it’s going to be this week; and as soon as I take out the trash and recycling, unload the dishwasher, and fold the laundry, I’ll be ready for the weekend.

Well, except that I still have to make dinner tonight.

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Adventures with Heavy Cream

It sounds like it could be a previously unpublished with by William S. Burroughs, but no, it’s just me in my kitchen.

It took me several days to reach a point in our schedule when it was feasible and reasonable for me to leave the oven on at 180°, which is what I would have to do to try my hand at making clotted cream. But I hit that golden hour on a recent Saturday night. And so, armed with the link provided me by a staffer at Kimball Brook Farm, I tried my hand at making clotted cream.

The instructions, from this website, are very easy. You buy cream and pour it into a shallow pan; you cover the pan with tinfoil, and then you leave the pan in the preheated oven for twelve hours. After twelve hours, you take the pan out of the oven, and peel back the foil a bit to let steam escape. When the cream’s cooled for 30 minutes, you decant the stuff into a jar, pop it in the fridge for another twelve hours, and at the end you’re supposed to have — WHOO HOO! CLOTTED CREAM!

So I did all this. At eight thirty in the evening, after the dinner dishes were cleaned up, I turned the oven to 180° and I poured the cream into an 8″ square Pyrex dish and I covered it with tinfoil and I slid the pan gently into the oven. Then we all went upstairs. Eight-thirty the next morning, after my first cup of coffee, I removed the pan from the oven, peeled back the foil a bit, and let the cream cool. After thirty minutes, I got out a little Mason jar and a shallow spoon and did the big reveal.

What I saw was a thick layer of stuff on top and… warm cream underneath. I was frankly not sure what the big deal was; was the stuff on top the clotted cream? Because it really wasn’t quite what I had in mind. Or maybe it was; no, it definitely was; but there wasn’t much of it.

Nonetheless, I had a sense that separating the cream from the cream, if you’ll follow me, was not what I wanted to do quite yet; I needed to get all of this stuff into the Mason jar. It wasn’t easy to spoon it into the jar, but I managed, and only made a small mess (which the cats were happy to clean up) (yes, I cleaned the floor afterwards), and then I bunged the jar into the fridge and told myself that no matter what happened, I would be able to use the cream, and it was just some dairy products and everything would be ok.

I didn’t dare to open the jar until Monday morning. The jar made a strong “pop!” sound as I opened it, and the cats came running. “Okay,” I said to myself reassuringly, like the way the surgeons do in movies when they’re reconstructing the violinist’s hands and rebuilding his heart at the same time. Sure, it’s tricky work, but if you stay calm, you can do it. As I was saying, I opened the jar and I gingerly stuck a teaspoon in. Sure enough the top of the jar was nearly-solid cream — butter, more like — and underneath it was a pool of heavy cream.

Bearing in mind that my husband had been very curious about this process, I decided to not muck with it any further until he got home from work. During the course of the day I decided, too, that I would use some of the cream to make biscuits for dinner — because, frankly, I’d have to use the cream up, and it would probably only be suitable for baking. He came home from work and as he poured himself a drink and lifted the lid of the pot on the stove to see what we were eating for dinner (chicken and lentil soup), I said, “You gotta see this.” I took the Mason jar from the fridge.
“What’s that?” he asked

“This is the cream from Vermont,” I said. “Check this out.” I opened the jar and jabbed another spoon into the thick cream. “Oh, nasty,” he said.

“Come on, you jerk,” I snapped.

No one wanted to try it. I ate some of it myself, on toast, and found it fine, but to be honest, not particularly compelling; and it wasn’t the kind of thing I’m capable of eating in vast quantities anymore. I guess I’m getting old. And, given my family’s reception of the results of all this work and attention, I don’t think I’ll be bothering to do this again anytime soon.

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Pastrami Risotto. Because I’m a daredevil.

It was the end of a long and difficult afternoon involving bus travel, poor weather, and unhappy children. I was facing making dinner without a lot of emotional steam to work with, and also without a concrete plan. This is how someone like the Hausfrau winds up staring into the refrigerator and saying, “Sure, I could make a pastrami risotto.”

It began when I was at the Italian market down the street a couple blocks, contemplating pizza toppings. This was a few nights ago: it was my daughter’s birthday dinner. She had requested that I make pizza. A spur of the moment reminder from my daughter than I’d made an excellent stromboli with pastrami inspired me to buy a pound of pastrami. “We’ll use it on the pizza, Papa will love it,” I said to my daughter, who nodded. I had visions of pastrami sandwiches, another stromboli, and so on. We carried the pastrami home and I assembled the pizzas and they were quite good. One was pastrami, red onion, and olive; the other was spinach and olive. Those were some fine pizzas.

