I don’t know if I’ve mentioned Captain Awkward here yet, but it’s one of my favorite sites now: http://CaptainAwkward.com. She reminds me strongly of another favorite, Miss Manners: Miss Manners has a reputation for being about stationery sizes and fancy forks, when actually many of her letters are “Dear Miss Manners, My husband is being dumb, but my way of telling you about it is also kind of annoying”/”Dear Gentle Reader, [Piercingly intelligent reply that untangles all the issues and sets everyone straight].” That’s how Captain Awkward is, too: she’s kind, but she GETS TO IT.

Anyway, one of her themes I strongly agree with is that if you’re feeling bad, it’s good to get some practical things done to take care of yourself (haircut, vegetables, walk, face wash) or your living space (clean, tidy, fix). I like this because when I try it, it feels almost like a magic spell: I do some tasks, and they don’t seem like they’d have anything to do with why I’m feeling bad, but I DO feel better. I feel like a rat pressing a lever, but by George it works.

I’m thinking of that today, because I got a couple such things done that I’d been putting off for quite awhile: I got my hair cut (2 inches off the ends—nothing interesting), even though it meant going to a walk-in place because I can’t seem to manage figuring out and scheduling an appointment; and I made an appointment to see the doctor about my hands, which seems silly because they’re not SO bad, but they’re often feeling weak or uncomfortable, and I’m starting to have trouble sometimes with opening jars or whatever, and sometimes I do something normal like opening a drawer and I get a stab of pain, so off I go.

It isn’t even that I don’t think it’s worth going to the doctor about the hands: I think it’s pretty clear I need to. It’s that I don’t want to START A THING, and an appointment like this is STARTING A THING. There might be ideas to try (new keyboard, exercises, not holding the phone that way to play games on it), or questions I have trouble answering since the problem is irregular and hard to figure out, and follow-up appointments; and I will think afterward that I explained things wrong and that if I’d explained differently she would have tried different things; there might be a referral and all the accompanying fuss (calling the insurance, figuring out when to schedule things, calling to make the appointment, calling the doctor back to get the referral sent through, etc.). There will then be insurance screw-ups, more follow-up appointments. Maybe there will be decisions about surgery, which will involve more insurance and referrals and figuring out when to schedule. It will be A THING.

Also, it’s silly but I think there’s a little feeling of “If I don’t go looking for bad news, there won’t be any.”

Well. It still feels good to have the appointment made (despite dreading everything about this), because it is better than knowing I OUGHT to make the appointment. Thinking of it every time my hands hurt, thinking, “Urg, I guess I should make that appointment” and then “Urg, it’s the end of the day and I still haven’t made that appointment”—it was wearying. Accomplishing the making of the appointment feels better.

Laura Lou had the good idea to follow up on some of my guest-related concerns: specifically, how to figure out what they expected, and how to deal with the religion/church issue. I’d also been concerned that there might be hard feelings over Paul and his sister not having a funeral for their dad (his aunt’s brother), and I’d been concerned that his aunt would boss me (those two issues are both mentioned in the church-issue post as well).

1. Figuring out their expectations. For this one, his aunt gave me an opening: she emailed chatting about a fun day they’d had doing various things—things that had equivalents around here. So I emailed back, saying oh, if you like those things, I wonder if you would like to do those things on your visit here? And she emailed back saying that although those things did sound like fun, what they’d prefer to do is just spend time with our family. I would have found this a little puzzling (I consider “doing things together” to be “spending time with family”), except for the context and also Paul’s translation: he says for his family, “spending time with family” means “at the house, chatting.” And that really is what we did: we sat and chatted. I was pretty wrung out afterward from the intensity of that kind of social contact (seriously: 10.5 hours where the only time I wasn’t in a conversation was when I was in the bathroom), but it was also fun: because his aunt and uncle are relatively new to me, I could ask TONS of the fun/easy-to-talk-about questions, like about how they met, whether their kids got along, all about their grandchildren, etc. And I could tell all MY fun/easy stories, too.

2. The church issue. I used Judith’s suggestion of giving them a strong hint framed as an offer to find out information: “Would you like us to get service times / recommendations for churches in the area? We’re not part of a congregation, but we’ve heard good things about Church X and Church Y.” I put it in the same email as the questions about activities. They responded that they would indeed attend church on Sunday but that they would find one themselves. They didn’t question us specifically, but we didn’t pray before meals, and one of our children asked what a hymn was, so it seems like things must have been fairly clear. Paul’s aunt asked a number of questions (“So your dad was a minister?” “So how did you come to attend [Christian college]?”) that told me she would really like to know more, but at least on this trip she didn’t ask directly. (Though I would have been okay if she had: my main concern was that there would be an awkward question that was only awkward because it assumed we were religious, and was hard to answer without first addressing that point.) I think that on this topic, my history leads to very misleading conversations: I’ve had the same trouble with my wine-and-appetizers friends, where I keep telling stories about my minister dad or my Christian schools, and then realizing that might be why people are saying “sorry” to me when they swear.

