It’s a very snowy March day. I was hoping our Littles would be out for a visit today, but it’s kind of nasty out so I doubt the kids will brave the roads. The snow is coming down in a way that is letting us know Mother Nature still means business. It’s been an easy winter here, but I suppose we needed a reminder spring has not yet completely sprung. All those pussywillows that sprouted early, thanks to all the warm weather, are getting good and chilly.
My Sweet is working and our youngest son is deep in another book, so the house is quiet. It’s a good day to catch up on some of the chores I’ve been putting off. These are the jobs I never put on a to-do list because I know I’ll find a way to put them off and I hate not checking everything off on my list. I’m one of those people that will add completed jobs to the list just for the satisfaction of seeing those checkmarks.
The new trim for the bathroom is stained, highlighted, and glazed. It’s drying, curing, and tomorrow I can install it. I did that first thing this morning. I took down the shelf in the bathroom and refinished it as well. Those aren’t the jobs I was putting off.
The chore I’ve been putting off is…cleaning the oven. I hate cleaning the oven and I’ve been putting it off for far too long.
We had a family dinner here not too long ago and I wouldn’t let anyone in the kitchen for fear they’d open the oven and see its shameful state. Clearly, I had put it off long enough, so now the house has the aroma of lemony oven cleaner. It’s going to need to soak a while to eat through the layers of spilled over, baked on food. A good bit of what lies on the bottom of the stove are the charred remnents of our oldest son’s birthday pie. Saskatoon-rhubarb makes a lot of juice. His birthday was last August, so that should give you an idea of just how much I hate cleaning the oven and how long I’ve been putting it off.
I don’t really know why I despise this particular job so much. It isn’t like it’s that hard. The super-duty, maximum strength oven cleaner I have to use does most of the work. All I need to do is get in there, elbow-deep, and wipe it out. And I know that once I’ve finished I’ll be glad I finally got it done. So why put it off so long?
I wish I knew.
Maybe it’s because I can keep the oven door closed and not have to look at it, at least not constantly. I would never not clean the bathroom, but I can’t hide that. People come here and it is inevitable that they will use the bathroom. But, I can keep them out of the kitchen, and at the very least, out of my oven. No one ever needs to be witness to it’s shameful state.
What’s the first thing you do when someone is coming over for a visit? You probably put on the kettle for tea. I close the doors of the rooms I don’t want anyone to see into. There are things stowed under every bed in my house and cupboards that pose a significant risk to anyone opening them too quickly. It isn’t that my house is dirty, it isn’t. I just have some catch-all spaces that eventually start to overtake the rest of the house and I will put off dealing with them because, quite frankly, there are other things to do, fun things.
But eventually, I can’t take it anymore and I get a particular look on my face (much to the alarm of my husband) and I grab the biggest garbage bag I can find. This action is usually accompanied by a comment like “I can’t stand this anymore!”, and My Sweet requests that I don’t throw out any of his “stuff” and then flees from the house to avoid the coming flurry of purging.
I tend to keep a lot more hidden than just my dirty oven. I am one of those people who tends to push down emotions, negative ones like anger or disappointment. The trouble with that though, is eventually the feelings build up and overflow. The ‘smoke’ of simmering frustration becomes glaringly evident and it needs to be dealt with before smoke turns to flames and burns my house down.
It’s taken me a while, probably a lot longer than it should have, to understand that if I am open and honest about how I’m feeling, I can just deal with it and move on. Letting things build up until I can’t contain them anymore is far more destructive. Foolish really because putting off dealing with whatever is troubling me only creates a bigger mess and I find I’ve wasted a lot of time stewing over things when if I’d just dealt with it, I could have moved on to better things, funner things.
So, there you have it. Now that’s I’ve waxed philosophically about cleaning the oven and my character, I suppose I should get to it, cleaning the oven that is. *sigh* I mentioned to my younger son that there are ovens that clean themselves. He said, “Seriously? Why don’t you have one?” That’s a good question, my son, a very good question.