I wrapped up the rest of the pastrami — the cats yowled indignantly — and felt smug about it, thinking I had a trick up my sleeve to help me jazz up dinners for the rest of the week.

And when it came to last night: it was dismal outside. It was pouring rain when my husband walked in the door. I was trying to be optimistic about the tiny epiphany I thought I’d had, which was, People use proscuitto to form a layer of flavor when they’re starting all kinds of italian dishes, including when they’re making risotto; why couldn’t I use pastrami the same way?
So when my husband came home, the rain was pounding down and I was in the kitchen chopping onion and I said to my daughter, “Bring Papa a towel from the drawer” — pointing my foot to the low drawer where I keep plastic storage tubs and towels to be used for cleaning up messes, along with a few special-purpose linens (tea towels suitable for use as pastry cloths; cheesecloth; stuff like that). She reached into the drawer and then ran to help her father, a dutiful daughter, and my husband came into the kitchen, squidge squidge squidge, to find me roughly chopping long slices of pastrami. “Whatcha making?” he asked cheerfully. “Pastrami risotto,” I said. He looked skeptical, but I pressed on.

I had some nice vegetable stock that I’d made; I heated it up and used it to start to cook the risotto. I added a couple tablespoons of tomato paste to pep things up a bit. I had a lot of sliced red onion in the pot, and the pastrami, and the rice, and everything smelled quite delicious. Toward the end of the cooking time I added green peas and parsley. My daughter walked over and stuck her nose over the pot. She made approving noises. I was,  thus, optimistic that this meal would be greeted with pleasure. It did, for sure, look absolutely beautiful: the red pastrami and the red onion looked gorgeous with the bright dots of green peas and parsley. I mean, it looked like something you’d totally want to eat, and it smelled like something you’d totally want to eat.

Instead, we all sat down to eat, and while no one complained that the food was bad, no one seemed to actually enjoy it very much.

It was fine.
There’s plenty left over.

It was today when I started to sort the laundry — one of many small tasks I had to tackle today — that I found my biggest piece of cheesecloth in the laundry. “What the hell,” I said to myself. I knew I hadn’t used it for anything — I haven’t used cheesecloth since I think last summer. And then I realized: my beloved girl had handed her dripping wet father a piece of cheesecloth to use as a towel. I’m sure he was confused, but too polite to say anything like, “no, can you get me an actual towel?”

So I laundered it. And I’ll be the one to eat the leftover pastrami risotto, for lunches, tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that. It’ll be fine.

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It’s just a stack of big heavy books and laundry supplies in the doorway. No big deal.

One recent evening, as the adults in the household were getting ready for bed, my husband’s sock snagged on a tiny splinter of wood from the wood floor, right in the doorway to our room. “Hey,” he said, annoyed. He bent and and felt the little flaw with his fingers. “I better glue that down,” he said. I was sitting on the bed folding the last few laundry items that had been piled up there for hours; there was no going to bed without folding the laundry first. Hence, my back was facing my husband as he got down and did some futzing around with stuff at the floor in the middle of the doorway.

I got up, holding a stack of clean towels, and noticed that while my husband was no longer in the doorway, there was, instead, a rather imposing little tower. We had, in the middle of the doorway, the following items, which are, you’ll note, mostly very large, heavy books:

The Grove Dictionary of Jazz; the Washburn Bible; Roz Chast’s Theories of Everything; a collection of works by Lewis Carroll; and a brand new, full, 5 lb. tub of OxiClean.

In the middle of the doorway.

I gave my husband a skeptical look. “What,” he said.
“What if the cats trip on this?” I said.
“The cats can see in the dark,” he said.
“What if I trip on it? when I go the bathroom in the night?”
“You’ll see it there; there’s a nightlight in the hall.”
I sighed.
“This would make a great Roz Chast cartoon,” my husband observed cheerfully, settling in with his book. Annoyed as I was, I had to laugh at that.

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Short and Sweet: Remembering A Housebitch Moment

My husband decided to make pancakes on a recent Saturday morning. He needed 1 1/2 tablespoons of sugar. I happened to be standing in front of the sugar tub, which I keep a 1/2 cup measuring cup in, all the time. “I’ll get it for you,” I said, trying to be helpful. I scooped up some sugar, eyeballed, shook some out, and held the cup aloft for him to take.
“You can’t just scoop some out,” he scolded. “You have to measure.”
I said, “This is one and a half tablespoons of sugar.” He protested that there was no way I could know that. I said, “Fine, get a measuring spoon, measure it.”
He got a set of measuring spoons and measured it. It was precisely one and a half tablespoons.
“Fine,” he said, grudgingly.
Do not fuck with the Hausfrau, people.