3. The no-funeral issue. Did not come up.

4. His aunt might try to boss me. It seemed to me that she is Quite Bossy by nature, but that she is self-aware enough to attempt to reign herself in—unlike my late mother-in-law, who would just LET FLY with anything she felt like bossing me about, with the strongly-felt implication that there was The Right Way and The Dumb Way. I think Paul’s aunt ITCHES to tell people The Right Way, but that she is aware that it’s not necessarily The Dumb Way if they want to do it differently; or that even if it IS The Dumb Way, that’s not her concern. Also, she is aware that people don’t necessarily LIKE to be bossed. So for two days, she did well. But by the end of the second day she was starting to Make Suggestions in a way that told me that if I were her daughter-in-law, or if she were staying longer than two days, we would start to have Issues. As neither of those were the case, we got along beautifully and I liked her very much. If Paul and I ever do the road trip we’d like to do someday, I’d want to deliberately route it so that we could stop and see his aunt and uncle.

The visit from Paul’s aunt and uncle went well! Very well indeed! There were no major hitches, and the minor ones were along the lines of “Whoops, forgot to think about napkins, good thing I keep buying pretty paper napkins I have no use for, because now I suddenly have a use for them, SEE PAUL???” I’d also forgotten to think about dishes, and by the time I DID think of them I felt too tired out to lug up the boxes from the basement and wash all the dishes and find a place to keep them, so instead we just used our usual hodge-podge dishes, and if anyone felt this was less than fancy, they kept those thoughts to themselves.

I wondered, in fact, if they might have come away with the impression that we were rather poor: non-matching dishes, shabby recliners with actual rips in the upholstery, coffee table with about half its original finish, kitchen made up of an assortment of non-official fixes (such as having an island made out of what used to be a changing table), etc. When actually, it’s partly procrastination, partly wanting to make do with what we have, partly not wanting to buy nice things while our children are still wrecking them, partly not noticing/caring very much, and only partly a matter of wincing at prices.

The house had reached an acceptable level of cleanliness/tidiness by the time they arrived, so that it did not much embarrass me—and I think it is good to get periodic practice in “not feeling as if the cleanliness of my house MEANS SOMETHING about me,” and “just because some people take pride in a clean house doesn’t mean I have to feel shame in a messy one.” What I’d like to do, now that it is in fairly good shape, is try to KEEP it there. But I am remembering when I had the flu a couple of years ago and lost 20 pounds, and I thought, “I feel so much BETTER this way! Now that I am here, I am going to KEEP it here!” And yet slowly, inexorably, I went right back to my usual weight. In order to maintain a lower weight, I need to be actively ill; in order to maintain a cleaner house, I need to be actively anxious about impending houseguests.

We had a plumber here this morning to install our new toilet, which I hope will end The Decade of Plunging the Toilet Every Time Someone Uses a Little Too Much Toilet Paper or Just Doesn’t Crumple It Right, and I tried out a new coping mechanism that worked BEAUTIFULLY. I know I am not the only one of us who feels all skittery and weird having a worker in the house (I was going to say “workman,” then stopped to adjust it to workperson, which didn’t seem right, and worker isn’t quite right either but is better, and then I realized ALL the workers in our house have ALWAYS been men, which made me think again of the idea of an all-woman construction/repair/plumping/electrician company because that would be SO EXCELLENT and probably illegal) (but I still would feel skittery and weird about having a worker in the house). I am going to go ahead and start a new sentence here, instead of finishing that one.

In fact, let’s have a whole new paragraph. *brushing off clinging strands of sentence* Many of us, perhaps MOST of us, feel weird when a worker is in the house. This coping idea won’t work for when we have someone in the house ALL DAY or whatever, but for the times when someone will be there for an hour or two, this is the idea I tried today: BAKE. Or COOK would work, too. The idea is, I was in the kitchen, so I was:

1. industrious in appearance, rather than appearing to loll around while someone else did work

2. industrious in actual fact, to keep my nervous SOMEONE IS IN MY HOUSE energy occupied and to get stuff done that needed to be done

3. easy to find, without someone having to call through the house if they’re looking for me, and without me having to wonder every time they walked down the hall if they might be looking for me

Really, it was perfect. I made ginger snaps, which I wanted to make to have on hand for our impending guests anyway, and it made the whole house smell great. Then as the plumber was leaving, I said, “Take a couple of cookies with you, if you’d like!,” which made me feel like a easygoing, natural, friendly person who didn’t at ALL mind having a stranger in the house. And he DID take a couple of cookies, which made me feel happy too. Then I had a couple of cookies myself, which made me feel even happier.

