Housework

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Fold Your Own Way

The longer you live with someone, the more you discover about how little you know them. At least, this is true for me, when it comes to my husband. I have known this man since 2001, for over half my life, and have lived with him since 2003. And yet I have only recently discovered some things about him that baffle me completely. (Does anyone else recall the time when I learned he does not consider soup to be a meal???) 

While I am the primary laundry-doer in our household, I don’t fold everything that I wash. This is not out of laziness, Internet. Well. Not solely out of laziness. My husband is not only the Better Folder of the two of us, he has folding preferences. I am sure I’ve mentioned before that he prefers to fold his own T-shirts. For that I am eternally grateful, because I am horrible at folding, especially when it comes to things that can’t be lined up edge to edge, like a towel or a blanket or a dishrag or another piece of fabric with straight and symmetrical edges. It’s not like I haven’t tried. I have. And yet, despite sometimes extreme effort, my attempts at folding T-shirts result in such lopsidedness and extreme variances in size of end product that frankly boggle the mind. My husband, possibly due to years in his youth spent working in clothing retail, possibly due to being a normal person and not folding challenged like his wife, can fold his T-shirts with seemingly no effort and end up with a stack of perfectly identical little rectangles. This is all to say: my husband prefers to fold his own T-shirts.

Okay, fine. But I can at least fold his pants, right? I fold my own jeans and leggings (the extent of my pants collection) and they make nice tidy stacks. I fold them once lengthwise, meeting one corner of the waist band to the other, so they look like a one-legged pant, and then fold them shortwise (what is the opposite of lengthwise? widthwise? I am explaining this very poorly), bringing the hem up to meet the waistband, and then fold them one last time so that the waist band touches the folded portion of the knee area. (This reminds me of that old elementary school exercise where one person has to explain step by step how to make a peanut butter sandwich and the other person has to follow each step literally, as if they have never experienced either peanut butter or jars or sandwiches before. You know: the explainer says, “Put the peanut butter on the bread” and the sandwich maker picks up the jar and puts it on the bag of bread.) What I am trying to say is that I make three folds and the jeans end up in a small square. 

Fold 1.
Fold 2.
Fold 3. I don’t know why the pocket does this but I hate it thanks.

This is how I have folded everyone’s pants since time immemorial, including my husband’s jeans and work pants. Then some years ago I found out that that my husband preferred me to simply fold the pants in half, lengthwise, and leave them at that. Okay, weird, I thought, but whatever. Saves me two folds per pants pair, clearly a significant amount of time in the grand scheme of life. But as the years passed, I wondered why he was so adamant about the single fold. Because, in fact, when he puts his jeans/work pants away in our closet, he stacks them in neat little squares just like I stack my jeans. 

It took a long time for this mild curiosity to develop into an actual question, which was, “If the end result is the same, why don’t I just fold your jeans for you?” To which he reluctantly told me that when I fold his jeans, he refolds them, and he feels bad about that, so he wants to relieve me of the initial fold. To which my response was, “WHY.” Which is when he admitted to me that when I fold his jeans/pants, I fold them backwards.

My jeans, folded my way. Still with the pocket issue.
I STILL REFUSE TO IRON.
My husband’s jeans, folded the opposite way.

This is a very, very long story to say that a) apparently people can fold jeans/pants differently, who knew, and b) apparently that can be bothersome to some people, and c) my husband and I are pants-folding opposites and I only just found out. (How do YOU fold your pants?)

(By the way, I have since been folding his jeans/pants the opposite way – although I still only make the single lengthwise fold – and it is surprisingly difficult to do! My brain has A Certain Way it believes folding should be done, and that is not it.) (It’s a feeling similar to folding your hands together differently than you normally do: if the left thumb normally sits on top of the right thumb, when you try to fold them so the right thumb is on top instead, it’s doable, but it’s weird.)

I have since kept my eyes open for other weird differences in our everyday trivialities and have come up with two others. 

One has to do with filing. Picture a filing cabinet, with folders of paperwork for things you keep track of over time – utility bills, insurance statements, tax returns, etc. I think we can all agree that it makes sense to file these sorts of things chronologically, right? And yet, to my SHOCK, there are (at least?) two ways to do this. 

When you open one of the folders, what is on top: the most recent bill/statement, or the oldest? Well, I do it one way and my husband does it the other way (the WRONG way) and that is absolutely insane to me. To make matters worse, at one point in our relationship, we maintained separate files, so some of the files use my system and some use my husband’s. I would almost rather transition ALL our files to his (wrong) system than to have two completely opposite filing methods in the same cabinet. MADNESS.