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I have no need for runny blue cooky icing, do you?

I try very hard to keep track of what I’ve got on hand in the house and what I need to stock up on. For example, I knew that it would become necessary for me to supply various social occasions with vast quantities of baked goods, and so I would need a lot of flour, a lot of sugar, and a lot of butter. Accordingly, when I placed a Peapod order, to be delivered a few mornings ago, I requested several five-pound sacks of flour (on sale! lucky me!), many pounds of butter (also on sale! More lucky me!), and many pounds of granulated sugar (not on sale, but also not that expensive, so it’s ok).

However, I made what my husband might call a rookie error. I neglected to order several pounds of confectioner’s sugar. Any idiot knows that if you’re baking snazzy desserts, you’re going to need confectioner’s sugar; and, what’s more, that it’s the kind of thing it’s smart to over-purchase, because you often need to add it with abandon to get icing or frosting consistencies just so. Recipes SAY “Combine two cups confectioner’s sugar to four tablespoons of creamed butter” or whatever but I’ll be damned if two cups has ever really been sufficient. They say two cups, I say three and a half cups. Basically, I know better. And I need, like, six pounds of confectioner’s sugar, easily, if I’m going to ice 58 little cookies shaped like letters.

One recent fine, cold morning I set aside several hours in which, I told myself sternly, I was going to make icings in pretty colors to decorate the 50-odd alphabet cookies I had already baked. I was going to mix up the icing and sit down at the table with the cookies and many sheets of wax paper and squeeze bottles and I was just going to do this thing.

Except I had no confectioner’s sugar.

Shit.

Furthermore, the grocery stores, which are normally an easy stroll away, were treacherous to get to because they were covered in sheet ice. I love my neighborhood, I do, but too many homeowners do not shovel their sidewalks as they are supposed to; this is a real bummer (and also illegal, but we won’t dwell on that). Did I want to risk falling and hurting myself to get confectioner’s sugar? No. I remembered that I could, hypothetically, make my own confectioner’s sugar out of granulated sugar and some cornstarch, and so I cheerfully took out the food processor, the sugar, and the cornstarch, and got to work.

I won’t go into the boring details, but let’s say that 90 minutes after embarking on this project, what I had was something that was totally unsuited to the task before me. I wasted a cup of sugar, two teaspoons of cornstarch, about two tablespoons of milk, two tablespoons of corn syrup, a squirt of fancy blue food coloring gel, and even — added in a moment of hope and desperation — two tablespoons of Bird’s Custard, to arrive at…. nothing useful.

In the end, I waited until the next day, when I felt more confident about my ability to walk safely to the grocery store. I paid a ridiculous amount of money for four pounds of confectioner’s sugar; I took it home; and then I got to work, feeling totally on top of things. The cookies were iced (not beautifully, but for sure colorfully); my daughter came home from school and expressed deep admiration for them, asking if I would do another batch but this time do only purple and green because those are her colors; and they were dispatched to the art opening. I washed my hands (and my pastry bag) of the whole enterprise, and had, happily, a whole bag of confectioner’s sugar left over for the next project.

One problem remains: what should I do with the two squeeze bottles of different shades of blue icing I have leftover? I see more cooky decorating in my near future.

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Recalibrating the Oven: or, The Hausfrau Can Google Things, Too.

Well, a few days ago the Hausfrau went to bake a loaf of bread, as she frequently does, and this time things went horribly wrong. The bread baked; and it baked; and it baked; and it was, somehow, never done. I should have known, sooner than I did, that something was not right — my inner Miss Clavell should have sat right up, pointing a finger in the air — but I did not. And so nearly two hours was that bread baking (ok, maybe 90 minutes). The house smelled wonderful, and the exterior of the loaf looked fine. But evil  was lurking within.

I admit: it wasn’t evil. It wasn’t as though we cut the bread open to find anything festering in there (thank god). But it was a sodden, heavy, wrong loaf of bread. And I was very sad, because I had used really good stuff to make that bread, and it was simply useless.

(I should, someday, attempt to whizz this stuff up into bread crumbs, I suppose. But it is so sad and wretched, even after being sliced into large wedges and dried out in the oven, that I suspect I will simply give up on it and throw it in the trash.)