The one downside is that it made me feel like SUCH a…I don’t know. Housewife, I guess. I don’t like the word (I’d always use “homemaker”), so I use it deliberately here because it fits very well how I FELT: woman at home in the middle of the day, baking cookies. There’s NOTHING WRONG WITH THAT. And for all he knows, I’m a cut-throat corporate-takeover specialist, and I am just home today for his visit, and I am making cookies because it is rare for me to have time to do such a thing! Perhaps I am planning to use them to manipulate shareholders!

I have made more progress cleaning. I’m concentrating on the four rooms the guests will spend the most time in (living room, dining room, kitchen, bathroom), and pretty much ignoring everything else: maybe they’ll want a tour of the whole house and maybe they won’t, but I am working with limited time and even more limited enthusiasm. I am also remembering when I was getting ready to go on my trip with Elizabeth, and I wanted to get all caught up on laundry before we went, and I left all her laundry and my laundry for last so we’d have exactly what we needed for packing—and the washing machine broke right after I’d finished everyone else’s stuff and right before I’d gotten to ours. Most-important stuff FIRST, not LAST, that is the goal now.

One of the best helps is making everyone clean together at the same time. We’ve done it a few times (we’re aiming for once a day until the guests get here), and it’s surprising what a difference it makes. Each person chooses whatever they want to do, but I emphasized ahead of time that we were looking for tasks that made the biggest impact. The littler kids barely have any effect on anything, but they DO make SOME difference, and the two big kids are big helps, and it’s hugely good for morale to have EVERYONE CLEANING and not JUST ME. (It’s something I’d like to keep doing, maybe an hour every Saturday or something, but why don’t I tell you about it AFTER we actually implement such a plan and keep up with it for awhile, instead of when it’s just me assuming Future Me will be happy to do all that work.) We put the radio on loud and it’s not really FUN but it’s satisfying, and things definitely look better when we’re done. The children are starting to say MY lines, things like “Can’t people put things AWAY when they’re done with them?” and “Ug, look at all these PENCILS! They go in the MUG, not ALL OVER THE PLACE!”

Another excellent development: the annual ladybug invasion has begun, which means it will appear that the speckles up high in the corners are from THIS year, rather than still there from last year!

I removed considerable stress by deciding that for the two dinners, we will make our specialties: tacos (me) and pizza (Paul). Those are the only two meals we seem to be able to make in huge quantities AND that the children will eat without complaining and/or acting as if we normally eat only tacos and pizza (“What’s THIS?”—suspiciously looking at carrot shred as if utterly foreign substance). These are not the meals I think of as ideal for (1) company or (2) people in their mid-70s, but so be it. Making something we know how to make (and know how to shop for) will be much, much, much more peaceful from an Inexperienced Hostess point of view—and maybe they will LOVE it and be GLAD it isn’t Company Food. Also, these are both meals we make with child helpers, which makes us AND our children look good. And the tacos are highly customizable, which is nice for guests, and the pizza can be sliced small and I’ll make a salad, in case they go lightly on pizza-like foods. But Paul’s aunt has made several nervous, self-deprecating comments about eating too much, so my hope is that they are plump and love food and will think of tacos/pizza as treats. I still have to decide about desserts.

For lunches, I’m doing what one of my grandmothers did (perhaps the other grandmother did it as well, but I specifically remember it with only one), which is to put out a great abundance of miscellaneous things and let everyone help themselves: three kinds of bread, peanut butter, two kinds of jam, two kinds of deli meat, two kinds of deli cheese, mayo and mustard, cottage cheese, applesauce, grapes, dried cherries, carrot sticks and celery sticks, nuts, sunflower seeds, chips, crackers, cookies. It’s fun, it’s flexible, it lets everyone eat how they want without making me feel like I have to Guess Correctly, and it’s easy to use up whatever’s left over after the guests leave.

Those of you who have instruments that need to be kept humid: how do you keep them humid? The guy who rented us Rob’s cello said we would need to keep the cello in a closed room with a humidifier, and keep maybe even more than one hygrometer in the room to make sure we were getting an accurate reading. He then told us some horror stories: The Family That Thought Two Humidifiers Were Enough, But THEY WERE WRONG! and The Family That Kept Their House at 50% Humidity, But IT WAS NOT ENOUGH!