The other way we are opposites is in how we get out of the shower. Yes, I am really writing about this. Day-to-day minutiae is my favorite topic (next to food) and if you are new here, boy are you getting slapped right in the face with household nitty-gritty.

Our shower has a sliding glass door with two panels. You slide one panel over the other – so they overlap – to expose the opening to the shower. My husband slides both panels toward the front/faucet end of the shower to exit; I slide both panels to the back, wall end. I wonder if this has to do with our individual towel placement: my towel hangs just outside the faucet end of the shower; my husband’s is on the wall on the other end of the shower. Would we exit the shower differently if we hung our towels differently? Are there simply Front of Shower Exiters and Rear of Shower Exiters, just like some people are optimists and others are pessimists?

These are some of the very silly, inconsequential differences between us that are as charming (to me, at least) as they are perplexing. All of us are weird in our own weird ways. And I’m delighted to still be learning new things about this man I’ve loved for nearly a quarter century.

There are lots of other ways that he and I are Very Different. Some of them I know and accept: for instance, he is a Laundry Basket guy, and I am a Pile Clothing Into My Arms And Drip Socks All Over The Floor gal. But maybe (probably?) there are things I am yet unaware of. I hope we have time to discover all of them.

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1200 or So Words about Vacuuming

I have been dying to tell you that we got a new robot vacuum over the winter break. Actually, we got it at the very tail end of the break.

As you know, I adore my zooper with all my heart. I use it, oh, two or three times a day, mainly in the kitchen. Over the break, in addition to regular kitchen crumb fest, there was also debris from my giant glorious poinsettia (still, against all odds, alive) and then we sanded the workout area before we painted it so there was paint dust everywhere, and there always seem to be bits of leaves and sticks and pebbles of dog food all over our house at any given moment. Plus, instead of the house being occupied by mainly me, all three of us were home for two consecutive weeks. This combination resulted in a TON of zooping, let me tell you. 

Why so messy, poinsettia?!

Oh and also – NICOLE, BRACE YOURSELF – there was a mouse. Carla, despite lots of instruction on how to not attract mice and bugs, had been a little lax in keeping snacks under wraps in our pantry. Early on in the break, she found a meat stick with a bite taken out of it and a Jolly Rancher with a bite taken out of it, and that was enough for me to do a deep clean of the pantry during which time I found Definitive Mouse Evidence. 

I also found a teeny little crack in the pantry by the bottom of the door frame, which I filled in (temporarily) with Loctite mounting putty, which was on hand because I was hanging up holiday cards at the time. Next time the exterminator is here (he is ON THE SCHEDULE, believe me), I will ask him to replace the Loctite with something more durable. 

We subsequently caught a mouse (please let it be the only mouse) and Carla has been, under supervision, much better about snack foods. But as you can imagine, my zooping of crumbs has been all the more diligent since that revolting discovery.

Shockingly, I am the only one in my family who seems to appreciate the act of zooping. I feel as though I am always the one doing it. Even though it is literally a chore on Carla’s chore chart. If I dare remind her to do it, she will flop bonelessly over the nearest surface and groan and ask me if I can do it, pleeeeeeeeeeeease, just this once, she haaaaaaaates it and it’s soooo looooooouuuuddddd. And honestly, the whole ordeal would have been done by then so often I just roll my eyes and do it. (Is this teaching her that flopping and groaning will be rewarded or is it picking my battles? As with everything about parenting: impossible to know if I am doing the right thing.) 

Brief aside: When you were a kid, were you ever watching TV and your mom suddenly turned on the garbage disposal or started vacuuming in your vicinity and you were overcome with indignance that she would so thoughtlessly interrupt your TV viewing with such noise?!? (We also had a trash compactor as our kitchen garbage, which would mechanically compress the trash in the bin when you pressed a button. That, of course, also made a loud, TV-interrupting noise.)

Well, that happened to me frequently and I could never understand how my mother seemed to pick the exact worst time to be so annoying and loud. And now I am that mom. Because there is never a good time to execute a noisy chore, especially when you are all three together in one house for two weeks. 

My kid will loudly and huffily object to the noise of the zooper anytime I operate it within an our-house-sized radius of wherever she is.

My husband, though he never said it in so many words, seems to feel about my zooping the same as Kid Me did toward my mother running the garbage disposal during Family Matters. 

