Not a Nice Surprise

I have to go back to work tomorrow.  Surprisingly, I am looking forward to it!  So, yesterday, I decided to go and work on my classroom for awhile.  We teachers have to pack everything up for the summer so that the custodians can uberclean our classrooms.  It takes me hours to putter around, getting everything "just so" in my room after unpacking all of my teacher treasures.

Just as I was getting ready to leave, I decided to plug in my refrigerator so that it would be ready to keep my drinks and snacks nice and cool for me to enjoy.  I opened up the door to the fridge to see if there was anything that needed wiped out after sitting unplugged all summer.  Of course, OCD person that I am, I had wiped it out before I left for the summer, but things do have a way of growing anyhow!  Well, something had gone awry inside of my fridge since the end of May when I had last perused its inner contents.  It was filled with mold--disgusting, stinky, possibly toxic mold!  How could this have happened?  I was so careful to take everything out of the refrigerator and wipe it down with Lysol disinfecting wipes.  What had I missed?  A quick examination of the mold trail led to the culprit.  Ice cream.  Left in the freezer all summer long.  This was not my ice cream, mind you.  It belonged to two of the girls in Advanced American Studies who had asked me to keep it safe for them until the end of the school day and then had forgotten to retrieve it.  It had been there, in the freezer, waiting for them to remember it, since April.  Obviously, I too had forgotten its existence or I most certainly would have eaten it.  It was Ben and Jerry's, after all! 

Now, no one in their right mind would eat that ice cream.  Unlike the Burger King sandwich from my college days which had sat on a shelf in a boy's dorm room for a year unscathed by mold, Ben and Jerry's had created a lot of mold.

After I left my classroom in dismay, I felt my throat getting sore and a headache coming on.  What if I had breathed in some awful toxins that would soon have me starring on an episode of Mystery Diagnosis?  I envisioned myself lying in the hospital, in an isolation room, with loved ones only able to visit me after they had donned a mask and gloves.  If I do become incredibly ill at some time in the future, will you all please remember this incident and tell the doctors that I am most certainly dying due to breathing in toxic ice cream spores?

So, today, I return to my classroom, armed with all sorts of germ, mold and bacteria murdering substances.  I am not going to wear a mask.  Instead, I will quickly open the door to the fridge and start spraying the unwelcome inhabitants of my refrigerator with the lemon scented Lysol cleaner that I purchased last night.  After it has committed germ genocide, I will use paper towels to wipe them away and I will throw them away in a hallway trashcan so that I don't ever have to look at their disgustingness again.  They weren't even a pretty color.

On the Amazing Qualities of Vinegar

In my college days, I worked at Dial-A-Maid.  I learned to scrub toilets with tooth brushes and to vacuum my way out of a room so as not to leave footprints.  I could get the toughest cigarette smoke and mildew off of any surface out there.   I thought that I had learned all of the sneaky little tips to save time on cleaning that I would ever need to know.  Boy was I mistaken!  Now, don't get me wrong: I still believe that Murphy's Oil Soap is one of the best products that a clean freak can own.  But, the recent discovery of a common household staple turned into cleaning dynamo has changed my life!

Did you know that vinegar is one of the most useful items in your house?  Not only is it tasty drizzled  on salads and added to recipes, it is an amazing cleaning product! 

Laramie is notorious for its hard water.  I spend a great deal of my cleaning efforts trying to get hard water deposits off of glass shower doors and the lovely fixtures that adorn our bathrooms.  Last year, I read about how I could put a baggy full of vinegar over the shower head and attach it with a rubber band.  Leave it on for several hours, and VOILA, no more clogged holes!  Along the same lines, I have always cleaned my windows, my Bunn coffee maker and the tray underneath the automatic water dispenser on my fridge with vinegar.

