Happy New Beginnings for an Old Obsessive Compulsive Crone

I’ve been called many names like perfectionist, difficult, and obsessive.  I think it takdes obsession, takes searching for the details for any artist to be good. ~Barbara Streisand

I turned SIXTY this past September.  That’s a big 6 and an 0.  Six DECADES of life.  And I still feel like I’m 17 with the whole world at my feet and eternity to explore it in.  As my birthday approached I became increasingly reflective, contemplating the past and what I have accomplished and musing about how much time I had left to accomplish anything,; whether I could accomplish anything that mattered,  and what I wanted that to be.  What kind of legacy did I want to leave behind?  How could I be the best me I could be?

These musings were very private and personal so they didn’t get written about.  At least not for public consumption. They consumed a great deal of time and energy and as a consequence this Blog and many other things were neglected.  It was a downright obsessive compulsive period that lasted much longer than I would have thought  but in many ways I am glad I took those long months off and engaged in more than a little self indulgent navel gazing.  It was good for me because I realized that I had been shambling  through life like a tumbleweed blown hither, thither, and yon at the whim of whatever breeze blew the hardest.  I need to focus.  I need to narrow down what I will give my precious little available head space  and physical energy to and set some goals.

I don’t usually make formal New Years Resolutions because when I do  I usually set such lofty goals for myself that I can’t possibly live up to them.  But then that leads to vague, unfocused rambling semi-goals  that are seldom really productive.  Every year I do choose a few  new to me things to learn.  Usually something difficult and something not so difficult and something easy. I really enjoy learning to do new things and I have learned a lot of things over my lifetime.  I’m proud of this ability and I’m proud of the many varied interests I have.  I think it keeps me young and my mind alert.  (I may be kidding myself about that part.)  Most of all it means that I am very rarely bored.

However, where I get into trouble is my expectations for myself.  For instance last year I vowed to learn to play bridge and I did learn the basics but bridge is a complicated game and there was so MUCH to learn that I became overwhelmed so I quit.  I wanted to be able to jump into a game with people who had been playing Bridge for years and be competitive.  I was not content to BE a beginner.  And that is my hubris.  I expect too much of myself.  I’m too competitive.

The same thing happened when I decided to learn to crochet before my daughter was born.  I didn’t just want to learn to crochet, I wanted to crochet her coming home from the  hospital outfit and when I was a couple of months along I chose a lovely and not too complicated  pattern. I managed to accomplish learning how to crochet and I did manage to make my daughter’s coming home outfit before she was born but I didn’t learn some things that were essential for crocheting a truly lovely garment.  And my disappointment in my effort led me to quit putting in any more effort to learn.   I couldn’t do it perfectly so I didn’t want to do it at all.  I realize now that it really was too hard to learn more than the basics  all by myself.  What’s more, I wasn’t willing to do the dull practice of crocheting simple scarves and hats that didn’t require complicated turns and counting stitches to get to the point that I could point with pride at what I had made. If I cannot produce a garment that looks as if it had been made by someone with 20 years of experience crocheting then I lose interest.  I want to be an expert in 3 easy lessons.

Of course that doesn’t  happen.  My expectations for myself were and always have been too high.  If I can’t be an instant expert, leftover tapes from my childhood begin to play in my head and I  abandon whatever didn’t come easy immediately.  So this year, late in life, I have decided to learn how to lower my expectations and learn something difficult one baby step at a time and not let my failure to be perfect at doing it right away get in my way. After all, over the years whenever I wanted a new scarf or a hat, I have picked up the yarn and needles and crocheted one and now people see my work and offer to pay me to crochet for them.  I have finally become an expert in scarves and hats. I’ve decided after all this time to learn to be a beginner. Not so difficult things usually comes pretty easy for me so I felt that the key to correcting this flaw in my character was to break something down into its simplest components, to begin at the beginning  and become an expert in one small piece at a time before I allowed myself to move on the the next small piece.

So these are my New Year’s resolutions.

1.  Find a teacher to teach me how to do something difficult the right way and quit expecting myself to be able to learn new things without help.

2. Accept that I cannot become an expert in something until I have finished the business of being a beginner.

3. Put my ability to be obsessive to good use and learn to deal with the boredom of the repetitive details of being a beginner until I have ceased to be a beginner at step one before I move on to step two.

