Get the Clean On - Make the Mess Gone

You shower, everyday, right? I hope so. Or at least every second day...the point is you have a personal hygiene schedule, I would expect, so why is it so difficult to maintain a certain level of hygiene for your house? The laissez-faire attitude of someone-else-will-do-it can only get you so far, but eventually there comes a time when you just learn to shape up and clean up. This week's topic is:

HOUSEWORK

There was a time when chores were chores and you had no idea why your mom and dad would make you do them. It was because they were mean parents, the WORST! and didn't remember what being a kid was like. They just make up chores cause they can. Vacuuming, picking up clothes, stacking shoes nicely, hanging up your coat. Some were easier than others and of course, being kids, you took shortcuts or lied and said you did something but really just swept the crumbs under the counter...

Well, now we're all grownups. We have our own places to live and we all have jobs. Guess what: chores still exist. Of course, we don't have kids to do the work for us but chores being chores are just that - chores. If chores were fun we would call it fun time. But then we would avoid fun time like the plague.

So if you don't want to do chores, why do we? Well, they have maid services. Paid people who come to clean your house. It doesn't cost all that much and they generally do a pretty good job. That's all fine, but I live in a 1200 sq ft townhouse. I don't want to say it all comes down to money, but when you don't have a lot, why would you pay someone to do something you can do just as well in about an hour.

Well, procrastination is the key to this puzzle. I hate cleaning the bathtub more than anything in the world and I'm often unmotivated to pick up the vacuum and walk it up and down the stairs. It is, however, somewhat gratifying running the vacuum over the carpet and hearing nothing but the clickity-clack of little rocks and dirt flying up through the vacuum hose and into the canister. It's gross to think about it but it's one small victory in the battle of home maintenance satisfaction.

I love to cook. I'm not all that good and my food usually comes out too spicy, too salty, too burnt or a mix of all three. For this, my kitchen MUST be clean. We're not talking countertops made out of Lysol, but a little bit of daily TLC wouldn't hurt the kitchen's ego. To make matters worse, we don't have a dishwasher. I know it's a pain but it just means dishes have to be done literally every day. There is no way to hide them away, close the door and walk away to clean dishes. It's a horrible job, but with no kids around, it has to be done...but grownup people. Movies often portray horrible messes in kitchens with dishes stacked to the ceiling and garbage bags flung all over, empty beer cans astray on the floor and a fat guy with a half eaten pizza lounging around in a mustard stained la-zee-boy recliner. Well, my house doesn't have enough dished to stack to the roof but if it did, it would be impressive (damn you, raise ceilings). Alright, so my point. I like the kitchen clean and these days it's because I like it clean, not because my parents tell me I should.

I have no problem with mess, either. But selective mess is the key. You see, the key itself is the difference between DISorganized and UNorganized. Disorganized, of course, if your average "oh my god, it's time for work and I don't know where my keys and wallet are" versus the unorganized "I, personally, know where everything is that I need but if YOU came to my place to try to find it, you would be as lost as a sheep with no herd (or something else that gets easily lost)". For those keeping track, I'm the unorganized type.

Sorry to jump back to kitchens, but this is a place where I will always be lost. Moving to a new kitchen is like falling asleep on a road trip and having no idea where the heck you are when you finally wake up. The plates are in the corner, in the side, up top, to the left, on the bottom on the right...it's insane. Don't even think about finding a specific kind of glass! Glasses organized by colour, size, weight, genre... Even cutlery drawers are confusing sometimes.
But it all comes down to chores. Maybe the kitchen owner was having a bad/great day that day and thought it would be a horrible/great inconvenience/prank if they put the spoons in one drawer and the forks in another. Maybe they just don't really care about how messy the food cupboards are, or maybe they were being lazy and they asked their kids to do it for them. Maybe all or none of this is true and maybe, just maybe (and most likely) they just really didn't want to care about anything because it's just another chore.

Thanks for stopping in.

Commenting on the Comments

Sometimes I misspell a couple words, but I'm pretty good. Sometimes I mess up my punctuation, but not often. sometimes don't properly capitalize of my words, but that's because i'm SOMETIMES too lazy. When people are ranting on a public forum, this ALWAYS annoys me. This week's cultural topic is:

FORUMS

News sites and forum sites insert the "comments" section at the bottom of the page for the readers. It allows readers to elaborate on the story or voice their own opinion about the topic in question. It is supposed to ad value to the story and increase enjoyment of the reader. My enjoyment is drastically reduced when the aforementioned conditions are not met.

