Author: Average Jane

This is what my office looks like when it’s relatively clean. Right now it’s much messier than this and my goal for the coming weekend is to get it cleaned up at least back to this standard. You can tell this is an old photo by the coffee cups. Now my desk is littered with empty water glasses.

I’m hoping to get rid of the Big Tubs O’ Stuff like the one shown on the left. There are actually three of them, all of which were hastily filled with papers, software, electronics, etc. when we began our studio and office remodeling project late last winter. The fact that I haven’t needed anything from any of the tubs since then indicates that most of their contents can be thrown out.

My office is separated from our recording studio by a sliding glass door and I know my husband is embarrassed by the easily visible chaos of my office when he has clients over. Of course, the studio isn’t exactly a paragon of cleanliness either, but I have to admit that my office is worse.

Wish me luck getting it back to some semblance of tidiness.

Today is my little sister’s birthday. I was three when she was born and did not appreciate ceding my position in the household to the interloper. Somewhere I have a Super-8 movie that shows me holding her when she came home from the hospital. One of my hands is balled into a fist and I’m aiming it threateningly at the baby’s face.

As we got older, the fighting intensified. I still have some scattered scars on one arm from her fingernails. Eventually we developed an extremely elaborate system of blackmail that kept the tattling and fighting to a bare minimum, although the occasional battle still broke out over unauthorized borrowing of clothes well into our high school years.

Then a funny thing happened when we grew up and moved out on our own: we became good friends.

We discovered that we had more in common than we thought, and after a while we figured out that we travel well together, so we started taking fun trips. One of my favorites was the vacation to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina where we drank rum drinks, visited every single Ripley’s Believe It or Not attraction in town (there were at least three), went to an alligator park and the House of Blues, and basically had a good old touristy time – none of which was planned in advance.

My sister constantly impresses me with the things she manages to accomplish. She’s a shrewd businesswoman, a great mom, a creative thinker, a loyal friend, and a lot of fun to be around.

Happy Birthday, Chick-O-Stick!

I have very little to report about the past weekend. I hung out with Cagey and Pharmgirl, baked a half recipe of Banana Bread (we only had one overripe banana), watched the season finales of "Psych" and "The 4400," and clipped all of the cats’ claws. I did two loads of laundry, washed all the pots and pans and ran the dishwasher.

Probably the most involved thing I did all weekend was re-dye the blue in my hair. I made such a mess that I ended up having to scrub down both sinks and the shower afterward. Blue turns out to be a difficult color to maintain, so if you decide to go the not-found-in-nature hair color route, be warned.

I have another busy week planned, but tonight is my one free evening. Do you have any suggestions for what I should make for dinner?

A rapper that my husband has been recording lately is planning on bringing his mom with him to a session later this week. I guess that means I should use some of my evening to figure out what’s ailing the Roomba so it can tidy up the studio a bit.

And that’s all I’ve got. Have a nice Monday.

The accumulated irritants of the week have been bringing me down, so in celebration of Friday, I’m going to mention them all here and sweep them out of my consciousness for the weekend.

• Comment Spammers. One of my posts has been getting a rash of comment spam in the last week or so. I finally had to go in and close its comments, which I’ve rarely had to do before. Grrr.
• Regular Spammers. My job involves monitoring an e-mail account that’s accessed through an old SquirrelMail e-mail client. It has NO spam filtering whatsoever, so I get to watch batches of related subject lines come and go as I scroll through the junk trying to find the few legitimate e-mails that may have crept through. For the last few weeks, the most noticeable subject line trend has been "My boyfriend’s [x] is too big for my [y]. The best part is [x], which encompasses a full thesaurus’ worth of terms, many of which do not mean precisely what was intended. I think my favorite [x] of the week was "phallus." Hee! ‘Cause everybody talks like that, you know.
• My Car. I’m actually feeling favorably inclined toward my car this week in one way: ever since the weather got cool enough that I don’t need my air conditioner, my gas mileage has improved. The bad thing is that it has a burned out headlight, which got me pulled over on the way home from band practice Wednesday night (at midnight, I might add). I didn’t get a ticket and the officer actually said, "I appreciate your wearing your seatbelt," which I thought was some nice positive reinforcement, but the idea that the next guy might ticket me $80 did not make me at all happy. I have an appointment at the crack of dawn this morning to get a new headlight and also find out why the "maint. req." light is on. [Update] It turned out someone forgot to reset the light after my last oil change. I was in and out in less than 45 minutes and my headlight replacement cost $12.
• My Brain. I have been incredibly forgetful this week. For example, I left my cell phone at home two days in a row. On the second day, I made a special trip home specifically to get my phone before I went to some after-work activities. I still walked off without it.

Okay, I’m finished griping now and I’m ready to start the weekend with a clean slate. If you have something that’s been bugging you, feel free to write about it in the comments and leave it behind as you start your weekend.