In researching this a little bit I found there is such a thing as a “case humidifier,” which appears to be…a sponge? in a little plastic box with holes? selling for way, way, way more than I would think a sponge in a little plastic box would cost, but presumably it is a SPECIAL sponge and a SPECIAL box. Or there are other versions, but the gist is that it is something kept inside the case with the cello. It seems like a way better system than humidifying a whole room or whole house—but if it WERE better, it seems as if the cello guy would have mentioned it, so that makes me assume it ISN’T a better system.

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We watched Nanny McPhee with the kids, and I’d forgotten how much I love that movie.

(image from Amazon.com)

I was completely sure I’d already blogged about it so I was going to link back to that post, but apparently I HAVEN’T blogged about it except for a brief parenthetical in the Wallowing post (a post in which I apparently ran out of steam on the photos). Which is disappointing, because I know I want to rave about it, but I don’t know SPECIFICALLY, so I was hoping I’d already written it. I love Emma Thompson, I love Colin Firth, I love the actors who play the kids, I love the cook and Mrs. Quickly, and the whole thing is just silly and funny and makes me happy.

There! Now I have also thoroughly cleaned the bathroom floor. There were a few areas I’ve found frustrating over the years: I wash them but they don’t LOOK clean. This time, from the dim recesses of a mind that doesn’t tune into cleaning information (“No one TOLD me!”), came this: “In old books, the housemaid is always down on her knees cleaning the floor with a scrub brush. It’s never a wash cloth or a paper towel.” Well, all right then. And the housemaid’s skillz were indeed mad, because the brush took the grungy-looking stuff right off. Right off!

I realize this may seem extremely dim to those of you as skillzed as the housemaid. “Wait. What were you…what were you using BEFORE?,” you may be thinking. I think that people who are good/experienced at something like cleaning can forget what a skill it is, like cooking or using a cell phone: it only seems easy and natural when you’ve had a ton of practice. Like, there are people who can taste some simmering food and say, “Hm, needs celery/garlic/thyme,” or whatever. And there are people who see you squinting with confusion at your phone trying to send an attachment, and they sigh and do it for you. And because I worked at a pharmacy, I finally understand the trinity of doctor-pharmacy-insurance and what error means what.

But maybe my cooking friend can’t figure out how to text someone a photo, and maybe my friend who can text someone a photo thinks that if the insurance won’t cover her prescription it means the pharmacy won’t give it to her, and maybe I can explain to her how that pharmacy stuff works but I didn’t know to use a scrub brush to get grunge out of the floor pattern. We all have our areas of interest and expertise because we can’t ALL master ALL of them or we’d be no use in a post-apocalyptic crisis (“Crud, we ALL understand pharmaceutical insurance but NONE of us knows how to make wine??”).

I just spent an hour cleaning the bathroom walls and the toilet seat, and I had forgotten how similar vigorous cleaning is to exercise, in that I need special clothing for it and afterward I feel GROSS.

I would like to say some appreciative things about this toilet seat. When I bought it, I bought it because it had a child’s potty lid built right in. What I paid no attention to was that the whole seat unit was “easily removable for cleaning.” I have never thought to actually remove it for cleaning, since that seemed like a whole different level of cleaning than I ever do: I don’t really feel the urge to clean place no one sees or touches, considering how many places we DO see and touch are ahead of those on the priority list.

However, today I DID remove the seat, because I wanted to see some information about our toilet which was hidden by the seat, and OMG. It was so extremely pleasant to clean that thing by putting it in the tub and using a giant scrub brush on it. It was so much easier to clean places we CAN see but that are hard to GET at, like around the hinges and around the screws. And while removing a whole toilet seat seemed like it would be a burdensome task, it was seriously easy: move two clasps and pull it right off. It took like 6 seconds, and that included 4 seconds of peering to see if there were instructions. A++++++ would buy this same concept again.

I’m not sure cleaning the walls made a definite enough difference to be worth the time, but I KNOW it’s more worth it than cleaning a sock drawer. Also, we’re in that awkward time period where it’s much too early to clean the regular parts of the kitchen/bathroom for the impending guests, and yet I am almost PANTING at how much cleaning needs to be done. My hope is that it’s like when I clean out under a piece of furniture and it feels like it makes a HUGE difference in the clean feeling of the room, even though that makes no sense because most of the under-furniture can’t even be seen.

