The Wonderful World of Cleaning

In October I decided that when the craft fair ended I would start cleaning our apartment in preparation for my husband coming home and decorating for Christmas.  Some of the things on my list included things that I have wanted to do since January when we moved in.  Some of them have just piled up because of my unmotivated mood for the past 3 months.  Can you imagine the layer of dust that piles up in 3 months?  in 6 months?  Could one call this exponentially expanding dust?  Any good stereotypical wife should be dusting every week, right?  Well, sometimes we can't all be stereotypical all the time, especially in the desert where your battle with dust is an unending torment of sneezing, allergies, and even, yes, dust! 

So in my zeal to create the perfect homestead, I have put off sewing, crafting and quilting in favor of reading (oh, wait), baking cookies (hmmmm), and, finally, cleaning.  The first thing I did was shred and shred, and shred.  Here is the proof: yes that bag is full of our shredded life.  The actual first thing I did was go through a bunch of paperwork so that I could create this lovely bag full of little pieces of our private information. 

 
After the great shredding adventure came the great refrigerator caper.  I chose to do this the day before I went grocery shopping so there was hardly anything even in the fridge.  Since I'm on my own, there's hardly ever anything in my fridge anyway.  I cleaned the walls; I washed the racks; I rinsed the hydrator pans (which I never use because they are not see-through and I always forgot I put stuff inside: imagine my surprise 2 months later!).  Very exciting.  Too bad you can't tell how clean it is from the pretty picture.

And I finally organized the dining room closet, which is where we put things on the day we moved in and where they have stayed for the past 10 months even though they don't belong there.  Finally, I started throwing things away, recycling, and reorganizing to provide new and improved room.  You may notice some strange things on our shelves.  Half the bottom shelf I reserved for everyday decorations that need to be stored while the Christmas things are up.   

My final activity was vacuuming it all.  Now I am finally ready for Christmas decorating...ahem, I mean for my husband to come home.  Unstereotypically, I like to put the Christmas tree up around Veteran's Day.  The reasons behind this are much too complicated to discuss in a blog post that is not singly dedicated to the topic.  Luckily, I married a man who doesn't really care when the tree goes up and I love fake trees-they are alive forever!  So here come the Christmas songs and the tree and the (fake) presents under it; stockings, garland, and nativities.  Sometimes the most unstereotypical of things can make a person, in fact, the stereotypical Mormon housewife after all.