Smokey the Magnificent

Not feeling so oosewifely today.  I did my 30 minutes of cleaning (laundry, dishes and microwave) and have made a vague attempt at my Bible study homework, but that’s it.  On the other hand, I made carrot and pumpkin soup for lunch and have started some hot cross bun dough for tomorrow.  I’m also soaking a bunch of grains for multi-grain bread, and am endeavoring to sprout some buckwheat.  For all I know it’s heat-treated and as dead as six thousand tiny doornails, but we will see.  Sprouting is one of the things the cool kids do, and I feel I should try it.

I’m about to go into town and do some shopping.  I want to buy some bling for the couch cushions, and I unwisely spent a lot of time on sewing blogs over the weekend and now want to make thousands of cute garments for the baby.  Unfortunately my enthusiasm for sewing is always greater than my talents, time or money… I was all fired up to make the couch cushions, and now I’m halfway through the first one I’m going ‘Ooh, shiny!’ at pictures of babies wearing cute wintry hats.

I also gotta return my library books and get some groceries.  Tonight’s dinner is burritos, and I’m planning to use a tortilla recipe which contains fine cornmeal; but when I looked in the pantry I discovered the whole jar had been infested with weasels.

Later…

Oops.  Town took longer than I expected, and by the time I got home it was getting dark.  I prevailed upon Helpdesk Man to start the mince for dinner while I attacked the garden, and successfully got my 30 minutes in before the sun went down.  (Mostly mowing, but I also planted some snow peas, harvested some tomatoes and turned the compost).

We then made dinner. The tortillas were surprisingly good!  Cornmeal makes a weak and feeble dough, but the taste is nice, and differentiates the tortillas from chapattis.  As would the weasels have done, but I used fresh cornmeal.  Anyway, what with a lateish dinner, baking my hot cross buns, zig-zagging the edges of my new fabric and the baby throwing up on my side of the bed, it was ten before I got around to working on my article.  Which I have now done.  Whew.

So, I completely forgot to mention that tomorrow is the start of Script Frenzy!  My sister, whose name I will not mention because she hasn’t given me permish to blog about her - you may call her Nimbus Nose - is cowriting with me; we’re attempting a musical based on the book of Esther, which should prove very interesting, in that we a) are living in different cities, b) have never penned a musical before, and c) have never collaborated before on anything more creative than watching M*A*S*H* when we were supposed to be homeschooling ourselves.  So just to make my life more interesting, for the next month I will be writing half an off-Broadway (very off-Broadway, being New Zealand and all) musical extravaganza.  K?  It’s got a harem in it.

Gah.  Nothing like starting the week off sleep-deprived.  Helpdesk Man doesn’t snore very frequently, but when he does… hoo boy.

Well, it’s 2PM and everything is oosing along nicely.  My 30 minutes of cleaning turned into 40, even after I scrupulously added an extra four minutes to make up for taking the muffins out of their tin.  Never let it be said that Smokey the Magnificent cheats at her 30 minuteses.  On a Monday, anyway.  (The muffins were quite something, incidentally.  I filled them with marshmallows and chocolate fishies, which swole up and drizzled down the side of the muffins like so many molten eyeballs.)  It was mostly unloading the dishwasher and cleaning the stove, which had had kidney beans boil over on it some days previously.

I also dutifully spent 30 minutes on my article, and channelled my inner Zindi probe cutting swathes in the grass with my push mower.  It’s kind of addictive; I would have kept going, but the baby takes mowing as a personal affront.

Then I got distracted and ended up watching a whole bunch of Youtube clips from Hello Dolly and the Wall-E soundtrack.  So, um.  Back to work.

Later…

Hmph.  The baby is sitting on my knee carefully ‘planting’ cupcake crumbs in the keyboard.On the bright side, I managed to get in a bit more mowing by plonking her in her pram outside with a tomato.  Her dress will never be the same again, but the lawn looks better.

I did some mending this afternoon, which made me feel v. domestic.  I zigzagged around the edge of an embroidered beastie-cloth which was coming unravelled, and the zigzagging made me feel so reckless and spirited that I re-zigzagged the edges of some of the snortlepig’s nappy inners.  Which are nearing their last legs… how does one further downgrade a nappy inner?  Cleaning cloths, I guess.  If I were a nappy inner I’d consider that a step up in the world, especially given that my cleaning cloths tend to live lives of undisturbed ease on a shelf in the cupboard.  But for that very reason, I don’t really need thirty new cleaning cloths…

Helpdesk Man is at his parents’ tonight, so I have an hour to make the place look slightly more respectable.  For a relatively productive day, it looks like I spent it in a coma.  Ach well.  I bought some groceries and did some laundry, and the baby managed “Where’s my chin?” successfully twice.  “Hands on head” still eludes her; it’s probably the mercury in my filling.

So.  New week.  I decided to structure this challenge around the fact that the grass needs mowing, the garden hasn’t been cared for in forever and I have an article to write by Friday.  I’ve had some success scheduling my time rather than my tasks in the past, so I’m gonna try that.  Anyone who wants to join me by copying my system, the combox is waiting!

