My Secret to House Cleaning

I don’t know anybody whose day was made better just for the simple fact that they got to clean their house.

“I just had the best day EVER!!! I scrubbed cat vomit out of my carpet in 3, count’em, 3 different places!! Then, to make it even better, I found the most AMAZING hairballs in the drains as I was cleaning the bathtubs! Wish you could have been here!”

As a matter of fact I’m pretty sure that most of my friends abhor the thought of having to scrub another toilet.
I had the pleasure of learning the secret to get yourself motivated to clean. Wanna know what it is? OF COURSE YOU DO! Who wouldn’t want to know this insanely awesome information? Are you ready? Really ready? Ok, here goes….

Set your mind on doing a job that you’ve been dreading for months… (i.e. cleaning your fish tank). Once you have your mind set, your kitchen will magically be buffed and shined better than you’ve ever seen it before. You will be able to see your face in the counters and you will have no trouble sliding across that newly shined kitchen floor in your socks! Every cabinet will be organized, your utensils will be in their designated homes, and unicorns will prance by in the backyard. Ok, not the unicorns. But you hopefully have the idea of how wonderful this trick is and how great it works!

I learned this secret by pure chance. I decided that today was the day that my fish would have a clean home. I had been contemplating cleaning out their tank for a couple weeks and just hadn’t gotten around to it, so, today was the day! I walked over to the tank and gave it a good stare-down, thinking about what to do first. I had to take the filter off and clean up the lid. I had to empty the rocks and other aquarium items as well. In order to clean all the aquarium items, I was going to need a clean sink. There were only a couple dishes to do, but I had to put the clean dishes away in order to have room for the newly washed dishes to dry. As I was putting the dishes away, I noticed that I didn’t have room for all of my glasses. That definitely would not work. I couldn’t have glasses without homes, so I opened all the cabinet doors and decided that in order to make room for everything, I needed to organize. All of the contents of my cabinets were removed and given new homes, as well as the tea glasses that hadn’t had a home since my husband brought them back from his trip to Jordan about a year ago. Hey, tea glasses need homes too! In finding new homes for the glasses, other items were left homeless. This created the need for a total cabinet overhaul. Even the junk spaces got cleaned out. I even found a food processor that I didn’t know I had. Of course, that needed to be washed and played with before it could be put away again.

Once I was satisfied with my squeaky clean cabinets, it was time to start on the fish tank. The stare-down began again. Then it hit me. I’m going to have to have everything out of the way in order to maneuver this fish tank and get all the water out, so I must clean my countertops off. I started by moving the dish drainer out of the way and decided that it was a good time to rearrange things. I mean, you can’t clean a fish tank if your counter is unorganized, right? RIGHT! Every item on my counter was washed and arranged in various locations until they inevitably ended up in the same spot they started out in. That’s ok though because as I was arranging and rearranging, I had my handy dandy Clorox Disinfecting Wipes (the greatest invention since the Mr. Clean Magic Eraser) on hand and scrubbed the counters down as I went. Counter extravaganza complete.

Cleaning off the countertops left a few homeless food items and a few crumbs on the floor. This led to (begin Rocky theme song) the cleaning of my pantry and the sweeping of the floor. I am one of those OCD people who have to have everything in the pantry organized and with “like” items, so I couldn’t just throw the random items in there. They had to have a proper home. Pantry organized? Check! Floor swept? Check!
The only things left untouched in my kitchen were the stove (which had been cleaned the night before), and the fridge. I didn’t want them to feel left out, so I gave them a quick wipe down. There was nothing left to do other than mop the floor. But I figured it would be better to clean the fish tank out first and mop up the mess afterwards. Who knew that cleaning the fish tank would make your kitchen look brand new?

So you see, this really works! If you need to clean the house, do yard work, fold laundry, or do anything that you’ve been putting off for a while, just find a more tedious task and be determined to get that tedious task done at once. Before you know it, your house will look as though you hired professionals!