4. Do allow my compulsive nature to jump ahead to what I consider  the “fun stuff”  ruin the process of learning.  Learn to accept “failure” and frustration as part of the process of learning.

5. Relax and enjoy being  the best me I can be.

These are the new things I want to learn this year:

Making good light fluffy cream Scones

The Korean alphabet

Understanding and using Linux terminal  command lines

Oh, and one more resolution:  BLOG about my experiences

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Arranged

Modern sculpture from native rock Mifflin and Carroll Street, Madison, WI.

Barbara Gavin-Lewellyn 

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Meeting Jeong Sun

I’m excited because today I am meeting a Korean student from WESLI to see if we will be a fit as English conversation partners. Her Korean name is Jeong Sun (first and middle) but when she replied to my contact Email, me she told me her English name is Alice. She’s 27 years old.

I wonder if she chose an English name to make it easy for us Wisconsinites to talk to her or if she really prefers to use that name. If it is the former, I hope we can just drop it soon and use her Korean name because it is very pretty and I THINK I can pronounce it OK. I found the meaning of the name online. Jeong  means “virtuous and chaste.”  Sun means “goodness”

We’re meeting at the Fair Trade Coffee House on State Street which is a short walk from my house. I can’t remember the last time I went out for coffee so this will be a treat.

I’ve written up a list of questions I hope will be good conversation starters for this initial meeting. I’m curious about:

Why did she choose the English name Alice? Does it have any special significance for her?

Why did she come to the US and Wisconsin, in particular, to study English?

How long has she been here? When will she go back to Korea?

What does she like most and least about Madison?

Does she have brothers and sisters? Are they older or younger than she is?

Does she enjoy Korean Television Dramas and comedies? (This one is important because I am absolutely hooked on them and would like very much to find someone to watch them with me who understands the language and can explain the nuances that I think are there but don’t understand. They are subtitled so she doesn’t have to translate them for me. I just want her to explain the cultural things that are happening.)

My interest in Korean Dramas is what prompted me to contact WESLI and become a volunteer English conversation partner. I think they are wonderful morality tales and probably a reflection, albeit imperfect, of Korean culture just like American television is an imperfect reflection of American culture. On the other hand, the Korean television dramas are far better than anything I have seen lately on free American television. I don’t have cable so I may be missing some really good stuff on American TV but I doubt it if what is being talked about in the forums online is any indication.

So that’s my big event of the day. The week actually. Oh, and my daughter and son are both coming to see me this evening. We’re having a BLT salad and I am going to make them some of my spiced coffee. Sunday we’re having a family get together with everyone for my nephew, Greg’s birthday. He requested fried chicken and everyone in the family is super excited because we usually only fry chicken on the 4th of July because we’re all calorie and saturated fat conscious the rest of the year.

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After Twenty-Eight Years, I Am Finally Saying It: I Don't Owe You A Smile.

Reblogged from Alaina Mabaso's Blog:

• 

There’s nothing like a smile to brighten somebody’s day – if the smile is freely given.

But how do you feel when someone else tells you to smile? Especially if that person is bigger than you are, a total stranger, and has interrupted you for no reason while you walk down the street, wait for the train, or stand in line at the store?

Read more… 1,866 more words

What a powerful post. I am reblogging this and sending it to my daughter and all the young women I know as well as the young men in my life. The one good thing about getting older is this pretty much stops happening to you when you get past child bearing age.

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Hell Yes, I’m Defensive

Tell St Peter at the Golden Gate
That you hate to make him wait
But you just gotta have another cigarette

~Willie Nelson Smoke!Smoke!Smoke!

They say that the first step in overcoming addicition is admitting that you are addicted and powerless over the substance of choice. Fine, I’m addicted to nicotine. Satisfied?

The problem is that I have no trouble at all admitting that I am addicted and the cigarettes control me more than I control them. The problem is that I’m not really unhappy with this situation. I like my cigarettes. I don’t want to quit smoking.

 Oh yeah, I KNOW I should. I’ve read and experienced all kinds of evidence for that. But I don’t wanna. And you can’t make me, so buzz off, please and thank you.

 

Barbara Gavin-Lewellyn  

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Places To Go and Things To Do in the ‘Hood

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.
Aristotle

Last week, a group of about 10 of us from The Capitol Center Apartments went on a little excursion (about 3 1/2 blocks) to visit one of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Art Department labs. TASS Matthew Piepenbrok and his students Kristine Karlen, Bao Thao, and Sean Everett gave us an exciting demonstration of glass blowing and patiently answered our questions. It was a lot of fun and very educational.  

