Life Among the Dust Bunnies

I can still vividly recall, during the holiday festivities at my house, when my mother ran her finger across the top of my furniture, turned to me and gave me "the look."

Sheepish, I shrugged and said, "Oh well."

Yes, I've always been the master of comebacks.

Once upon a time, I emulated my mother. I arose every Saturday morning, did my grocery shopping, and proceeded to give the place a thorough going-over. I spent several hours vacuuming, scrubbing and dusting. I kept up this ritual for years.

Enter husband #2, a beautiful Saturday in Virginia, and his insistence that the dust would be there long after we had left this earth. And if we didn't get out there and enjoy the day, we'd regret it.

Admittedly, it didn't take much convincing on his part.

Over the years, I've cared less and less. The kitchen is a priority. And the bathroom. But the dust bunnies I don't worry so much about.

In a world far, far away I also used to care about the clutter. It didn't accumulate the way it seems to these days. That's what I thought, anyhow, until I pulled out an old photo of my desk from J.B. Robinson days circa 1986 and saw the papers piled all over it. I guess I'll never be labeled a neatnik. Oh well.

Fortunately, from time to time, Mr. Ginley tires of the clutter and ruthlessly plows through piles of stuff, tossing and filing and organizing.

"Do you really need all these receipts? Look at this one! It's for lunch at Piada six months ago. Are you planning on returning that meal?"

But then, He is the master of pamphlets. Whenever we go on a trip, he returns with a pile of pamphlets about places we will probably never visit. He often endures the stares of the Visitor Center Nazis as he clears out their stock. 

But I digress. If digression were an Olympic sport, I'd win the gold every time.

I'm sure there is a balance between being a slob and being obsessively clean and tidy. That state of grace is unlikely to find me in this lifetime.

Sometimes I imagine how my mom would react to all of the chachkas that have appeared around our home in the last few years.

I only wish she could be here now to give me "that look."

Mr. Sandman

Last night, Mr. Ginley woke me up to tell me about his dream. I'd hit him in the head with a flashlight. The details weren't clear. Why would I do such a thing? Was it metaphorical? Was I trying to enlighten him.

I didn't spend too much time pondering. I made my trip to the bathroom and trooped back to slumber some more.

This morning, as I debated whether to leave the confines of my warm, cozy, bed to write my blog, he woke up and announced I'd just shot him. Why? Apparently, my response was, "Because I wanted to." He expressed distress and pointed out that it hurt. He said I was nonchalant about the whole thing. "Did I shoot you just once?" I inquired. Yes. Well, then I guess he didn't do anything terribly heinous to provoke me. Was I just in a cranky mood? Did I shoot him just for snoring? Who knows.

Maybe it's just a cautionary tale not to keep guns around. Or flashlights.

There have been many books written about the meaning of dreams. They help to explain some of the more common ones. Like flying. Or arriving at school/work, looking down and realizing I've forgotten to put on my pants. But the books aren't a lot of help with many of the weird images my brain conjures up in a night.

Much of the time I dream about work. I've spent hours proofreading or agonizing over a missed error. The odd thing is, while the people are the same, the setting varies. In many cases, I'm in a huge building with several floors and banks of elevators, and I never seem to get off at the right floor.

Then there is the dream that I'm at my high school, but I don't recognize the layout, and I wander like Moses through the desert to find my Earth Science class. There is a test that day, and by the time I find the right room, the test is over and I've flunked.

Very occasionally, I will have a really cool dream. When I was little, I saw my grandfather in one of these, walking up and down steps in a heavenly setting. (I sure hope this doesn't mean the afterlife is like being stuck on a Stairmaster for all eternity.)

There was also the time when I had the white light dream. All around me was amazingly peaceful and calm. At the breakfast table, I spoke about it, and my dad very nonchalantly told me he'd had the same dream. That's one I wouldn't mind having again. I like waking up calm and relaxed, instead of stressed and worn out.

If my subconscious wanted to be really helpful, it would dream up the winning numbers for the next lottery.

It's not going to happen, of course. But sometimes it's nice to dream!

Getting Hammered

It seems incongruous for one who spends so little time on home repair projects to want to hang out at the hardware store.

Sure, Mr. Ginley and I will troll for the stuff he needs. Last Sunday, we had to pick up some glass for windows he's repairing. We got what was required for the job, then browsed for awhile, him musing aloud, "I know we needed something else from here, I just can't think what it was."

This time, it turned out to be more light bulbs. So Lowe's became my lunchtime destination on Monday.

My first stop was the light bulb disposal unit. Now that we have CFL's with mercury in them, they have to be properly pitched. So...as directed, I wrapped each little body in a plastic bag and sent it down a chute to hang with all of the other burned out bulbs. It made me a little sad, wondering if there was an analogy there to my retirement.

But I digress.

I found shiny new bulbs to take the place of the old ones and was about to turn around and check out, when I decided to stroll around a little, just for yucks.