I had the housework talk with my husband a couple of nights ago as I washed pretty much every pot and pan we own. Admittedly, we’re both huge slobs. That’s why I can manage to dirty a pan and leave it for so long that I can’t even remember what I cooked in it. It’s also why he can walk by that dirty pan day after day after day and have it remain completely invisible to him. SEP Field technology is alive and well at our house.

I know most couples struggle with balancing housework between them, but I think the problem gets much worse when you’re dealing with two messy people. Two neat freaks (or even one) would at least produce better results, if not more harmony.

My husband is just filled with excuses when it comes to helping out around the house. He claims he doesn’t know how to run the dishwasher or the washing machine, yet he’d be happy to take the TiVo apart to install a new hard drive. Also, he won’t do laundry because there are spiders in the basement (which is true but, I feel, irrelevant, unless you’re a big ol’ baby).

I suggested to my husband that he start washing the pots and pans now and then. There’s nothing about that task that can’t be done by a second grader. You fill the sink with water and a little dish soap, put in the pans, utensils, bowls, etc., and scrub them with your choice of a sponge or Golden Fleece. Then you rinse them and put them in the drainer that lives permanently on the right side of the sink. All done!

His suggestion was that perhaps he should start cooking and then I could wash the dishes. That would be a delightful idea if only he knew how to cook anything. Clearly he doesn’t even like his own cooking, judging by the fact that he seems to eat at Einstein Bros. every single day.

So, we’re back to where we started. Once a week, I clean out the cat boxes, he takes out the trash and I take out the recycling. I do the laundry and dishes when I get around to it. He maintains the computers and other electronic equipment. I do simple plumbing repairs and other minor home improvements. We have a cleaning lady who comes in every other week to handle the floors, bathrooms and dusting.

Thus, the house stays relatively clean, but untidy. It’s been that way for about 15 years now; I suppose it’s as good a system as we’re going to get.

The trip to San Jose was cool. We managed to stop by the Apple Store at Apple headquarters and each purchase an "I visited the mothership" t-shirt. That may be the ultimate geek statement, don’t you think?

Our meeting went well, and then we had dinner at a Thai restaurant on Castro Street in Mountainview and a beer at the Black Watch tavern in Los Gatos.

The hotel was a Holiday Inn, and it turned out to be where BlogHer 2006 had been held. I didn’t recognize it when we drove into the parking lot, but the lobby looked very familiar. As soon as I peeked around the corner and saw the courtyard, I knew it was the same place. Very random. (For the record, the room was nicer and cleaner than I remembered from ’06.)

On the trip back, I bought Water for Elephants at the airport in San Diego. I read the entire book between San Diego and Kansas City. At first it reminded me of the HBO show Carnivale, without the supernatural stuff, but only superficially. It was really absorbing and entertaining and I recommend it highly.

Over the weekend, my husband and I rented season two of Weeds on DVD. It, too, was quite entertaining – arguably better than the first season. We don’t get Showtime, so we’ll have to wait until next summer to find out what happens.

Now that I’m back, it’s proving to be a little challenging to catch up on all of my household stuff. The laundry alone is almost too daunting to tackle. Last night I started with the baby steps of washing the pots and pans, loading the dishwasher and changing the sheets. Maybe tonight I’ll be able to work my way up to shredding the last several months’ worth of junk mail.

Well, it’s off to work early for me today. Enjoy your Monday as well as you can.

One of my favorite throw-away jokes in the vast tome that is "Gone With the Wind" is a mention that when Scarlett was getting ready to open her general store, Rhett suggested that it should be called the "Caveat Emptorium." She liked the name so much that she had a sign made…and then he told her what it meant.

My own failures to caveat emptor (how’s that for a segue?) usually result in my being stuck forever with some product I’ll never use. However, I got a more assertive last night because I had two different purchases I didn’t want, and I needed some travel money for my business trip.

Thus, I went to Lowe’s and divested myself of a weeding device that didn’t really work ($21), and then I went to Target and got rid of a shirt that made me look fat ($13). Now I can afford to eat lunch and dinner in San Jose later today. Hooray!

I have an early flight and a meeting that will last pretty much all day once I get to California. My travel companion will be fellow blogger Jeremy, who is just as disappointed as I am that the Computer History Museum isn’t open on Thursdays. This will be my third trip to San Jose in three years and I’ve never been able to make it there. Sigh.

We are planning on driving by Apple HQ and taking some photos, though. If we can’t do our #1 geek choice, the Apple pilgrimage runs a close second.

The stiff neck with which I started the weekend has only gotten worse thanks to my klutzy stage leap on Saturday. For the last few days, it’s been all sore and non-turny. I called my chiropractor Monday to see if I could get in Tuesday, but her office is closed until Thursday.

That would have been better than nothing, but I learned yesterday that I’m leaving town on business at the crack of dawn Thursday and won’t be back home until late Friday afternoon.

My last hope is that today’s yoga class will help a bit – assuming I can actually make it to class considering how many meetings I have scheduled today.

I guess I’ll just head into work reeking of Flexall and keep my fingers crossed.