It was four days after I baked that bread that I went to bake some cookies and discovered, in the process of pre-heating the oven, that things were not correct with the oven. I thought I had preheated the oven to 350°, but it was hovering around 325°. “Well, that isn’t right,” I said to myself. I re-set the oven so it would say it was at 375°; this time it got up to just under 350°. “Huh,” I said to myself. “That isn’t right, either.” I texted my husband: “The oven needs to be recalibrated,” I said to him, “I think.”

He wrote back saying, basically, “Huh?”

I baked my cookies, keeping a very close eye on them. They turned out fine. I made dinner, which also came out fine. Then in the evening, when the kitchen was officially closed for the night, I went to Google and did a search for “recalibrate oven.” My fear, of course, was that this was a task that I could not do on my own, and that I would wind up paying some big burly guy $300 for the pleasure of having him hit three buttons, go “boopboopboop” with some battery operated device, and then turn to me to say “There you go, ma’am.”

It turned out that recalibrating the oven — a phrase that I’m familiar with mostly through reading old cookbooks and household manuals — is something that current oven manuals discuss. I was, in fact, able to track down my oven’s model number and through the wonders of Google find the manual for it online. It turns out that I didn’t have to pay a big burly man anything to come go boopboopboop and no battery operated device was necessary at all. I was able to recalibrate our oven myself — well, mostly. It’s still running about five degrees cool, I think. I want to put a little more effort into getting it as correct as I can — but I can do that.

I want to assure you: I am probably the least mechanically-minded person in the world. While it’s true I’m not afraid of disassembling a vacuum cleaner to see why the suction’s all stopped up, it’s also true I’m really afraid of tinkering with computers and I certainly don’t want to mess with something that might, theoretically, explode (cf. gas ovens in my apartment). But I figured if the household manual says I can do this, then I can do it. Here’s one thing to bear in mind, when you go to recalibrate your oven: you want to have at least one, and probably ideally three oven thermometers on hand so that you can arrange them in different parts of the oven and see for yourself what the temperature(s) is(are) in the different parts of the oven. We experienced bakers get that ovens have hot spots and cool spots — but you ideally have a sense of where they are. I’ve never had this information in my head; I’m just someone who keeps a close eye on things when I’m baking, or else relies on the fact that it’s almost impossible to overcook a braised dish.

Believe it or not, I do not own three oven thermometers, but I do own two of them. (One is better than the other — easier to read.) So it was easy for me to place two of them in the oven  — one way to the left, one way to the right, one on the upper middle rack and one on the lower middle rack — and set the oven for 350° and see what would happen. What I found was that one dial moved up to 345° and the other one went to just a smidge past 350°.   If I had a third and fourth thermometer, I’d scatter them about, too, and see where they landed. My guess is that the middle of the oven is, in fact 350°, or close enough for government work anyhow, and I’m ok.

But isn’t it funny: we’ve been using this oven for five years, and I’ve never had any trouble with it, and then suddenly it’s out of whack. What happened to cause this? I have no idea. I don’t know what (other than just sheer mechanical failure of some oven part) causes an oven to go out of whack. I’ve now spent enough time reading up online about oven functioning and what I’ve decided is that a) I’m going to keep both of these thermometers in the oven and b) when I preheat the oven, I will not assume that things are ‘correct’ just because the oven display says it is so: I will wait a little longer, and check the thermometers before putting food in. If I have to preheat twice (moving the setting up or down, as needed), so be it.

On that note, I’m going to go roast some beautiful red peppers I bought the other day. Maybe I’ll make pimiento cheese this afternoon.

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Short and Sweet: The Hamantaschen Chronicles, 2017.

This past Friday, I was mostly housebound with a sick child. Since she was spending the day curled up on the couch dozing or watching TV shows, there wasn’t much I could do except be nearby, which meant that I had an opportunity to focus on making Hamantaschen (this weekend is Purim, after all). I made several dozen beautiful Hamantaschen, using the recipe I decided was the Mother of All Hamantaschen. (The recipe is here; but I have altered it slightly to suit my tastes. I use only butter, and skip the orange juice, which is anathema to me. I wrote at length about making these, in vast quantities, last year. This year, I had the good sense to not double anything, and avoided disasters. By five p.m. I had a lovely pile of hamantaschen, some of which I packed up (in tins leftover from a Christmas cooky exchange, gevalt) to deliver to friends. Shabbat dinner was Chicken a la King served over rice, with Hamantaschen for dessert.

The fillings this year, by the way, were poppyseed; raspberry; and fig. It turns out that fig jam makes an admirable hamantaschen filling.