Counterproductive comments. A Vancouver Canucks fan coming onto the Calgary Flames or the Calgary Herald website leaving a comment saying "Calgary Flames Suck" is not productive. Sure the Flames are having a tough year, but we obviously didn't go to the website to see some uneducated fan of a different team voicing their unwarranted (though sometimes truthful) boisterous exclamations. You don't see me going onto the Maple Leafs website talking about how their 9-1 win over Atlanta probably won't happen again this year...

Unnecessary additions. Comedy pairing announcing a show in Toronto with comments like "Come to Ottawa" which is clearly not their intention in the first place. www.jakeandamir.com If they wanted to announce a show to Vancouver, or Sweden or Montreal or Missouri, they would announce it. Thank you Jake and Amir for acknowledging your Canadian fans. And dear Canadian Fans, if you live in Edmonton, you will just have to wait a while longer.

Poor spelling and grammar. Not only are naysayers ruining my reading experience by telling me things I don't want to read and don't care about, but they are commenting negatively without proper grammar! This is not a text message. This is not a casual conversation with your buddy after the game. This is the internet. Oh, and in case you didn't know, anyone with the internet CAN access your ill-advised, poorly worded, rantings - and they DO. "Kippersof is a amazing golie. He is to kewl for the calgery flamers." If this made sense and had factual data to back it, it might be acceptable but in it's current state, let me tell you: it does not.

"First!" That drives me insane. Enough said.

Listen, I get that people want to affirm what a news story is talking about, but keep it to yourself. Going onto the Globe and Mail or New York Times forums to post "that is really horrible" talking about a suicide bomber does not positively affect anyone's day. Everyone knows that terrorism is bad. So thanks for agreeing but affirmation does not necessitate redundancy, and no one in northern Manitoba needs to know that Joe-blow from Oklahoma City agrees with a generally understood fact of life: bad things are bad. (no disrespect if you are from any of these places)

The world has ups and downs and everyone understands that different events affect different people differently. This is what makes everyone individuals. Obviously, it's not reasonable to assume that people aren't going to disagree with what reporters report, or that everyone in a certain area is homogenous in thought or opinion. Forums allow for public discourse and people expressing themselves is what makes a forum a forum. But next time you disCOURSE, please make sure you aren't being disCOURTEOUS.

DKH

Next Gent

Sometimes opportunities present themselves and you jump. But you jump maybe in a slightly wrong direction. You miss the landing, you crash, and everything goes horribly wrong. This week's cultural topic is:

The Reset Button

Starting over from the point of failure? Vanilla Sky touched on the idea, but that was in the form a "lucid dream". Sad to say, folks, but that just doesn't exist. People talk about going back to high school or university or getting married or buying a house "knowing what they know now". Yeah a time machine would be nice - you could talk to your past self and fix little issues that had come up in your past in their future. This causes problems with the space-time continuum and according to Doc Emmett Brown "having information about the future can have disastrous consequences. Even if you're intentions are good, it can backfire drastically!"

I won't compare it to sports, because obviously many athletes would love to not have taken that penalty or shot the puck/thrown or kicked the ball differently, not to mention that happens hundreds of times of day in tens of different sports on hundreds of different levels to millions of different players in every single country in hundreds of different languages in tens of different dialects and if a reset button existed it would simply be re-reset by the reseter's opposition in an eternal dual of resets and time may even cease to continue. It does exist in some recreational golf in the mulligan, but it also usually results in a penalty stroke. OK - RESET.

Do you think Columbus got it right on his first try? Of course not. In fact, he tried four times to make it to India via the Atlantic Ocean before the Americas were officially considered discovered. (Not to mention - why does USA get a Columbus Day and Canada doesn't? Our 1490s history looks pretty similar to me...) Columbus is kind of a hero, but don't you think he would have preferred to have found India like he had planned? RESET.

It's like when you're cruising down the highway and you see that red and blue flash coming up in your rear view mirror. Hearts start racing, palms become sweaty and studies suggest that an overwhelming majority will reflexively hit the brakes. Makes sense, but if you are the one they want it's probably too late and if you're not the target, you probably don't have much to worry about anyway. You are in control. RESET.

Photography is always a hit and miss. Sometimes the shots come and some days they don't. The nice thing about photography though, is that you CAN try again. No one is going to know if the shot was the first shot or the last shot from a shoot. And the truth of the matter is that it doesn't really matter. Often all it takes is one. Photoshop helps too.

As we all know, my positing has been sporadic at best. A good friend of mine, Dale Vaughn, has a growlingly successful website, www.nextgent.com a type of open forum for the next generation of gentlemen. I have the opportunity to do some work with it and possibly get some great exposure, but here's the thing. In real life, there is not reset button. We learn from our mistakes and try again. So that's what I'm doing right now - getting the fingers moving, the mind rolling, and the creative juices flowing. You can look for me there soon, but for now, let's focus on not needing that reset button to (re)begin with.