But the past few weeks has brought my love of vinegar to new heights.  First, I discovered vinegar's wonderful ability to make my bath towels softer and fresher smelling by just adding one cup of it to my wash load.  This is especially helpful if you have children who forget to hang up their towels, thereby making them "smelly".  I also used vinegar to deodorize my carpet.  But, the ultimate use that I have found for vinegar is to make the most amazing shower cleaner ever!  Take one cup of vinegar and heat it in the microwave until it is hot but not boiling.  In a spray bottle, put one cup of Dawn detergent(just the plain jane kind--nothing fancy).  Add your cup of hot vinegar to the bottle and, after you have put the lid on the bottle, shake it to mix the two ingredients.  Now you have the best shower cleaner I have ever used!  Spray it on the shower and, depending upon your amount of grime, leave it for awhile(one lady said that she left it over night because the shower was so gucky).  I only left it for a couple of hours.  Then, take your wet sponge and wipe down the shower.  Rinse, and prepare to be amazed at the beauty of your incredibly cleanly and sparkling shower! 

I hope that my tip will help you to not waste valuable time and money on cleaning products that just don't work worth a damn.  Believe me, if it exists I have tried it!

Pig Wrastlin!

This summer has been an adventurous summer of firsts for me.  In July, I went to my first demolition derby and had quite the enjoyable time.  I was surprised at how much I enjoyed watching the cars smash into each other.  My particular favorites were the compact cars.  There was a Datsun 210 just like the one I had in high school.  It did pretty well but didn't win. 

The crowd was almost as fun to watch as the derby.  I had no idea that such an eclectic group of citizens lived in my town!  There was everything from cowboys, to hippies, to rednecks and preppy college professor types.  (Not sure where I fit into this equation...)

Now, in about thirty minutes, I am off to the county fair to watch the Pig Wrestling.  My son, who is a former pig wrestler himself, has told me how difficult of a task this is. Not only is the pig mad as hell, it is slippery and quite fast.  Needless to say, he and his brother didn't win the competition.  I still regret the fact that I had to miss that spectacle.  However, I am sure that I will have a great time watching young folks try to catch greased-up piggies. 

Who knows what wildness might be in my future?  We are taking Brady up to school in Rapid on Monday.  Maybe I will pay a visit to Sturgis and see a completely different type of Hog!

The Kitchen Monster

Well, sadly, I have not graduated from the kitchen yet with my organizing.  I try to organize things, but before I know it, they are a mess again.

For example, I have tried three times this summer to organize underneath my kitchen sink.  If you looked right now, you would have no idea that this is true and you would call me a liar for saying that I had.  It looks horrible under there and I can't find anything! Part of this problem stems from the fact that I don't finish up the old cleaning products before I start using the new ones I purchased to replace them.  But, I can't throw a little bit of cleaner away, because that would be "wasting it".  They all sit under there, waiting for the day when I might decide to use them or to even combine two bottles of products to make one.

Then, there's the refrigerator.  Earlier this summer, I cleaned out the condiments and we had twelve different types of mustard!  In addition, we have more kinds of hot sauce than any family could ever use up.  One entire shelf and all of the door space are taken up by condiments.  This leaves little room for anything else in the the fridge.  A month ago, I reattempted to tackle the refrigerator and its overabundance of condiments.  A lady on Pinterest suggested that I organize my fridge into "zones" and have different areas for things such as bins with sandwich supplies, a cleaned and ready to eat fresh veggie section, a place for drinks, and a place for leftovers.  I faithfully did this.  However, within a few days, the leftovers had taken over the sandwich area, and the whole thing was a deplorable mess again.  What is the solution to this problem?  I don't know!  Maybe stop cooking and just go out to eat all the time, then there will not be any leftovers to contend with.  Oh wait, I forgot about my other promise to myself to stop going out to eat so often and to cook healthy meals!

The pantry shares a similar fate as the refrigerator.  It is jam packed with food, just waiting for someone to use it up.I don't think that I can send the items to a third world country to be enjoyed by starving children.  Shipping said food to Africa would be prohibitively expensive, and there are certainly strict regulations which must be followed to get food across international borders. Anyhow, it would all be rotten by the time they received it.

I am no quitter, though, I'll have you know.  As I sign off for today, I head to the under sink cabinet once more, to try and get it under control.  If you don't hear from me for awhile, you can probably bet that I was crushed by falling cleaning products and am waiting for someone to come home and rescue me.