Saturday evening my husband went out to a concert and I stayed home with our daughter, who was still a little under the weather. She and I went to bed around nine o’clock, and hence I was asleep when my husband came home. I caught up with him this morning when I went into the kitchen to get some coffee. He was there, pouring himself some coffee, and peering under the lid of the cake carrier in which I am storing the cookies. “There should be lots,” I said. “We each only had one last night.”
“Well, except, I got home last night and ate four,” he said.

“Four Hamantaschen! That’s kind of a lot,” I said.
“I know, but they’re good.”
“Yeah, but — these aren’t small  Hamantaschen,” I said. “They’re kind of big. So four is a lot of cookies.”
“I know,” he said, “It was very satisfying.”

I may be making more Hamantaschen today, because clearly doubling the recipe is what has to be done to assure that we all get enough Hamantaschen. I am considering using the rest of a jar of orange marmalade in some of the next ones; I hate orange marmalade, and this might be a good way to use it up and clear the space in the fridge. (Birds, meet stones.)

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Housecleaning at Night. Or, When You See Schmutz, Clean Schmutz.

I’ve long wondered why it is that I tend to clean the kitchen — I mean serious deep cleaning — after dinner. It was only last night that I really figured it out. It’s because it’s only at night that I can actually see the filth.

A couple of days ago a Facebook associate asked me for housecleaning advice and I found myself engaged in a long dialogue on the subject, which basically began by saying “It’s not that you need special products or create a special system; you just have to have a system that works for you and the products needed to implement it.” She had said, “I don’t have a housecleaning schedule and I feel like everyone else does.” I said, “I don’t, with the exception of the days when I know I have to face laundry or the world will fall apart. Everything else is catch-as-catch-can.” You notice that the bathroom sink is visibly vile, grab a washcloth and clean it. The toilet can wait if you want, but do the thing that’s bugging you really fast, if you can, and get it out of the way. This is a riff on the Peg Bracken advice that you should embrace any small housecleaning urge the moment it seizes you, because the feeling will pass and then you still have the filth and that particular housecleaning urge may not visit again for a rather revolting-to-consider length of time.

A case in point is this scene from last night. I was quite tired: it was eight o’clock, and I’d cooked dinner and done the dishes and wiped down the counters and by all logic, I would be flopping on the couch and zoning out in front of the TV as any good American would. However, while I was wiping down the counter, I noticed that there was rather a lot of schmutz on the edge of the shelf where all the spices live. Looking more closely, I looked at the tops of the spice jars and boxes: they, too, were grey with schmutz. I took a handful of jars from the shelf and saw these very sharp, clear rings in the dust. Clearly, the shelf and jars needed to be wiped down.

I could have said, “Screw it, I will deal with this tomorrow.” But here’s the thing — and it came to me in a flash — I cannot, for whatever reason, see the schmutz as well in the daytime. Inexplicably, the light in the kitchen is such that I literally see the dirt better in the evening than I do in the daytime. And since it makes sense to clean when you can see what you’re cleaning, it came to pass that at 8.15 last night I was removing everything from that shelf and taking a towel and wiping down every surface. The shelf itself was cleaned, and then each jar was cleaned. Then I rearranged the stuff back onto the shelf. It took me maybe fifteen minutes all told, which isn’t very long, but on the other hand, when you’re tired and you’ve had it, fifteen minutes is a long time. However, I didn’t mind doing it because I knew that once it was done, it would be done. This is a task I only perform a few times a year — maybe twice or three times — and I felt good about knowing I’d taken care of it. The next time I will notice schmutz on the spice shelf, it will probably be mid-July, and fine: I’ll get there when I get there.

I now understand why it is that every so often, having washed the dinner dishes and wiped the counters and set up the coffee for the next morning, I will find myself washing the kitchen floor. It’s not because I think it’s a good time to wash the floor. It’s because that’s when I can see the schmutz. And it’s ok, come to think of it. At least it’s getting cleaned. Sometimes. Once in a while. This is also how my oven gets cleaned: after dinner, when I am done with the dishes and setting up the coffee and thinking, “All right things are good!” That is when I’ll notice what a shanda the oven and stovetop are — especially the glass door, why can I never really get the glass door clean? — and I’ll think, “There is no point in putting this off.” Forty-five minutes later, I will finally be satisfied with the state of things, and I’ll apply hand lotion and call it a night. It’s ridiculous. (Especially when you consider that the best way to deal with the stove burners involves an overnight-with-ammonia process that is no joke.) But look: the cleaning gets done this way. And, equally important, I get to go to sleep with a clear conscience.