What's Fair about it?

So I'm sitting here watching the Oilers get very badly beaten, waiting for the Flames game to come on after a long day of selling tires, buying cars and researching Alberta employment legislation on boring technicalities of sick day pay and I think to myself...holy crap it's been a long time since I posted on this less than often viewed blog of mine. That isn't very gracious of me and definitely isn't fair to anyone looking to read. On the subject of fairness, this post's cultural topic is:

FAIR TRADE

I was recently at Second Cup (yes, the generally accepted lower quality Canadian long lost step sister of the great Starbucks but went to it because it's close and I'm lazy) with no real purpose other than buying a pound of coffee. If you know me, you know that I have a pretty regimented routine in the morning and coffee is an integral part of that process. Just like any addict, I have very particular tastes that need to be satisfied and considering I haven't been to a Second Cup in what is likely 5 years, I had no idea what kind of coffee I was supposed to order. I asked the girls for something medium-dark with sort of a chocolatey finish and after much deliberation, they came to the conclusion that I would like CUZCO, a Medium roast Costa Rican bean which, when I got it home was EXACTLY what I wanted. Why they would call a bean from Costa Rica Cuzco, a town in the Peruvian Andes is beyond me but I got over it pretty quickly and now is besides the point.

The big thing, however, that caught my eye (not on the first half pound that I bought but rather on the second full pound!) is the Certified Organic Fair Trade factor. (Look for the label!!)

Now, I've never really been all that into hippie things like fair trade or organic and especially not veganism (which goes hand in hand with both but is not the subject of tonight's post) so I decided to read into it a little...like a good curious little boy. I mean, I knew the premise or the facts and why it exists and for those who don't know, allow me to explain.

Historically, Americans (Canadians included) have been the by far the number one consumers of international coffee and make up nearly a fifth of the entire worlds consumption. Since coffee harvesting is so labour intensive, small player farmers producing coffee for export are able to cover basic supply costs but are left to make up for cost of harvest, manufacturing and shipping and many are literally losing money by producing their crops. (There are other contributing factors, but let's not worry about them for now.) Fair Trade coffee, on the other hand, guarantees farmers minimum prices for their harvest and retail buyers will often purchase directly from the farmers in order to minimize costs and maximize farmer profits. Of course, there is a growers' co-op to oversee and protect the farmers as well.

So let me get this straight à la FAQ.

Q: So I get the same quality coffee for the same low price?
A: Not true. Fair trade coffee often ends up costing you, the end consumer, more money but allows the international coffee community to grow and improve their growing practices and remain sustainable and profitable so we Americans can continue to be addicted to coffee-based caffeine.

Q: People actually like paying more for things?
A: When it's for the good of humanity sometimes people don't mind.

Q: So if I pay marginally more money for dramatically better coffee that doesn't treat emerging Third World Countries like coffee producing sweat shops, how am I supposed to feel good about it? In the end I still have less money...
A: Feeling good is a matter of opinion. Just keep a positive attitude, maybe pick up a second job and you'll be buying fair trade for the rest of your life.

Q: Is fair trade coffee right for me?
A: Personally I don't like the taste of Folgers or Nabob anyway. Does that answer the question?

Q: If Starbucks thinks this is such a great thing to do, why don't they buy and sell exclusively fair trade, why do they still hate some farmers?
A: Baby steps, I guess. Besides, some people (even farmers) just aren't that likeable.

Q: Do I have to stop eating meat, stop washing and cutting my hair, and buy a VW van if I start buying fair trade coffee?
A: Of course not. All of those things are unhealthy and owning a VW can become costly and parts are difficult to find in times of repair.

Since having bought my Cuzco label Second Cup coffee, I have recommended Second Cup to many a person. The girls were helpful and I found a coffee that exactly met what I wanted going in. Will I go to that location again to purchase my coffee? Yes. Have I already? Yes. Do I like the coffee only because it's fair trade coffee? No.

So what's the moral of the story? It's not that horrible to drink fair trade coffee. Coffee chains look good. My wallet barely notices. Farmers are happy. My taste buds are happy. So is it "fair"? No. It's FAIR TRADE!!


Guerrilla Coffee Fare

Quotes

James: Hey Kai, that was some good cheese.

Kai: Yeah, I got it at Superstore. Do you want some more?

James: No, I've got enough dick cheese...WHAT?! Did I just say that?

Kai: Yeah, you really did.

James: I don't know why that was the first thing that came into my head. Shit.