Smokey the Magnificent

Well, minions, I feel it is time to shake things up. This afternoon in a listy mood I devised a cunning stratagem to keep me on the baking-apple-pies-in-a-ruffly apron side of the tracks. (Having led a sheltered life, I’m not entirely sure what goes on on the other side of the tracks. Scarification? Hash beef Wellington? Power-padded shoulder suits?) I have decided to bribe myself.

Basically, I’m gonna use my Suite101 earnings to buy nice things for myself and the house; but given that many of the items I like aren’t strictly frugal, I’m going to use them as a reward for being clean and virtuous. With points. For example, small domestic tasks such as giving the snortlepig a bath, taking her for a walk or changing the pillowcases are worth one point. (So is “eating a piece of fruit”, which might be seen by some as a copout, but given that from one season to the next scarcely an apple touches my lips, I thought it was worth an entry. I don’t like to brag, but the future of the human race would probably have been a good deal brighter if I had been the one kicking about with Adam.)

Slightly more complex, time-consuming or unpleasant tasks, such as cleaning out the chickens’ cage or taking the baby to music class, get me two points. Running errands in town and planting veggies in the veggie garden (to which I have a strong weather-related aversion) get me three; and so on. I have assigned various values to several one-off tasks I need completed, such as finishing various sewing projects and painting the house; and have further decided that the successful sale of a print article is worth an entire 20 points.

Then, of course, I have to assign values to the things I want. I’m not quite sure how I’m going to go about that; probably intuitively rather than mathematically. I was thinking the Dieselpunk bodice I want might come in at about thirty, whereas something really marvellous like this ought to be worth, ooh, a hundred and fifty? Difficult to say. It has to be hard enough that I have time to actually acquire the funds via Suite, otherwise the whole bribery thing is a bit moot.

And not everything will be quite as frivolous as steampunk corsets, I hasten to add. Mostly I’ll be using it to buy fabric, I suspect, for my ever-growing list of Quilts  I Want to Make. And a hat rack.

Helpdesk Man, as usual, treats this scheme with tolerant amusement, telling me that I can buy myself dieselpunk bodices whenever I please without having to assuage my guilt by cleaning out chicken cages. He is a pleasing sort of husband to have; which is all the more reason to clean out the chickens, innit.

For me, cleaning the house is 99% inspiration and 1% perspiration; it’s all about the mental rather than the physical oomph.  My mind usually being on Higher Things (such as the perplexing question “Would you accept a million dollars if it meant that once every week for the rest of your life at a random time you would throw up with only thirty seconds’ warning?”), it is unlikely ever to occur to me that the doorframes need wiping down or the valance needs waxing, or… you know… whatever it is housewives do.

But just last week I lit upon a stratagem so brilliant I’m considering approaching the publishers of The Secret and marketing it as a sequel.  What you do is take a microfiber cloth, the kind that works wet or dry and can wipe up an entire powdered elephant without flinching.  You clean something with it until it is good and smeggy, then toss it in the machine.  When you next do a load of laundry and are hanging up the wet clothes, you come across the now-pristine and usefully damp microfiber cloth and think “Aha!”  So instead of hanging it up to dry, you wander round the house with it until you find a surface that needs cleaning and clean it, pausing not nor blenching until the cloth is once more in a state of disarray.  Then you simply toss it back into the enpty washing machine, where it awaits the next load.

The good thing about this is that microfiber cloths can be used on a whole range of surfaces that are easy to forget about cleaning, such as mirrors and windows and windowsills and… well, in my house, everything really.  The first time I did this I got all excited and wiped off half the house, starting with cleanish surfaces and moving to more atrocious ones. I’ve been doing it for three weeks now, and my ceilings have never been less fly-specked.

Try it.  It’ll make your house a good 3% cleaner, I guarantee… and when your husband comes home from work and says “What did you do today?” you can beam at him with the smugness of a Stepford wife and say “I wiped the skirting board in the bathroom“.  And he’ll be like “Uh, k” and then cautiously congratulate you, eyes flicking round nervously as if he is afraid you will go for his neck.  And that is a Good Thing.