Fine, I’ll wash the floor tonight, ok?

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The Moebius Strip That is Our Three Bedroom Apartment: Musings Inspired by Hausfrau During February School Vacation

Prefatory statement: I began to write this on Thursday morning, when my husband and child were not in the house. It is now six days later and I am only now able to clean it up enough to post it. I have spent the morning doing laundry, cooking dinner, and cleaning up much of the mess addressed in the below essay.

My daughter had a full week of winter vacation from school. My husband decided to take some time off from work so that he could spend time with us and engage in fun family activities with our daughter. He did a splendid job of it; on Friday, they went to New York City on a fact-finding mission: Where is the Best Ice Cream in Manhattan, and Is It Better Than Ashley’s on York Street? The day before that, they went on a bird-watching adventure which lasted about an hour, culminating in their being (so I am told) nearly attacked by a hawk, which was, according to them, totally awesome.

These mama-free time frames are fun for them; they get to do things I either don’t approve of (walking around in nature) or am too lazy to do (go to New York solely to eat ice cream; I approve of this wholeheartedly, but there’s no way I’d ever do it).

Part of why I was happy to stay home on Friday, and not go to Manhattan with my loving husband and child, was that I hadn’t had much time to myself, even with all that wholesome bird-watching. We pretty much stuck around the house all week. All of us. Which is fine — I’m not known for my love of travel — but it means that my usual housework was, at the same time, increased exponentially and also made exponentially more difficult, because I lacked the usual six hour window of time in which the house is empty except for myself and the cats. Without a school/work day, it is very hard for me to get things done, or even think, in this apartment. Obviously, too, I hadn’t had a lot of time to just be in my own head without an interruption. If we went out of town, during a school vacation, there’d no time to be alone, it’s true, but it’s also true I wouldn’t have the housework weighing on me either, since we wouldn’t be at home cooking and so on. (Ok, it would weigh on me in that I’d know I’m coming home to whatever havoc the cats may have wreaked, but that’s a different kind of problem from the usual day-in-day-out of the human chaos.)

In other words: if we are all home, all of us, all the time, there is a constant rotation of activity in the kitchen, a constant rotation of laundry, a constant rotation of straightening up to do, in even greater levels than normal, because there is never a period of time in which the house is laying fallow and I can try to keep up with it a little bit. That little bit at a time — the probably two and a half hours a day when I am, really, absolutely focused on keeping the household running properly (and the rest of the time, in which I’m doing other things with half my brain and keeping the household running with the other half of a brain) — turns out to be absolutely necessary to keep the house operating at a level where we aren’t, say, eating off floors covered in random bits of paper, pieces of the Master Mind game someone sent us, and stepped-on bits of Meow Mix. To keep the house relatively orderly, it turns out, I need the house to be empty for at least five hours of the day, and this assumes I personally don’t have anything else going on.

The fact that it’s not just breakfast and dinner that have to be assembled — that lunch and snacks must also be served to three people every day — throws a spanner in the works. Normally, we run the dishwasher once every three or so days — possibly every two days, if I’ve made some particularly elaborate dinner one night. But three meals a day served, plus snacks, means the dishwasher is being run far more often. We only have so many plates and forks and spoons, after all. And the coffee cups! My husband will drink coffee all day long, and the number of cups that are generated as a result is staggering. Mostly I wonder why we have so many coffee mugs, but a few days of all three of us at home in the wintertime makes it clear that we actually need all these mugs.

Then, in wintertime, there is the likelihood of the child going out to play in the snow. This week we had snow on the ground at the beginning of the week but then we hit a warm phase. The snow turned quickly to mud. Either way — snow or mud —  it meant an increase in the amount of laundry being done, because snow pants/muddy pants and gloves/muddy sweatshirts, whatever the case may be: all of it has to be washed and dried after use.

It should be obvious, too, that the bathrooms are utilized more frequently than they are during a normal week, and so they are getting dirtier faster, and need more attention than I would normally give them.

All of this wore me down as the week passed.