The Universtiy of Wisconsin-Madison at the behest of Harvey Littleton was the first college to establish a glass blowing lab in the United States in the ’60s. Above is a view of the furnaces in the present-day lab.  There are four of them and they all have whimsical names because it is easier to tell someone to use Lucy than it is to say the second one from the left.  Lucy and Joe were the ones in use while we were there.

TASS Matthew Piepenbrok (pictured left) is studying to be a professor of art and if his presentation to our group is any indication, he’s going to be an excellent one. He’s a very engaging and personable young man with a great sense of humor and seems to have a profound love of teaching others about his craft.  Examples of his art work can be found at ARTQ.net

In this picture he is showing us the molten glass he has just poured into a cold mold from one of the furnaces. What a card! Wouldn’t it be fun to have a professor like this?

Here he is showing us the hollow stainless steel rod that the liquid glass will be “loaded” onto in preparation for blowing. It was very warm in this lab due to four furnaces that were keeping the molten glass at a temperature of around 2,400 to 2,000*.

The long sleeve on Matthew’s right arm is to protect him from burns as he loads up his glassblowing rod.  According to Matthew and his students glassblowing is a very risky business and not a day goes by when one of them doesn’t get burned as Bao Thao kindly demonstrated for us later in the session! They were very nonchalant about it, treating it as an ordinary part of their day in the lab although you could tell it hurt.

Above Matthew and Kristine Karlen are loading a glob of molten glass onto the rod. In the picture at the right, Matthew is showing us a closer view of the glass after a small amount of air has been blown into it. At right, he is using a pad made from many layers of newspaper to begin shaping the glass. Later on he showed us how the heat from the glass had burned through several layers. 

The whole time the glass is being worked the artist or glassmith must keep the rod turning in order for centrifugal force to keep the glass on the rod or gravity will take effect and the piece will slump and become disfigured.  That’s not so hard at this stage but as they continued to add glass, the piece became heavier and heavier.  We were given a sphere of cooled glass to examine and it is quite heavy. I’d guess between 10 and 15 pounds.

Little by little more molten glass is added to the piece and more air is blown in then more shaping is done to smooth the piece and achieve the desired size and contours. All the while the rod must be kept spinning to keep the glass attached to the rod. The work is painstaking and physically challenging.

The top picture  shows Matthew blowing more air into his  globe of glass. Bao Thao steps in to assist him and Matthew demonstrates other shaping tools glassmiths use to get the effects they want to produce.

Sean Everett steps in to become Matthew’s assistant and things begin to get very dramatic! 

Protruberances were added to the sphere by dropping globs of glass from a rod. To keep the glass at the right temperature, a propane torch was used. Melted glass started dripping onto the cement floor!

At this point they began to let gravity take effect and elongate the round sphere in preparation for the cold mold that had cooled by now to be attached to the piece. It took 3 people to manage that task! Clearly glass art of any complexity is a collaborative effort.

Bao Thao brushes excess sand from the attached cold mold while Kristine Karlen stands by with the propane torch in case heat is needed to keep the glass at the right temperature. The glass can break or crack at any moment if the right temperature is not maintained and in fact, did during this demonstration but fortunately not badly enough to ruin the whole thing so they would have to start all over.

The cold mold has now been attached to a solid stainless steel rod and Matthew, Sean, and Kristine detach the former sphere from the hollow rod. They will begin pulling and twisting the piece into a an elongated horn shape after adding some colored pigment.

Bao and Sean hold the tip of the horn while the piece is being turned and pulled to shape it.

Kristine applies some heat to the tip to refine the shape just before it goes into the cooling tank.  She looks wicked cool with that propane torch!

Barbara Gavin-Lewellyn

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Family is not an important thing, it’s everything. ~Michael J. Fox

If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.
George Bernard Shaw

Happy is said to be the family which can eat onions together. They are, for the time being, separate, from the world, and have a harmony of aspiration.
Charles Dudley Warner

Family. Can there be a more prickly source of joy and despair in our lives? Last night my children, Daryn and Kerryn, came to have dinner with me. We haven’t had a meal together just the three of us in years. There were a good many conversations that began “remember when…”

Daryn brought Kerryn his electronic key board (she wants to learn to play the piano and is planning to take piano lessons!) and while I got dinner on the table and took pictures of it, she began trying to play chopsticks. I was immediately transported back in time, wandering down memory lane. That was the one piece I taught them as youngsters and they loved the fact that we could all three play a part. Whenever we got near a piano back in the early years the three of us would play chopsticks.