Growing up, hardware stores were neighborhood affairs. We had one in our neck of woods until a couple of years ago. Those stores were packed floor-to-ceiling with tools, parts and home repair products of every kind. The cool thing was, you could walk in, hand the guy some gewgaw, and he would have you wait for a minute, then return with a replacement gewgaw. The guy was magical, like a resident Harry Potter. You swore he went in the back room and conjured the thing up. How could he possibly have a replacement part for a screen door that was made in 1926?

Today, we have super stores like Lowe's and Home Depot. They're certainly large. And they have lots of stuff. Maybe too much stuff. In spite of the vast selection, it seems to be more difficult to find exactly what you're looking for. I haven't figured out why this is, it doesn't make sense. But, time after time, I go in there looking for a specific item, and they don't have it. Sometimes I'll luck out and Home Depot will have it. But that requires a second shlep.

And, while sometimes I do enjoy just walking around those places and marveling at all the stuff and imagine someone using it to create something wonderful, many times I just want that part for my aging screen door.

But, I suppose that's the business model, to get you to roam the miles of aisles, to buy lots of stuff you hadn't planned on getting, dreaming of projects that will ultimately be completed by some local guy you find on the internet.

Lowe's knows!

Cooking with Gas

I still remember my biggest cooking flub.

The recipe was my mom's (for spaghetti sauce) and I was a young bride (20 years old), married to husband #1 (whom Mr. G. refers to as my practice husband.)

Anyhow, back to my embarrassing story. The recipe called for a cup of instant coffee. So, I trotted out my Taster's Choice and a measuring cup and poured out a cup of instant coffee grounds and dumped them in the pot. Hmmm. Something wasn't right. A quick phone call to my mother confirmed that I was supposed to make a cup of coffee. The sauce was ruined, I was in tears, and we probably ate out after that because I was too distraught to make anything else.

Anyone who tells you that being a good cook is simple and all you have to do is follow a recipe is full of shit. I'm sorry, but it's true. My grandmother had plenty of recipes, including one for "milk pie." The thing is, I watched her create this concoction, and she didn't measure anything.

"But Grandma, the recipe calls for a cup of milk, and you just poured a bunch in. How do you know that's a cup?"

To which she would reply, "It's just the right amount. You just put in the right amount."

Needless to say, I've never been able to duplicate her milk pie. I've come close, using a recipe I found on the internet, but nothing that really nailed it.

When I was a young lass, Home Economics was a required course. I don't even know if it's still taught in schools. That's where I learned basic cooking and baking skills, including how to measure. I also learned valuable lessons like turning off a mixer BEFORE you lift up the beaters. (Thank you, Holly, my fellow 7th grade student.)

Cooking is an art, and if you consider stick figures and finger painting art, I suppose you could say I'm a cook. Mostly, I make the same recipes I've gathered over the years, the ones that have been deemed acceptable by the Food Approval Committee (aka Mr. Ginley).

One day, I was lamenting to my husband that I'm not a very adventurous cook, that all I can do is read a recipe and put all of the necessary ingredients together. He pulled out my recipe file and pointed to the stained, wrinkled pages. Most of them had notations, adding, deleting or substituting ingredients or altering cooking time or method.

Maybe I got a little something from my grandma after all!

The Oldest Kid on the Block

When did I go from being the youngest person at the office to being among the oldsters?

It's like I woke up one day with cataracts, creaky bones and one unanswerable question on my mind: "How did Justin Beiber become a celebrity?"

I knew I was really out of the loop when I was reviewing material at work last week and one of my co-workers had to explain to me that there really is a "Movember" (Mustache + November). Who knew?

  Admittedly, in some ways I have been left in the dirt as the world moves forward. But, like the old fogey I am, I hold out a certain pride that I can say...

1. I am still able to sing all of the lyrics to the Patty Duke TV show theme song.

2. I enjoyed Beatlemania the first time around.

3. I learned to type on a manual typewriter, and I was pretty good at it. Also, I can still work a 10-key calculator. And balance a checkbook (manually).

4. I understand printing fundamentals because I learned the process before everything was automated. (Although, admittedly, I don't miss mechanicals with type that shifts/falls off and I do like the ease of making corrections.)

5. I grew up with the giants of Saturday Morning Cartoons. Including Bugs Bunny, Wacky Racers and Fat Albert. (And Rocky and Bullwinkle are still awesome.)

6. Although I understand (mostly) modern technology, I can appreciate their predecessors...a la vinyl, black and white photographs and ballpoint pens.

7. I know I could use my wits to survive without all of the amenities that have become de rigeur over the last 20 years. Because I survived before. (Although, admittedly, I would miss the Google.)

8. I get shopping malls. And why it was fun to shop at Pentagon City Mall at 3:00 on Christmas Eve.

9. I knew the joy of snarfing Cocoa Krispies and guzzling Coca Cola with all the real sugar and none of the background noise about childhood obesity. (I was so busy running around the fat couldn't keep up.)

10. I get why books and magazines and newspapers that you can hold in your hands are tactile bliss.

Well, I see by the clock on the wall (okay, on my computer), that it's time to wrap this up. No more allusions to old people stuff. So I'll just gather up my bones and shuffle off to Buffalo.

Oops, I did it again!