One vacation morning I was scooping the cats’ litter boxes, as I normally do, around ten o’clock. (It’s something I try to do twice a day. There are two cats, and three litter boxes, and you’d think that once a day would be enough. I suppose technically it is, but the reality is, life is better for all of us if it gets done twice a day.) My daughter came downstairs for no apparent reason — just to remind me that she was alive, I think — and held her nose: STINKY!
I snapped at her, “Yes, it’s stinky. But this is something I do every day. Instead of complaining, why don’t YOU try doing it to get rid of the stink? Or just don’t complain?” She removed her hand from her nose and looked at me in surprise. “Have you ever, once, scooped the litter boxes?” She shook her head no. “Ok, then don’t complain that scooping the litter boxes is gross,” I said. I tied up the vile bag of cat excrement and brought it upstairs to add to the kitchen trash, which would shortly be brought out to the dumpster. I tried to not think about the fact that ideally, I would also be vacuuming around the litter boxes and mopping the floor around the litter boxes and laundering the old sheet that I keep under the boxes to try to limit the spread of filth in the basement. I could ask my husband to help with this chore, I suppose, but I know perfectly well that he wouldn’t do it to my satisfaction, and it’s something best left for me to do. But I didn’t have the emotional wherewithal to take it on right then. (Let’s let it pass that I could be doing it instead of writing this essay; take my word for it, I need this time to write a lot more than the house needs to have that sheet shaken out and laundered.)

The challenge of “what to make for dinner” also expanded, mysteriously, during the week, possibly because it’s one thing to come up with something novel or just tasty to eat once a day; to do it twice a day is a real drain. Most nights I make dinner without complaint, and I do it after having a day to think over what I’m putting together. I’m lucky of course — as I am about so many aspects of my life as a housewife — because I’m doing this as my full-time (extra-double-plus-full-time) job; I don’t have to figure this out after being out in the world at work all day. I get that; logically, making dinner is easier for me than it is for others. But that doesn’t make the slog any less of a slog. It’s merely a different type of slog. I face the challenge in a different manner from my friends who teach all day or work as speech pathologists or in retail or whathaveyou. But it’s all labor, ok? And, frankly, since I don’t have a job, the expectation is that our house should run better than houses where the adults are not at home all the time; because, if it doesn’t, what the hell am I doing all day? (Writing; and Good Works. But that’s not enough of an excuse. So.)

The slog of making dinner: some nights are better or more ambitious than others, but the fact is, I’m able to do it, and do it reasonably well, in large part because I haven’t had to really think about breakfast (which is a bowl of cold cereal, or toast) or lunch (which is consumed by the child at school and by the husband at whichever place he decides to get lunch downtown). This is a nearly militant stance for me: I really refuse to cook breakfast and I resent assembling lunch on school days. My family by and large accepts this, and since dinner is usually good, I’m on steady ground.

However, when you have to put dinner together after also putting together breakfast, lunch, and snacks: that sucks. And dreaming up a nice dinner at the end of such a day is not easy. Because not only are food supplies looking uninspiring, or nearly non-existent, but one’s ability to get enthusiastic about making another mess in the kitchen is also drained.  I swear to God, it’s not that I look forward to cooking dinner every night, but it doesn’t normally get me down the way it did during vacation week. That week, come about 4.30 in the afternoon, my husband and child would look at me and ask, “What’s for dinner?” and there was, honestly, not one time I gave an answer that was met with glee. Something was always inadequate. I knew better than to say “I’ve been thinking about soup,” even though soup would have been the perfect thing to make with the last of the stock and short ribs I made on Monday — because if I said “soup” no one, and I mean no one, would have been happy, and then I’d’ve gotten angry, and the whole evening would be shot.

Friday, as my husband assembled some sandwiches to eat for his and our daughter’s lunches, he asked me what I would do all day, with the whole day to myself. I said, “Well, I’ve decided one thing, which is that I am not going to spend the whole day doing housework.” “Ok,” he said, not seeing why this was a big deal. I said, “I was thinking I would do some writing today, since that’s something I’ve not really been able to do for a little while now.” “That sounds good,” he said. Unspoken by me was the obvious fact that, even if I didn’t do housework in a serious and intensive way, I would still be taking care of the fundamentals. On a day when I’m “not doing housework,” I am nonetheless scooping the litter boxes, washing the breakfast dishes, taking out the recycling, and probably doing two loads of laundry.

On a day when I vowed to not do housework, I did three loads of laundry, I vacuumed the entire apartment, I tidied the kitchen table, and I made plans for an extraordinarily good Shabbat dinner. I worked on this blog post for about ninety minutes. I did housework for longer than I worked on writing this.

There was an article in the Onion a few years ago which friends always send to me every summer. The headline was “Mom Spends Beach Vacation Assuming All Household Duties in Closer Proximity to Ocean.” I always laugh a little but it’s just true. Vacations are, to me, the same thing as regular life, for the most part, just in a different place. The exception is: Unless we are staying in a hotel where meals are provided and there is maid service. Preferably, the situation is such that I somehow magically don’t have to worry about laundry at all. If this is not the case, then basically what vacation means to me is, “Everything you do on a normal day, but in triplicate.” This past week, when we did not go out of town on vacation, it wasn’t just All Household Duties, it was All Household Duties on Exponentially Larger Scales.  It was very grim. By mid-day Friday I was fried but resigned, too: I had only to get to Monday. Monday, I told myself, I will regroup. It’ll all be ok.