Last night was special. My kids became kids again and I was the Mom. We were the family of origin once again.  The salient unit. Happy being together.

Sadly, I forgot to take pictures of THEM. I’m pretty sure they enjoyed having just the three of us together without spouses, grandchildren and extended family members present. We’ll have to remember to do it more often.

On the menu: “left over” Boef Bourguinon (I froze some of the beef and broth when I made it a couple of weeks ago and added fresh vegetables. Fairly quick and easy.) and Dairy Free “Buttermilk” Biscuits. It was a great meal for a night spitting rain and snow and the biscuits turned out really well.  So far I have had only one failure with my egg and dairy free adaptions of family recipes.  That’s amazing!

Barbara Gavin-Lewellyn

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Snowy, Snowy Night

Starry, starry night.
Portraits hung in empty halls,
Frameless head on nameless walls,
With eyes that watch the world and can’t forget.
Like the strangers that you’ve met,
The ragged men in the ragged clothes,
The silver thorn of bloody rose,
Lie crushed and broken on the virgin snow.

Don Mclean

These pictures taken February 23rd  in the courtyard of the building I live in reminded me of Don McLean’s “Starry Starry Night” and the VanGogh painting.  I love how the big flakes that were falling are visible and the play of the light from the yard lights on the snow.

I’ve been playing around with the tools in my photo manipulation program and this is what happened with these pictures.

The original photo first and then the manipulated version:

I used the photo manipulation program Shotwell bundled with Ubuntu Linux to transform that picture into the following:

I really liked how the colors that are present but not normally seen by the human eye popped out and made this scene almost surrealistic.

I didn’t go for the color in this next shot although there is some.  I just wanted to emphasize the snow on the branches.  I think I might like the original picture better than the manipulated one.

I <3 digital photography.  Wish I could afford a better camera.

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Poetic Genetics: A Conversation Between Two Generations

In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.

- Wallace Stevens

That’s my nephew, Greg Gavin.  He is a poet.  A good poet.  Here is a link to his Blog and poetry:  The Viscous Somniloquy.  I speak as someone who has studied, written a lot of, published a few, and at one time wanted to teach writing poetry.  We have our own little  mutual admiration society going on.  It has been such a pleasure for me to discover a kindred soul in my extended family.

He and I have been having some interesting conversations about writing on Facebook’s Instant Message thingie.  A few nights ago we were discussing where our gift to string words together in pleasing and wondrous ways comes from and he asked if I thought the ability to write well was genetic.

I do.  Both of my kids are fairly good writers.  Particularly my son who actually writes in connection with his present and past jobs as an educator.  He wrote all the training manuals for the people he trained at his last job. My brother Michael writes very well.  I’ve been getting emails from him lately and I can “hear” him talking while I read.  He writes just like he talks.

But what I find most interesting is that my Dad, Bill Gavin, wanted to write when he was a young man and had, in fact, written at least one mystery/crime novel.  Greg was unaware of this.  Sadly, that doesn’t surprise me.  My father is a taboo subject back there at the family of origin’s homestead.

My mother told me years ago that there were some manuscripts in a trunk down in her basement.  For whatever reason, I never asked to see them.  I wish I had.  I worry that she cleaned out that trunk and destroyed those manuscripts out of a desire to erase all traces of my father from her life.  Not that I would really blame her but I really, really want to see those manuscripts.

I know my Dad was a good writer because of a very few letters I got from him over the years that I didn’t keep.  I wonder if he ever wrote poetry.  It would be interesting to find out if anyone else in hthe Sinner-Gavin family had aspirations to be a writer.  Especially a generation or two back.  Grandma Gavin, Iola Sinner Gavin, was the word person in Dad’s family.  She used to do the New York Times crossword puzzle every Sunday and loved to play scrabble.

It would be even more interesting to discover that the Hoyt-Fate family line had some aspiring writers in it.  I know they were avid letter writers.  My Gramma, Della Fate, encouraged me to have pen pals and even bought me stamps and stationary to encourage me to write letters to my cousin Linda who lived in Japan where her parents were missionaries.