It DOES seem to me as if the whole bathroom looks cleaner (I cleaned things like light switches and outlets while I was at it), but perhaps that’s mostly the lemon scent. Also, it quieted some of my cleaning anxiety: I have Made Progress! Next I plan to do the floor. “Next” as in another day: TODAY-next involves a Hershey bar with almonds, and the Shirley Jackson book that distracted me from my Jane Austen study program, and washing my hands a dozen more times to try to remove the smell of rubber gloves.

I had coffee with a friend this morning and feel quite revived and perky. It’s funny how it continues to be a little scary to make such plans, and I continue to feel a little nervous beforehand, but then I have a fun time and when I come home I feel happy and I wonder why I don’t go out more often. (Well, and I wonder why I said so many dumb things. But it gets easier to dismiss those as the friendship gets more established.) Also, I smell delicious from sitting in a coffee/doughnut shop.

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I continue to be so, so, so happy with my rainbow flatware. At this point I am so converted to it, and to the idea of owning it, that I think I would buy any set of it I encountered, just to Have It. Paul and I each have a monthly allowance, for things only one of us wants and neither of us needs; the flatware fits beautifully into this category. (Paul generally spends his on cool workshop tools that he wants but doesn’t really need for anything; mine tends to accumulate.)

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I just read Roz Chast’s new book Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?

(image from Amazon.com)

I love love love love Roz Chast books and so do the kids, but this is one I think the kids won’t want to read (yet): it’s a graphic (“graphic” as in “graphic novel,” not as in “graphic violence”) memoir of the aging and decline and death of the author’s parents. It is not cheery, but there are a lot of funny parts. It made me feel kind of sad and scared and stressed about my parents, and also about Paul and me, and also about aging and decline and death in general. I realize I am not selling this. But I felt like it was the good kind of sad/scared: an informative, helpful, thought-provoking sort of book—and also entertaining. I liked it. I said to Paul: “I am not sure there could be a book more fitted to my current interests.”

Before I was ever pregnant, I read a lot of books about pregnancy because I was interested in pregnancy and it was something that was likely to be of even greater interest soon. I tuned into things people said about pregnancy and motherhood: real life people, but also people in movies and books; and I was drawn to novels and movies that involved pregnancy and early motherhood. I got a job at a daycare because I was interested in babies, and I asked the moms about their pregnancies and labors and deliveries. I also watched shows like A Baby Story.

I think a lot of times when people say “No one ever tells you…” or “No one ever talks about…,” the actual situation is that people ARE telling, they ARE talking, but it’s hard to tune into things and/or research things before they apply to us. This is where anxiety and what is commonly (and not very nicely) referred to as “over-thinking” serve me well: because I sometimes think (and/or worry) a lot about things before they happen, I get INTERESTED in those things, so I tune in. I don’t think I ever one single time thought “No one ever tells you…” about pregnancy, childbirth, or early motherhood. Things surprised me a little here and there, of course, and other things took some personal experience before I fully understood them, but it was never that sad, betrayed, lonely feeling as if other people could have warned me but inexplicably chose not to. If anything, I thought things like, “Lots of people say X, but really when it happens it’s not so bad.” Like the weeks of bleeding I knew to expect after childbirth: that sounded awful, but wasn’t a big deal at all. Or I worried quite a bit about being naked or partly naked in front of the delivery staff, but by the time things got to that point I was pleased and amazed to find I didn’t care at all. (This is where the anxiety/over-thinking serves me less well: I can spend a fair amount of time worrying about things that are completely fine and/or don’t happen.)

“Parents/us getting old and dying” is something that is happening and keeps happening and will continue to happen. People ARE talking about it; they ARE writing about it and filming it; they ARE telling us about it. My parents are, I hope, quite a long way from that point; I hope Paul and I are even further away from that point. But I’m interested NOW, ahead of time, so I’m tuning in.

I’m trying to draw the line somewhere sensible. On one end there’s “worrying and fretting about things that might not even happen, might not even be issues, and might not be so bad when they happen.” It reminds me of something Augusten Burroughs said in his book This Is How: he recommends that when you or a loved one is seriously ill, you wait to worry about what COULD happen until it DOES happen, because at that point it will just be What Is, rather than The Scary Unknown. On the other end of the spectrum, there’s going into the situation unprepared and unaware, crying out “NO ONE TOLD ME THIS WOULD HAPPEN! NO ONE TOLD ME I’D HAVE TO DEAL WITH THIS! NO ONE TOLD ME MY PARENTS WOULD GET OLD AND DIE! NO ONE TOLD ME IT WAS $10,000/MONTH FOR ASSISTED LIVING AND INSURANCE MIGHT NOT COVER ANY OF IT!” I’d like to find somewhere in between those extremes: aware in general of a wide range of possibilities, without spending time getting upset about things that haven’t happened and might not.