Housework

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Shortcuts

Sometimes I am a lazy bitch take shortcuts. Some of those shortcuts drive my husband nuts.

Front-loading washer and dryer with laundry and a red prohibition symbol over a basket of clothes
  • Refusing to use a laundry bin. I really have no idea why I am the way that I am. Is using a bin simpler, and more sanitary? Indeed it is. Do we have laundry bins, in our home, available for my use? Why, yes, yes we do. And still, I persist in loading my arms up with as much laundry as I possibly can hold and lugging the pile all the way across the house, dripping socks and tripping over the cat as I go.

  • Washing the sheets without their little holder. My husband, weary of our bed linens turning into a wet-in-the-middle sheet burrito each time we washed them, bought a handy little tool to keep the sheets and comforter from eating each other. They work GREAT. But I find it less convenient to attach them to the sheets than to simply deal with the sheet burrito. This may be the thing that tips my husband over the edge, hard to say.

  • Only doing half the towel replacement job. We have hand towels under our kitchen sink. Often, when I think to toss them in the laundry, I am doing fifteen other things and I forget, for a while, to replace them with new towels. The most frequent catalyst for remembering? My husband washes his hands and yelps, “There’s no towel!”

  • Letting damp dishes air dry. Our dishwasher has a drying function, but still, sometimes the clean dishes have a little moisture on them. Mug bottoms, of course. How else do you know that the dishes are done if there isn’t a little crescent of water in the bottom of your mug? (This is how! My husband isn’t the only one with handy little tools.) The other primary culprit is the plastic lids of our food storage containers, but sometimes a pot or a strainer or a plastic cup will have a little beading of water. My husband removes each of these from the dishwasher separately, dries them on the dish towel that I have of course completely remembered to replace, and only once they are completely dry does he put them away. Not me. I give a little shake then toss ‘em in whatever drawer or cupboard they belong. Literally nothing bad has ever happened from taking this little shortcut.

  • Not removing the lint after each load. Oh, good, we’re back in the laundry room. Why do I have so many laundry-related shortcuts? I DON’T IRON, EITHER. Okay, before you leap to the comments to warn me about dryer fires – my nightmare, seriously – I will assure you that I always, always clean the lint trap before I dry a load of laundry. I just do it before I dry things, rather than after. Sure, this sometimes mean my husband or child are cleaning out MY lint (although I do their laundry, too), but since I do the majority of the laundry in our household, I’m okay with that.
Kitchen countertop with water bottles, paper towel roll, storage basket, and small toiletry bag beneath white cabinets
These things will live here all weekend long. Yes, we still have the Zevo even though it did NOTHING.

Turnabout, as they say, is fair play. Members of my family are not immune to laziness cutting corners. Here are a few of the things they do that drive me nuts.

  • Leaving dishes “to soak.” Listen. LISTEN. I get it. Sometimes a dish benefits from a good soak in soapy water. (Although Dawn Powerwash cuts the soak time to five minutes, even for the most stuck-on grease and grime! I would accept any and all sponsorships, I love you, Dawn Powerwash!) But that dish should not be there the next day. Soaking returns diminish after about thirty minutes. Once in a great while, an overnight soak does seem to do the trick for a particularly obnoxious dish. But that is RARE and does not apply to, say, a bowl of oatmeal or a plate of melted marshmallow crust.

  • Walking around a thing as though it were invisible. Things assemble, detritus collects. That’s just a part of being a modern human, I suppose. But things should not live forever in a location that should be temporary. A sweatshirt’s home is not on a kitchen barstool. A pair of discarded socks does not make pleasing decor for the couch. The laundry room counter is not the perfect spot for an empty takeout cup to take up residence. I am not immune to letting something sit for a good long while. I’ve had a giant Hefty bag full of Clothes to Donate on the floor of my office for weeks now because I want to take it to the place where I volunteer, but I haven’t volunteered there in a while and I feel guilty and I haven’t been able to come up with a couple of hours to go volunteer and also the place is realllllly out of the way so it’s not simple to just drop it off, so I just yesterday tucked the bag behind my office door so I don’t have to see its accusatory mug anymore. But when the effort required to deal with a thing is, like, throwing it in the trash or moving it into one’s bedroom? JUST DEAL WITH THE THING.

  • Waiting to clean one’s beverage vessel. We all have our stainless steel coffee/tea mugs and our reusable water bottles and we use them. But when they need to be cleaned, they somehow end up congregating on my kitchen counters for days until the cleaning can be ignored no longer. Stanley carafes are not my idea of an appropriate knickknack.

Okay, your turn. Which of these shortcuts do you find most egregious? Also: I know you have shortcuts; time to spill.

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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.