Every day this week I will spend:

• 30 minutes working on my article
• 30 minutes in the garden (mowing, planting, weeding, cleaning the chickens, removing weeds from chinks in the pavement etc)
• 30 minutes cleaning
• 10 minutes teaching the baby to do tricks (her ‘Where’s Mummy’s chin?’ skills are slipping, and her ‘Hands on head’ is atrocious; kid’ll probably end up working at McDonald’s)

I will also, during the week, spend:

• 30 minutes working on my Bible study homework (or longer, if that’s what it takes, Malachi’s a doozy)
• Two 30-minute sessions on sewing (I need to finish my couch cushion and make a winter hat for the baby)
• 30 minutes doing unpleasant things.  Deliberately, that is; breaking an elbow, for example, doesn’t count.  On second thoughts, what the heck - if I break an elbow, it counts.  But I’m thinking more along the lines of cleaning out the fridge and emptying the foodie bin.

That sounds pretty doable, doesn’t it!  I have a few interruptions this week: on Wednesday my friend and her two kidlings are coming over for morning tea, Thursday morning is Bible study, on Thursday night some friends are coming over to watch Dr Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, and at some point during the week I need to venture into town to return my library books and buy cushion-covering items.

Our feeding plan for the week involves flatbreads - Bnonn’s idea.  Anything involving flatbreads.  I’m thinking burritos one night, pita chips-and-veggies-and-dip another night, and curry with naan or chapattis for Bnonn and Smokey Night (our date night, which these days means a slightly fancier than usual dinner and hoping the baby will be more or less sedate, which she never is).  I’m hoping some other ideas will come to me.

Other random things I gotta do:

• Query Taste and Recipes+ magazine
• Ring the tax man
• Henna my hair
• Clean the microwave
• Make Tuesday Muffin and its fellows for Helpdesk Man’s brekker

So here I am at my computer, temporarily paralysed because the sanctity of my to-do list has been corrupted by a request from Helpdesk Man, and it occurs to me that this might be an appropriate moment to address the issue of being a vanity Aspie.

Simply put, vanity Aspies are those lucky individuals who have a dim third-cousinship to autism.  We flirt with the black-T-shirted line between neurotypicality and government subsidies.  We are considered only a Bit Funny by the hoi polloi, while those in the know nod their heads wisely and lend us The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.  We’re the sort of people who find their tranquillity disturbed by untimely additions to an already-printed to-do list, but who have the presence of mind to come online and tell you about it calmly instead of flapping a dishtowel.  (Not that I have anything against flapping dishtowels, for the record.  Some of my best friends flap dishtowels.  Well, that’s not exactly true.  Most of my friends are only at the vanity Aspie level themselves, or at most genuine Aspie.  Some of my sister’s friends flap dishtowels.  She’s autistic.  So are they.  Actually I don’t think she’s seen the friend of whom I’m thinking for years, but that’s OK, because she’s autistic.  I hope this is all becoming clear.)

In short, we are the sort of people who could probably, if we loaded up on gluten and wore our Ren Faire capelets, trot down to an analyst and get ourselves a diagnosis.  But it would be a vanity diagnosis… a diploma-mill type of deal, useful for waving in relative’s faces when they invited us to social functions, but not truly earned with the sweat of our behaviorally-modified brows.  Plus, if we had the misfortune to pick an analyst who was into Firefly, he might not think we were Aspie at all; just cool.  Which, naturally, we are.  Make no mistake; neurotypicality is so last season.  And when the revolution comes, we’ll be ones clinging to our Aspie and autistic kinfolk, pleading “See?  We were one of you all along“.

Or, In Which Smokey the Magnificent Vows to Wear The Same Organic Hemp Sack All Year While Eating Nothing but Crockpotted Leftovers Bulk-Cooked From Homegrown Heirloom Beets, For the Purpose of Protesting the Cruelties and Injustices Visited Upon Orphaned Infant Weasels by Big Pharma.

Self-imposed challenges.  I love ‘em.  Show me a blogger who has given up the colour blue for Lent or written an entire fantasy trilogy without using the letter M, and I’ll be a fan for life.  There’s something so delightfully childish yet earnest, privileged yet well-intentioned and generally playing-at-real-lifeish about grown humans deliberately making the process of living more difficult for a cause, the pursuit of personal growth or just the heck of it.  And as a chronically disorganised housewife, I have fallen back on self-imposed challenges more times than I can count in the hopes of ever unearthing the kitchen floor.  A few weeks ago my meal plan included only Spanish food; the week before that, Italian.  (We did have a brief stab at Irish in honour of St Patrick’s Day, but after eating Irish stew the first night and futilely bandicooting for potatoes the second, we Googled, said ‘Um’ and gave up).  Another memorable week, we ate only foods beginning with B, E and F.

It’s not just cooking, either.  My freelance writing career, such as it is, is based on a continual round of “200 more words and you get to go on xkcd”.  My cleaning attempts are universally preceded by setting the kitchen timer and end with a celebratory square of chocolate.  The only reason I read to my baby at all this week was for the joy of ticking it off on my spreadsheet.  And when my husband innocently asked me to vacuum under the spare bed for the sake of his hayfever, I blinked Shylock-fashion and muttered something along the lines of “I cannot find it; it is not in the bond”.

One might ask, why not just join FlyLady and save time on making up lists and mind-games instead of doing actual housework?

One would be answered: Have you the brain worms?!  Making the lists is the only thing that stops me pawning the baby and moving to the Middle Ages to become a monk.  (A long-cherished dream of mine, incidentally.  Flattering brown habits, illuminating manuscripts in a well-locked tower in the morning, a bit of plainchant after lunch to get the old humours flowing and then a leisurely afternoon apothecarying in the herb garden with a mortar and pestle.)

So in the spirit of erratic bunny-hops towards perfection, the cyclical pursuit and abandonment of Balance, and occasional domestic competence alternating with a mind fixed on Higher Things… I bid thee welcome.