Flossie's Little Helper

Why, what a delicious meal of marinated tempeh, lemon-garlic kale, and herbed roasted potatoes and celery root. How did I ever do it? Oh, you know, just whipped it together between working at the office and trying to finish my dissertation.

NOT!

Mr. Flossie and I have been subscribing to the Red Avocado meal plan: four vegan and usually gluten-free dinners for two, $65/week. They are delicious meals, they patronize a worthy local cause, and...I feel so ashamed! I have a domesticity blog, for god's sake! I should not be outsourcing my domesticity!

Just to make the confession complete, I'll also tell you that we've been hiring someone to clean our house twice a month. Taking shortcuts is the name of the game Chez F.

"Why do we feel we need to do it all?" asked Dr. Knitter. "Did people think that men in the fifties needed to work from 9 to 5, then come home and cook and clean afterward?"

Sigh. No. But the house feels wife-less, in all the good ways, and all the bad ways.

Winterization Quiz

Which of the following home winterization techniques did Flossie learn the hard way?

a) Lay a path of nonskid welcome mats on the front porch between the front door and the porch steps.

b) Turn off the water supply to the garden hose and unhook the hose.

c) Replace the furnace filter.

d) Run the lawn mower until it is out of gas.

e) Plug in the cord to that insulation-sock thing that covers the water pipes in our garage.

The answer, dear readers, is B. One winter the water in the hose froze and backed up into our basement, bursting the pipes. The next spring, when I turned on the hose to water my flowers, the basement got a watering instead.

No Solutions, Just More Problems

I wish I could say that I've totally reorganized my recipe binder, but alas. I have not. Instead I have another clutter challenge to present: my shelf in the bathroom. For a girl who wears little to no makeup on a daily basis, I have a plethora of beauty products cluttering my bathroom. Where does it all come from? How embarrassing. I feel so vain.

So, that needs to be taken care of, and I need to take some anti-dust-mite action in the bedroom because I just learned I'm allergic, and I need to rake the fallen leaves in the backyard.

P.S. There is no time to do any of this and work on my dissertation.

Clutter Challenge

The filing cabinet in my study has become somewhat of a clutter black hole. My usual coping strategy when faced with a clutter zone is to avert my eyes, but one can only do that for so long. OK, three years. My point is, I hereby vow that this clutter will soon be no more.

Shoulda Read the Manual, Part 3967

Did you know? You are supposed to get your dryer serviced—and the lint vacuumed out of its innards—every six months. Otherwise the built-up lint can IGNITE OMG FIRE!!

It wasn't actually that dramatic; I was drying a load when we started to smell this awful burning-rubber, electrical smell. So I turned it off and the smell went away.

A few days later, the nice repair man enlightened me as to the usefulness of his lint-vacuuming service.

The dryer works much faster now, too.