Consider this post an epilogue or a postscript to my
previous post about my trip in a time machine.
You see I have been taking considerable ribbing from my family about the fact that I found a 13 year old box of Kraft dinner in my cupboard while searching for a long lost fondue pot. I think my brother In law put it best when he said, "Well sir that’s saying you clean your cupboards lots too!” (Read with a laughing voice in a Tignish accent). I guess I am not a cleaner. Don’t get me wrong, my house isn’t filthy. It isn’t one of those place we’ve all been in one at one time or another where you walk in and the smell hits you first thing and you are scared to sit down so you just look for any excuse to get out the first chance you can. No I’m not that bad. My house usually smells pretty clean and looks definitely livable. I’ve seen lots worse, but I really don’t enjoy cleaning. It is a chore and one that annoys me. Mostly because I kind of think, “I don’t live here all by myself, so why should I be the only one that cleans it?” now I can hear my family saying, “That’s not fair! We clean all the time!” and I can hear my kids, “mom makes us clean like slaves!!” But really it is almost as much work to get them to clean as it is to do it myself! You have to nag and cajole, and then even when they do it you have to go back when they say they are done and point out all the stuff they missed and make them do it over again and everyone gets cranky… like I said, not fun! I could think of a million things I would rather be doing than cleaning and usually those other things win the battle. My husband and I will tidy up now and then, and that is what I am good at, tidying! But that deep down nitty gritty cleaning… it doesn’t get done around here very often.
You see I have been taking considerable ribbing from my family about the fact that I found a 13 year old box of Kraft dinner in my cupboard while searching for a long lost fondue pot. I think my brother In law put it best when he said, "Well sir that’s saying you clean your cupboards lots too!” (Read with a laughing voice in a Tignish accent). I guess I am not a cleaner. Don’t get me wrong, my house isn’t filthy. It isn’t one of those place we’ve all been in one at one time or another where you walk in and the smell hits you first thing and you are scared to sit down so you just look for any excuse to get out the first chance you can. No I’m not that bad. My house usually smells pretty clean and looks definitely livable. I’ve seen lots worse, but I really don’t enjoy cleaning. It is a chore and one that annoys me. Mostly because I kind of think, “I don’t live here all by myself, so why should I be the only one that cleans it?” now I can hear my family saying, “That’s not fair! We clean all the time!” and I can hear my kids, “mom makes us clean like slaves!!” But really it is almost as much work to get them to clean as it is to do it myself! You have to nag and cajole, and then even when they do it you have to go back when they say they are done and point out all the stuff they missed and make them do it over again and everyone gets cranky… like I said, not fun! I could think of a million things I would rather be doing than cleaning and usually those other things win the battle. My husband and I will tidy up now and then, and that is what I am good at, tidying! But that deep down nitty gritty cleaning… it doesn’t get done around here very often.
I was watching a show about gypsies the other night and the
gypsy women and girls are raised to be house wives, they aren’t supposed to
work outside the home after age 16 and their days are spent keeping an
immaculate home. This one girl was
washing down the baseboards in her home as she was interviewed and the base
boards were clean! The water she was rinsing the cloth in was perfectly clear!
And all I could think was, what a colossal waste of time!!! Why wash the
baseboards everday, or week? Why not wait and do it when they are dirty, like
once a year?? If I was washing my baseboards that water would have been nice
and brown and you wouldn’t have any trouble telling where I had cleaned and not
cleaned… well maybe not, because over
the years I have chosen the décor for my
home with colors, textures and fabrics
that hide dirt! Yes it is true, I have
specifically chosen rough, sandy, dirt colored
tile for all my floors, no need for shine here because it has a nice matt
finish… there have even been times when I was scrubbing one dirty looking spot
and realized that It wasn’t dirt, it was just part of the pattern on the
floor! That being said, I can go weeks,
dare I say even months without scrubbing it! I have lots of natural wood wainscoting,
again hides dirt well, and dark colours and patterns!
Now if, like my family, you read my previous blog post and
thought, “Oh My God! She hasn’t cleaned her food cupboards in 13 years???!!!” no
that’s not true; I try and clean my food cupboards at least once every 2 or 3
years at least. Most recently it was
this winter and I threw out anything that had solidified and wasn’t supposed to
be solid, or anything that was expired, or that I could remember having bought,
etc. but getting back to the KD, I was
baffled as to how it got up there in the first place! I had never, to my best recollection
used that cupboard to store food! It was just too impractical! In order to get
at the space where the KD was I had to stand ON the counter and stick my arm in
up to my shoulder! So while I thought it
was funny that it was there, it was kind of a mystery! What had I been
thinking? If it were older, say 20 years old, I would have said it must have
been left by the previous occupants, but the date was on it clear, and there
were coupons on the box that expired in Dec. 1999, so I knew it must have been
placed there sometime in 1999, and somehow, all the other junk up there that
was older had been moved to make way for it! The wedding presents from 1993
were in front! It just didn’t make any sense!