I decided to throw some muscle into making dinner on Friday night. I thawed the last of the really good steaks I’d stashed away in the freezer in the first week of January, and served them, cooked perfectly, with chimmichurri. The sides were asparagus, roasted Yukon gold potatoes, and panne cotto (made with broccoli rabe and not escarole). Everyone enjoyed the meal thoroughly. I thought, “I have bought myself a ton of goodwill with this meal.” So Saturday evening, when my willingness to make a real effort was running very low indeed, and my willingness to go buy any groceries at all was nil, when it came to be five and my husband asked if I had any ideas about dinner, I said with a clear conscience, “I’m making pasta e fagioli.” (In other words, soup, but thickened up with pasta.) Fortunately for my family, there was no visible sign of disappointment.

I scanned the shelves of the fridge. I took out everything I saw that involved cooked vegetables and cooked noodles. I had the last of the panne cotto; I had a tub of cooked cauliflower; I had the last of the thick beefy mess leftover from making short ribs on Monday. I had some celery and some garlic and a Parmesan rind. I got to work and at 6:30 I served pasta e fagioli to my family, who snarfed it all down and quickly went back for seconds. Everyone was happy. I sighed and thought, “I will get through this.”

We scraped through Sunday; it was a long day, but we managed. Our daughter had two swimming lessons this weekend, and I watched the pile of laundry grow larger with her towels and bathing suits thrown into the laundry basket along with muddy jackets, socks, pants, and so on. “She will go back to school on Monday,” I told myself, “And I will catch up.”

Monday morning came. My husband left for work, and I saw my daughter off to school. She had a meatloaf sandwich and some leftover roasted asparagus in her lunch bag. (Meatloaf was what we had for dinner Sunday night. Out of desperation I went to the grocery store on Sunday afternoon and, seeing that ground beef was $2.99/lb. if you bought 5 lbs. at minimum, I bought 5 1/2 pounds and brought it home. Some went to meatloaf; some is simmering on the stove as chili now; and some will become bolognese later this week. I am never, ever not thinking about home economics.) Everyone had been dispatched in the correct directions; it was up to me to go home and face the house.

I spent the morning undoing as much of the past ten days’ damage as I could. First I walked around the apartment gathering things to launder, and at the same time assessing what messes needed cleaning. It was 8.30 in the morning when I turned on the washing machine. I’ve been doing laundry; running the dishwasher; finally cleaning up the mess around the cats’ litter boxes; setting up a huge pot of beef chili; cleaning toilets; scrubbing the vinyl bath mat that always seems to grow little rings of mildew around the suction cups; bleaching the cleaning supplies that I used to clean around the cats’ boxes; straightening up the coffee table; making lists of other things that have to be done.

Soon there’s going to be a Day of No Women in the United States, a protest designed to recognize “the enormous value that women of all backgrounds add to our socioeconomic system, while receiving lower wages and experiencing greater inequities, vulnerability to discrimination, sexual harassment and job insecurity.” This quote is from the Women’s March website, https://www.womensmarch.com/womensday. I didn’t just make it up.

I don’t have lower wages; I don’t have wages. I guess you could say I get room and board for the work I do, but not everyone would find that framing of the arrangement agreeable. As I’ve said many times, here and elsewhere in my life, while my life isn’t perfect, it is on the whole pretty good: we are lucky to be able to live the way we do, in the manner we do; we never want for anything we really need, and that’s because of my husband’s job, not because I’m such a genius at running the household. I’m good at running the household, and if I stopped doing it for a day, well, nothing disastrous would happen, but no one would benefit, either. Housewives don’t get vacations, and neither do housebitches — this essay is clearly in the housebitch category — and that’s part of the deal. If I stopped doing housework altogether (the way my husband stopped going to his job altogether last week), even for just a day, nothing good would happen to any of us, and we would all three of us become very cranky very quickly.

The Moebius strip that is running this household cannot be interrupted without consequences. Maybe they are not as serious as the consequences of, say, not showing up at your minimum-wage hourly job: my husband will not fire me if I don’t do laundry for a day, don’t scoop the litter box for one day, don’t cook dinner for one day. But I will only be making my own life worse if I stop paying attention to any of these details for only one day. Last week’s vacation proved it to me.

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