He mentioned, once or twice, that I seemed to be zooping quite a lot. To which I replied, I zoop two or three times daily, it’s just usually when you aren’t home. And then the zooper ran out of juice while I was ridding the workout room of paint dust, which shocked my husband. That had never happened in our old house! Well, the zooper works very hard and lasts a very long time but our current house is quite a bit larger than the old one. (And the floors of the old house hid dirt much better.) Do not blame the zooper; the zooper is not at fault.

After nearly two weeks of enduring twice or thrice daily zoopings, my husband set to researching robot vacuums. The brand I am most familiar with is Roomba, but he said reviews of Roombas are less favorable than he expected. I am also aware of Eufy, thanks to Elisabeth, which he said gets great reviews. But in the end he went with the Roborock Q5, mainly because it has a cool name. (Looks like the Q5 is no longer available, but the Q10 is and it’s $200 cheaper!) Just kidding. He did extensive research and this was the one that he deemed best. I am 99% sure he told me in excruciating minute detail all the specific reasons it was better for us than the others were, but I seem to have a blank space in my head where Roborock statistics should be. The main factor I remember is that it was on a really good sale (and still is, as of this writing!).

As pretty much everyone who has ever purchased a robot vacuum says: I do not know why we waited so long to get one. It is THE BEST. We were so excited when it arrived. As a family, we all watched it trundle around the main floor, mapping every room, and charmingly bumping into obstacles as it got used to where things were. We set it to clean and it bustled around picking up tiny scraps of plastic and bits of wax leftover from the Hanukkah candles and artificial pine needles from our tree and the aforementioned leaves/poinsettia buds/dog food and all the crumbs that accumulate as if from nowhere in our kitchen.

It is AMAZING. My floors have never been so clean. Rocky (that’s his name, of course) has an app (everything has an app, which I generally think is stupid, but I quite like Rocky’s app) and I can access it from my phone and I can see where he is and where he’s been. I can name each room in the house and assign him to vacuum specific rooms, or even specific parts of rooms. I can schedule him to vacuum every day right after breakfast if I want. He goes from carpeted to non-carpeted surfaces easily. He returns to his little house when he’s done cleaning and empties his collection of trash into a storage container. 

He is not quiet, but he’s not as loud as a regular vacuum; you can still talk at a normal volume while he’s cleaning. But you can hear him; he’s not meant to be silent; I don’t think I would program him to clean in the middle of the night because I think he would wake me up. He once got stuck on the edge of a rug when it folded over on him, but we simply put a footstool on that rug the next time we cleaned and that prevented any further issues. He can be programmed to avoid stairways, and if I have laundry piles all over the bathroom floor I can simply program him to skip that room. 

Lodged deep in my brain is a video I once saw of a robot vacuum spreading dog excrement all over someone’s house. So I think I would not leave Rocky to his own devices. (Not that we have a pet. Although I am still dreaming of Craig.) Right now, he’s still so novel and charming, Carla and I like to check on him occasionally while he works. I wonder if the novelty will eventually wear off, or if we will always continue to personify him and watch him fondly?

The only mild negative I have to say about Rocky is that he requires a home base. We’ve set him up in the kitchen, which I’m not a huge fan of; I like appliances, for the most part, to be out of sight. But I know that I will probably get used to his presence after a while, and if not, my husband promises we can move him to a less central location.

Rocky in his house.

If you have been dithering about getting a robot vacuum, I will add my voice to chorus of people who say I wish I hadn’t waited so long.

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Six for Saturday: Panicky and Exclamation Pointy

Wow! It has been… a week. Nothing bad! Just – so much driving, so many commitments. I have once again been A Terrible Blogger Slash Blog Friend, and all I have to offer you today are some bullets.

Cookie Swap Extension: THANK YOU to everyone who has sent in photos and links for the cookie swap! I am so excited! I wish we could all be traveling to a central location to share the scrumptious cookies in person! If you want to participate in the cookie swap but missed the original deadline, well, you are in good company as I also missed the deadline. I am hoping that I will get to make SOME COOKIES today or tomorrow, but it’s not looking great. I am looking down the barrel of at least two hours in the car both today and tomorrow and while that doesn’t seem like a whole lot when a day is twenty-four hours long, I find it Very Difficult to get anything meaningful done in and around so much driving. If I get an extension, so do you. I will aim to have the cookie swap post up on Monday evening or Christmas Eve at the latest. And, in part because I feel guilty about how flaky I have become, I have a little cookie-related giveaway planned for those who are interested. 