Then last night, as my brother in-law was making fun of me for not
having cleaned my cupboards since 1999 it dawned on me like a bolt of lightning!
I literally threw my hands up and said, “I remember how it got there!! Y2K!!!”
Now for those of you who don’t remember Y2K I’ll offer a bit
of back ground here. Apparently when
early computer technology began to become part of our everyday infrastructure
back in the late 70’s and early 80’s, those great computer geniuses out there
gave a lot of things digital calendars that would change automatically every
year on Jan 1, unfortunately for some reason most of them forgot to give these
computers the ability to make the first number of the year, i.e. 1999, be a 2,
it could only be a 1. This meant that
when the clock turned over on Jan. 1, 2000, millions of computers all over the
world would crash including those that ran our electrical grids, our cars, our
nuclear missiles… etc. you get the picture! Millennial Melt Down!! Now this glitch was discovered in the early 1990’s thankfully, and pretty
much corrected, but not before a few apocalyptic,
right wing, survivalists got a hold of the idea and ran with it! There were whole books written about it and what
kind of disaster it was going to be for our society, (I have one by the way,
called the millennium melt down, it makes for pretty humorous reading now if
anyone cares to borrow it) there were survival guides and the internet, in its
infancy, was the perfect place to spread this terror across the globe!
So here is where I have to admit something… I am a closet
survivalist. I am not very good at
actually doing things to prepare for the apocalypse other than reading up on
what to do, but I do think about it a lot.
I really like TV shows like Jericho where basically the world gets have destroyed
and the human race has to start all over again.
And I like to think that watching shows and movies like Deep Impact, or reading
Stephen King novels will give me an added edge when the day comes that we have
to forage and live off the land. My husband
on the other hand thinks my confidence is misplaced and that I will go down in
some sort of a crazed rampage after a week without a shower... which is
honestly more likely to be true, but hey, my intentions are good! And so when
rumours of the impending Y2K crisis reached me in early 1999 I thought, “maybe I
should try to prepare for this?”
Now to give myself a little credit I was under the influence of some very good friends who also happened to be very big survivalists. The husband of this couple was a real hippy who had lived off the land and had some clue about how to prepare, and they were convinced, 100% that it was going to happen and were stock piling like no tomorrow. Now my husband was, as usual, the voice of reason. He said, “Why do we need to stock pile food? Are all the cows, pigs and potatoes on PEI computer generated? Are they all going to evaporate on Jan. 1? What about all the wood in the forest around our house? Are there computer chips in those trees? They’ll still be there, we’ll have heat. What about our well? Is that water date sensitive??” any way, needless to say he was against stock piling, so if I was going to do it I had to do it … SECRETLY! So every week I would hoard away a few things from my groceries, up in this hidey hole cupboard that I had, some soap, some Maxi Pads, (those things that you can’t get at your local farm that a man would never think about needing!), a few cans of fruit, a few boxes of Kraft Dinner… until I had a nice little stock pile! And then… Trent found it. I got a bit of a lecture and he did talk some sense into me, but I think my little stock pile stayed until after Jan. 1, 2000. Then I gradually used it all up and forgot about it... until the other night when way at the back, I found that 13 year old box of Kraft Dinner!
Now to give myself a little credit I was under the influence of some very good friends who also happened to be very big survivalists. The husband of this couple was a real hippy who had lived off the land and had some clue about how to prepare, and they were convinced, 100% that it was going to happen and were stock piling like no tomorrow. Now my husband was, as usual, the voice of reason. He said, “Why do we need to stock pile food? Are all the cows, pigs and potatoes on PEI computer generated? Are they all going to evaporate on Jan. 1? What about all the wood in the forest around our house? Are there computer chips in those trees? They’ll still be there, we’ll have heat. What about our well? Is that water date sensitive??” any way, needless to say he was against stock piling, so if I was going to do it I had to do it … SECRETLY! So every week I would hoard away a few things from my groceries, up in this hidey hole cupboard that I had, some soap, some Maxi Pads, (those things that you can’t get at your local farm that a man would never think about needing!), a few cans of fruit, a few boxes of Kraft Dinner… until I had a nice little stock pile! And then… Trent found it. I got a bit of a lecture and he did talk some sense into me, but I think my little stock pile stayed until after Jan. 1, 2000. Then I gradually used it all up and forgot about it... until the other night when way at the back, I found that 13 year old box of Kraft Dinner!
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