House Cleaning...

I know it is spring time and all, but no I am not talking about spring cleaning. As far as I am concerned, that is an added chore that I am not interested indulging in at all.  I am talking about normal day to day cleaning of one's house.

We live in this small  ground floor flat which has an abnormal knack of attracting dirt and rubbish. |I wonder how all that dirt comes into the house? The windows are all double glazed and sealed up cos of the cold, the back door leading to the garden is kept open for an hour at the maximum every day and the front door for as long as it takes for us to pass through it, either way. It is almost like there are secret doors and windows which magically open up to let all the dirt and rubbish come in from outside while we are sleeping. I abhor to think of the dirt drifting in during the summer months when we will have to keep the windows open!

Phew. I never knew what a mammoth task it is to keep a house clean. To add to the agony, my husband is happily oblivious of it all, while I am ultra sensitive, so it has become my pet domestic chore( read pet peeve in life). Another part of growing up which I never bargained for and truly am not ready for. I love shiny and squeaky clean houses but I hate cleaning up the house--why cannot the rooms  just behave themselves and remain clean or better still clean up their own mess? But apparently not, like the rest of the world, they also like to be waited on hand and foot. So it has become part of my daily routine to clean some part of the house or the other.

To add a little routine to the madness I have decided to be organised and systematic about it. So for each room of the house, I have designated a cleaning day of the week. Like on Mondays I do the sitting room, on Tuesday the kitchen, so on and so forth. I must confess in this process the bedroom almost always misses out on a clean -up. By the time the turn for the bedroom comes I am tired and bored with all the cleaning up. And since guests rarely venture into the bedroom (they cannot with the bedroom door firmly closed, though I am sure it would not deter our relatives in India, definitely one of the perks of living abroad!) I keep deferring the bedroom cleaning. Poor room.

So thinks my husband!

My husband is no help. Whenever I grumble about the cleaning, he says he is fine living in a 'slightly' (please insert a man's definition of slightly here) messy house and so should I be, it would definitely make my life easier. And when I demand that he should clean up for a change he gives the example of 'that one day when he did clean up'. So done his duty and for the next six months no cleaning is needed in his opinion and no nagging or complaining will be tolerated. It was how he lived when he was single and mingling with me and he sees no need to change the routine. Irritated though I am, I cannot fault his logic. It is a life style choice, I choose to live stressing about cleanliness while he thinks it is a waste of time. For marital shanti, I have to respect his choice. So it is back to me with the cleaning duster. Honestly I would not mind it so much, if  after cleaning up a room, it remained so for at least a day or two. Much to my frustration, after I have laboured to put the house right, once we start living in it, it starts getting messed up right then and there. I know this may sound verging on the obsessive, if I had my way, after a through cleaning, I would quietly stand on one corner of the house, so as not to disturb the cleanliness. Another idea my husband dismisses so firmly that I have to but helplessly watch him mess up the very kitchen which I have slaved to put right.

Another thing which irritates me is after returning from office, when he fails to notice how clean a certain room is looking. I mean come on when he left in the morning, it was not that clean but now it is almost sparkling. So any sensible human being would stop right there, take in all the cleanliness and shower the cleaner with compliments, right? Whenever I go to a clean house I always compliment it. In fact my estimation for the people living in the house positively goes up. But no, this man is oblivious, he just marches in, fails to notice the subtle changes, and continues to be so till I point it out to him! Okay truth to be told compliments about a clean house is as vital to me as compliments on good looks are to some women. There, I have confessed it!

Had I not inherited my cleaning obsession genes from my father I could have at least blamed it on gender. But alas cannot even do that. But I firmly continue to believe that with a little bit of practice each of us can fit in cleanliness into our regular routine.

Disclaimer: All the images are taken from Google's image search.

Telephones and me..

What is it with telephones and me? No seriously, why I am so very uncomfortable speaking over the phone? I am abrupt and too to the point, I rush in and say my piece and dread the pauses, hence before a significant pause can arise I keep hurriedly down the phone. This, despite being trained all as a telephone helpline worker! It is simply shameful! More so cos in real life I am a pretty vocal and communicative person.

The other day a friend with whom I am not used to speaking on the phone, called up. Generally I am pretty chatty, so I could feel her surprise at my abruptness! But then the deed was done.

Years of training while I was growing up that the telephone was a means of quick and urgent communication and not a device for a long and slow chat has been drilled into me. 

While I was growing up, I saw my father use the telephone much like a telegraph machine, you know short precise communication like 'Tell your Ma I will be an hour late coming home today. Bye, see you later.' Even my mother, if not this bad, was not too far behind. I remember her being irritated if someone on the other side lingered for too long over the phone. She claimed it made her head buzz. My aunt had similar opinion and till this day she hates speaking over the phone. As a family we are generally so uncomfortable speaking over the phone that it becomes pretty plain to the person on the other side. If they know us, I am sure they think 'Oh there goes that mad family again. Seriously they should learn the art of slow telephone conversations'. If they do not know us, I am sure they would think ' my, what rude people!'. We are genuinely not rude, just have not got into the skin of telephones!

I remember early days of telephone conversations with my oldest friend in this world. It would go something like this...

Hello

Hello

I missed school today.

Ye,s why didn't you come?

I had tummy ache.

Oh ok.

What did you do in school today?

We did sums from chapter four, English passage chapter two and history Alexander the Great, in rest we did revision.

Ok, any homework?

Yes sums at the end of chapter four, Bengali spelling and dictation test tomorrow on chapter three and geography questions and answers on volcanoes. 

Anything else?

No.

Ok bye

Bye bye.

That was it. We were friends, we really were and still are. It is just that both were told by parents not to waste time chatting on the phone. So by mutual consent we kept the personal chit chats for later when we met.

Even with cousins, we would call each other up, get carried away laughing about something or bitching about someone and then we both would remember that we are on phone and abruptly say bye to each other. But then we are cousins and have known/suffered each other since birth, so we knew that the other person is not being rude, rather just a slave to their habits.

I remember in my late teens a boy used to call me up. He was persistent and I was nervous and that love story was domed even before it began. To give him credit the poor boy tried his best, but  I was too tongue tied, nervous and jumpy that those conversations were tortures as far as I was concerned. I dreaded his calls , agonizing over what should I say. Finally after going through this ordeal for a month or so, I asked him not to call me again. My cousin was really sad on my behalf and the love story that was never meant to be. But I was plain relieved.

Years have gone by, telecommunication has been revolutionized and mobiles have come. Yet old habits drilled from a really early age die hard. Even now living in two separate continents my conversations with my father occurs in military fashion, so much so I sometimes tell him I want to chat with him and no he cannot hang up the phone. My father sounds really surprised and tries his best to relax and forget for a minute or two that he is on the phone and chat with me.

Yet I cannot blame him, I am just like him on the phones. **Sigh**

The brighter side is that I am an ideal mobile phone customer. Month after month not even one tenth of my minutes are used up. I think I deserve a medal from them, at least!

N.B. This image is taken from Google's telephone image search.