Shiny Sinks

Hi everyone. Since I last typed to you, I traveled back to NY. This time was a bit different: I drove my car, Buddy came along, the raspberries were mostly past their peak, etc. We went to a wedding of an old, old, old high school and pre-high school, or pre-any school friend of mine. It was fun. But, I'm not going to write too much about that. You know how it is... going home, seeing people you haven't seen in 11 years, checking out the latest in Upstate NY fashion, realizing you know the words to a variety of country music songs from the 90s - still, seeing pictures of yourself in a prom dress projected on a screen in a room full of 120 people, eating too-sweet cake, and so on. We got back late last night. In the usual summer fashion, I-81 between approximately Canada and wherever it ends in Tennessee is under construction. We sat around a lot and it took a while but we found some juicy radio stations toward the end of the trip and that made it all the better.

So, now I'm back. For a bit at least. I think the next time I leave town is going to be in exactly 2 weeks when I fly out to the great PNW for more visits, hiking, and non-humid summer weather.

I keep thinking that I should be busy. Like, all the time. Busy, busy, busy. I'm working a bit, but I feel like I set a bunch of goals of things to do while I'm having a summer off and traveling. I've tried hard to make the list diverse in the sense that it has equal parts things I should do and things I want to do; I hope that by the end of the summer I'll know which tasks are more satisfying. Thus far, these things have proved to be therapeutic, challenging, mildly absurd, and not relaxing. Like cleaning the sink. Like, REALLY cleaning the sink. With chemicals. Typically I buy unbleached things... paper towels (when I buy them), flour, tampons, egg cartons, etc. But I love bleaching things clean. As far as I know it's not genetic; no one has yet isolated the gene sequence that when turned on in a human makes you love things properly disinfected. I guess I still get it from my mom though, or maybe some of my aunts. I am not sure why. For the most part, I had no troubles living in a tent for 6 months with very little bleach or things to bleach (except potable water containers); I'd do it again. But, when I'm here, in my house, the non-perfectly shiny sink haunts me. So, today I tackled it. And then I could not stop. I cleaned the bathrooms, the bathtub, the microwave, the dish rack, the counters, the garbage can. I wandered around the house looking for things to dump the little bleach powder on and scrub.

Then I made chocolate chip cookies and left the pan in the sink, the shiny, shiny sink.

I keep meaning to blog about certain things. As you may have guessed, I made a list of things I'd like to eventually blog about. I have also made a list of things that I want to learn how to do on the blog. Of course, this is because the blogging is supposed to be for learning... I'm going back to school, to study information and how people find it and process it. It seemed important to get technically good at the blogging. But, here I am, typing away about my feelings on cleaning and bleaching and leaving home and coming back. I feel like perhaps I should be more focused on skills and technical things than on yammering on the internet. But, I guess I'm learning that the yammering is kind of a lot of what blogging is about. It certainly is appealing and probably why people do it. Not to master some impersonal technical skill or to get to the bottom of the grime and say "oh, I did that".

So, this past post still stands. I still need to learn how to do all the things that I needed to learn to do last week in order to make the blog a pleasant internet viewing experience for the people. I'm on it, ok?