But yeah I do think the ability to write has a genetic component.  Just like the color of your eyes, the shape of your nose,  your hairline, health issues, and even your personality quirks and a lot of other things are genetic.  The neurons in our brains are composed of DNA.  Where nature leaves off and nurture begins to produce that passion to write is a mystery.  Hey, we could have (and actually have, at least in my case) inherited worse things from our family.

Greg has inspired me to pick this blog back up and write.  He has even inspired me to write some poetry again.  I wish I was rich because I would love nothing more than to be his mentor and a patron who could send him off traveling the world and writing about his experiences.  He’s an intelligent, gifted, and talented young man and he’s an old soul with a wisdom beyond his years.

Today is National “Have a Brownie Day.”  I think I will make Greg some Brownies just because.  These are the brownies I used to make my kids every Friday night for a few years when they (and I) were young.  They had to help beat the eggs and sugar until they were just right.  This recipe comes from the Joy of Cooking Cookbook by Irma Rombauer.  Thanks, Irma!  Four generations of women in my family have had one version or another of your cookbook in our kitchens.  It’s my go-to gift for Bridal showers and wedding gifts.

Brownies Cockaigne*

*Cockaigne? I’d forgotten that this recipe has that strange word in the title. I had to look it up.

 Quick definitions from WordNet (Cockaigne) ▸ noun:  (Middle Ages) an imaginary land of luxury and idleness.

Imagine that while you bake. 

Preheat your oven to 350*

Melt in a double boiler*:

½ cup butter

4 ozs of unsweetened baking chocolate**

Cool this mixture to room temperature. Irma says that if you don’t your brownies will be heavy and dry. I trust Irma. *Nowadays I would skip the double boiler and melt the butter and chocolate in a microwave safe bowl on low or even defrost for a couple of minutes. How did we ever manage without microwave ovens? Then stir it and nuke it on low again for a couple of minutes, more. Lather, rinse, repeat until the butter and chocolate can be stirred together. Be careful, chocolate scorches easily and that’s not nice. Trust me, you don’t want scorched chocolate in your brownies.

**If you don’t happen to have baking chocolate in the house you can substitute 3 TBS of cocoa or carob powder and one TBS of butter for each square or ounce of chocolate. Irma taught me that too. So total butter for this recipe using cocoa would be 1 cup. Melt all of the butter together on low in the microwave oven and gradually stir in 12 tablespoons (or ¾ cup) of cocoa or carob powder a couple of tablespoons at a time until there are no lumps. You might want to sift the cocoa or carob powder. Cool it to room temperature.

In a large bowl beat until light in color and fluffy:

4 room temperature eggs*

¼ tsp of salt

That room temperature note on the eggs is important.  Your eggs won’t get nice and fluffy and the sugar won’t dissolve unless your eggs are about 70*.  If you decide to make these Brownies on the spur of the moment, you can warm your eggs up by putting them in a bowl (with the shells intact please) and running hot tap  water over them for a minute or so and then letting them sit in it until the water is room temperature.  That will take anywhere from 15 minutes to half an hour. I learned that from Hints from Heloise.  Heloise had a daily column in the newspaper for years.  She taught me how to be a better housewife. <grin>

Add gradually as you continue beating the eggs until the sugar has dissolved and the mixture is thick and creamy. This takes awhile. If you are doing it by hand you should invite a friend to share the work and the brownies, your arm is going to get tired! Preteen boys enjoy doing this for some reason:

2 cups sugar

1 tsp vanilla

Quickly fold into the eggs the COOLED (I cannot stress this enough) chocolate and butter. Do this by hand. Before the mixture is uniform in color quickly fold in with as few strokes as possible.

1 cup of all-purpose flour

Before the flour is completeluy incorporated, add

1 cup of chopped pecans or walnuts*

*The nuts are optional. Bake in a greased (use some canned and pressurized oil aka cooking spray) 9” X 13” cake pan about 25 minutes for moist chewy brownies. If you prefer them more cake like then use a 9” X 9” cake pan.

Here’s the hardest part of the recipe:

Let the brownies cool to room temperature cool before you cut them.

We always put the pan on a cookie sheet and stuck them in the freezer to speed this process up because we were greedy piggies who needed our chocolate fix.  You can eat them straight from the oven but they won’t be pretty and they won’t taste as good. Anticipation adds a lot of flavor to almost anything.