Christmas Cactus: Ever since I read Nicole’s post about Noelle, her Christmas cactus, I have been enchanted by the idea of owning one myself. When lo, what to my wondering eyes should appear in the floral section of my grocery store, but a Christmas cactus in full bloom! I bought it, brought it home, put it in the one spot in my house that gets semi-direct sunlight, and gazed adoringly at it every time I passed through the kitchen. It seems to be actively rejecting my love and hospitality, though. The blooms have begun to crumple and this morning I found that one of the teeny pink buds had fallen onto the table. What am I doing wrong?! Perhaps it is simply horrified by the state of the kitchen table. 

Housekeeping Standards, or Lack Thereof: My Christmas cactus is not the only one who is appalled. Not only is my kitchen table full of Random Crap, it is also covered in crumbs. But that’s not the half of it. My normally mediocre housekeeping activities have apparently taken as big a hit as my blogging this week. When all you do in your home is eat and sleep and follow the child around urging her to hurry! we are late!, the crumbs tend to pile up. I have an enormous kitchen island in my kitchen, and normally it is PRISTINE. That is my preferred state. I do not like to pile things on the island; we have other counters for piles. I like the island to be a clean and welcoming expanse of granite awaiting the preparation of delicious and nutritious meals and/or cookies. NOT THIS WEEK. Mail has piled up on the counter, I have a row of holiday cards waiting for me to hang them on the wall, there’s some leftover cedar fronds from the cedar garland I bought to go above the mantle, crumbs everywhere. Let’s not even contemplate the state of the floor. How we are not overrun by mice and/or ants is a miracle. I cannot wait for my family to be done eating in the kitchen so I can restore order by way of cleaning fluid, Swedish dishcloths, and my zooper.

Favorite Flower: I may have gone a little overboard in terms of holiday flora this year. I bought a poinsettia. But then. I went to my mother’s house, where she had the most enormous, beautiful poinsettia I have ever seen. She got it at Costco, she said. So I braved Costco the week before Christmas to get my own giant poinsettia. For $15.99. It’s hard to see in the photo, but this thing is at least three feet tall. I am sure it will die any moment now. 

Last Minute Stocking Stuffers: As per usual, I have been panic-buying last minute stocking stuffers like it’s my job. You may remember I said I was going to buy a cooling towel for my husband? Well, then I didn’t get one because I was hemming and hawing about whether he would really use it, and then I couldn’t find him any other interesting stocking stuffers, so I returned to get the cooling towel and it was sold out so I ended up getting him this three-pack. So if he doesn’t end up using it, now it will be three times as wasteful! This is the power of procrastination, folks. It is supposed to arrive Monday, which is cutting it quite close. I also panic-ordered my dad this magnetic pickup light tool, which looks useful but may be something I already bought him for a previous gift occasion? Not sure. And while I was ordering things, I added this book to the cart because I felt guilty Carla only has one book under the tree. And then, because my husband mentioned that he may not have any stocking stuffers for me, I ordered myself a nice little stocking stuffer. Why yes, I do have a problem.

How Are We Doing This?! I am mainly howling into the parenting void, but honestly: how is anyone doing anything? It has taken me SEVEN HOURS to complete this blog post.  (I did take a pause to clean the kitchen and floors and take a shower.) This is my life lately. Yes, yes, there is Extra Holiday Stuff, but also this is just… how things seem to be? Everything takes seven times as long as it should. Interruptions abound. (Today’s interruption was having to take a 45-minute detour to the shoe store to buy snow boots for my child whose perfectly good snow boots are suddenly too small.) Minor but essential activities (cleaning the counters, doing my thrice-daily zoop, cutting my toenails, showering) are being shelved in favor of… something??? (Being in the car, probably.) Of course I am not getting enough sleep – my sleep is plagued with weird-ass nightmares that linger days after – and I’m tired all the time which I recognize is not helping. (But what is this stage of life if not Tired All the Time?) I am clenching my teeth. Somehow I am ten minutes late to everything. I am in the car all the time. Listen, I get that moving to this new house with the new, much longer commute was a big change to my routine. But it has been more than a year now, and I should be getting used to it, and GETTING IT TOGETHER. But I am not! Nothing is together! I only have the one child and the one husband! All the things are good! I have no real stress to speak of! AND YET. I continue flailing around, spluttering and splashing and dog paddling my way from tiny sinking island to tiny sinking island and NOTHING IS BEING ACCOMPLISHED. How are YOU doing this???? What am I doing wrong???? And how do I fix it?!?!?!?!

Okay. I am going to finally post this and go dry my hair and then pack my child for a night at her grandparents and try to get into a Staycation With My Hubby frame of mind instead of my current state of AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!