Writer's Block

What is it about making the choice to start blogging that causes one to have a major case of writer’s block? I was doing alright until a major meltdown happened (which caused the deletion of every post I had previously shared). Once I decided it was ok to start sharing again, I have come up with nothing. I can barely even get a single thought out coherently onto the screen. I even made an attempt to start that book that I’ve been contemplating writing for a great many years, only to come up completely wordless the second I decided to put it into actual words.

I had a ton of great ideas for this blog when I started it, and had quite a decent start the first time around. Now, I can’t even think of what ideas I may have thought about considering making into an article. I have made the assumption that maybe I’m better as a ‘keep it quick’ type of writer rather than someone who can go on an endless writing spree and create books/blog posts that the world will love.

I’m hoping that my creativeness will return quickly as writing has been a life-long dream of mine. I remember attempting to write stories as young as kindergarten but the same thing always happened as soon as the pencil would touch the paper. The things I was thinking, just couldn’t be written down in a way that expressed my thoughts properly and the harder I tried to write my thoughts down, the more blank my mind became until……. …… …… Where were we again? Yeah, it was, and still is that bad.

I read tons of different blogs where it seems that the person wrote effortlessly and came up with something amazing, inspiring, quick-witted, and completely fantastic in no time at all. And then there are those who are able to write a blog every day with (what seems like) no end in sight to their ideas and creativity. Then, here I sit, wordless and wanting so badly to get my thoughts written/typed down and nothing comes out. So, I guess I’ll just hang out and share my frustrations at not being able to come up with anything intriguing to write about until this writer’s block is lifted and my ideas are able to flow freely again.

Thanks for reading,

C.R. Mraiyan

You can't build a snowman out of freezing wind...

Anybody that knows me, knows that I LIVE for snowy weather! It's not really that I'm going to go play in it, rather than I just plain love the feeling that it brings. I love the way it gives you a reason to cuddle up on the couch with a biggole cup of coffee and your big fuzzy blanket to read a book or watch tv because you just flat can't leave the house to do anything. Even power outages aren't so bad so long as you are ready with a gas or kerosene heater (or some alternative form of heat). Power outages are a fantastic time for the family to huddle together and get to know each other again. It's a great time to play board games via candle light or listen to stories from when your parents/grandparents/other family members were younger. Sure, it's a bit nippy, but I think we've all gotten too spoiled and need to remember that there was a time when electricity was no more than a dream and people used blankets, fire places, heaters, and each other to get through the cold times. There's just that natural feeling that comes from situations like that, that are irreplaceable.

I'm sitting here on my loveseat this evening thoroughly enjoying the hideous weather in Houston, TX. The wind is howling so loudly that I'm afraid we may not have a roof by morning. It's a balmy 27 degrees (and dropping). The only problem with this is that where I come from, weather like this is always accompanied by snow.  In Houston, there is this constant layer of "wet" (aka overly excessive amounts of humidity) lingering all over the place, and it takes your super cold day and turns it into a "dear God what the hell have I walked out into" kind of day. The wind is blowing so hard that the "wet" completely bypasses your skin and directly high-fives your bones, leaving you virtually unable to move.

Up North, in my hometown in Missouri, they have gotten over 24 inches of snow today! (My family has been keeping me updated with videos and pictures. All of which are making me extremely homesick, but I love them nonetheless.) This is the way it should be. You wake up, see the snow, and instantly know that you are going to need your thermal underwear and ice scraper if you dare to leave the warmth of your house. You feel the cold wind, see the blanket of white outside, drink your coffee, sip from your bowl of soup, and all is right with the world. Not like in Houston, where you go to bed and sweat your buns off because it's almost 70 degrees outside, then you wake up in a state of convulsing frozenness because you had no idea that it was possible to go from 70 degrees down to 20 in just a few hours.

I guess what I'm trying to say is... You can't build a snowman out of freezing wind, so if it's going to be cold, at least let there be snow to go along with it. That way you can at least build a snowman, sit back and enjoy the beautiful scenery, and enjoy some good-old-fashioned-family-time.