Listen to Carly Simon while you’re waiting!

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More Kitchen Adventures: I Have to Clean the Oven? Today? Seriously?

Nope, my good girl, Kerryn, came to my rescue! Since she voluntarily came to clean my oven for the stupid HUD Inspections, I made her a simple supper of Salad, Omaha Steak’s Pork Loin Cutlets (a gift from one of my neighbors), and Garlic Mashed Potatoes and Cauliflower which she had never tried. The Pork Cutlets were really, really good. Thanks, Richard!

 The mashed potatoes and cauliflower combination is a fairly new discovery for me and Kerryn liked it so just for her, here’s the recipe for six to eight servings:

Garlic Mashed Potatoes and Cauliflower

Cook until tender:

1 head of cauliflower broken into small florets

4 medium-sized unpeeled Yukon Gold potatoes cut into 1 inch cubes

I usually start this process with the potatoes in a pot that has a steamer insert and put the cauliflower in the steamer until the potatoes are beginning to get soft. Then I dump the cauliflower in with them and finish them together.

While that is cooking peel, smash and mince 3-4 good-sized cloves of garlic and saute it in 1 TBS of butter until it smells good and is tender. Do not brown. OR if you’re busy and rushing things, use 1 tsp garlic powder in the next step. More if you like garlic.

When the vegetables and garlic have cooked put them in a food processor with a bit of the cooking liquid and add:

2 (or more) TBSP butter

1/8 cup of whole milk to start.

½ tsp salt

A few cranks of the pepper grinder

Turn the food processor on and let it do its thing until the potato peels are still visible but the potatoes and cauliflower look like mashed potatoes are supposed to look in your world. I like mine a bit lumpy. (What can I say, my mother was not into doing whatever it took to make smooth mashed potatoes when I was growing up so in MY world mashed potatoes are a little lumpy with chewy little chunks of potatoes in them.)

Turn it out into a serving bowl and stir in 1 TBS of parsley. Fresh is a nice touch but I seldom have fresh on hand so I use the dried stuff. Plop about a TBS of butter in the middle and crank some pepper over the top. Good with beef or pork gravy on it, too.

If I was going to make this dairy free I would substitute a good margarine for the butter and use plain soy, oat or almond milk instead of Cow’s milk. Maybe coconut milk.  I’ve been reading good things about the health benefits of coconut oil.

Since I live alone I halve this recipe and I’m inclined to use instant potatoes. Just follow the recipe on the box for 2 servings and dump everything into the food processor with half the cauliflower. It keeps well in the refrigerator for a few days

That’s Kerryn.  She doesn’t look much like a kitchen drudge in that picture does she?  But let me tell ya, she can clean an oven and not make a mess of the floor.  I don’t know how she does it. 

Thanks for helping me out with that odious chore, Sweet Pea. You rock!  Love ya a bushel and a peck and a hug around the neck!

Addendum:  It is 9:30am. The inspectors have come and gone.  I got the bathroom and kitchen mostly done, the windows washed, and my bed made.  I had the couch pulled out and the equipment and cleaning supplies to vacuum and steam clean the pet messes on the carpet (wouldn’t you know one of my brats puked on the carpet in two different spots yesterday) scattered around so it was obvious I was getting to them. 

They weren’t even going to look in the oven or refrigerator but I insisted they look at the oven since I stressed over it so much and Kerryn made a special effort to help me.  Jill said it was obvious that I kept up with the housekeeping so she just checked things off her list.  I guess that’s a compliment.  They did test the fire alarm and made sure all the other mechanicals were working–flushed the toilet, turned on the fans and all the lights. I pointed out that I cleaned the windows because if the windows are clean and the kitchen counters are cleared off, the dishes are put away, the kitchen floor is mopped and the carpets don’t have a bunch of crap littering them,  then the house looks clean to me.  The dust can be an inch thick but if those things are done, it looks clean.  Just don’t look too closely.

Honestly, I don’t know why they send that damn letter telling us that we have to do this long list of stuff to pass these things if they aren’t going to check to be sure they are done.  On the other hand, I still have nightmares about living at Shirley’s House of Recycled Virgins on Whitewater Avenue in Fort Atkinson when the kids were young.  What a PITA that stick-up-her-butt woman was when she did inspections.  I guess I won’t complain about the young ladies here and try to remember they aren’t Shirley…

Wikipedia: floor definition: the level base of a room. →

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