House kleening via youtube in These titles mean nothing.

I came across two house cleaning videos yesterday.
One was from our Canadian friend -

The other was from a guy I discovered on my own.

Don’t bother either watching the videos or reading what I have to say. Life is too damn short.
Both the videos are good and helpful and what I’m saying isn’t particularly either.

But here I am and here they are and here you are. So.....

The second video uses a third video from Jordan Peterson - another Canadian who gives mainly psychological advice. He’s right wing and my son dislikes him and I don’t much like him either but it’s interesting to see him filtered through the guy I was watching. This is the guy who got me eating semi-vegan. He also has a really good explanation of the D.C. plane crash. I guess you could say he’s versitile. (God, is that how you spell versitile? No!!!! It’s versatile!!!! My spell check was no help. I had to look it up on my own.)

What I noticed about house cleaning/ decluttering / etc. is that a lot of it only slightly applies to me. I mean it’s all good advice and I get it, but my own situation is not the same. Of course all of us, me included, should be making videos of our own. And sometimes it seems we are doing that. YouTube is cluttered with the homemade thoughts of a wide range of people. I even had a channel = perhaps it’s still there. It as movies of my dog Gracie - some of you might remember. Grace and her milk carton and other entertaining situations. A long one of my family riding sleds down the hill in the pasture just south of the house - with Gracie too. It was called Gracie’s People and as I said it was accessible a few years ago. As for now though, I’m fairly satisfied with being a YouTube watcher rather than a content producer. My life is like that I let things go by.

The thing about house cleaning, decluttering, etc. and me is that I just don’t do it. I always think my situation is different from other people’s. … and I suppose it is. Using round numbers I have lived 65 or my 80 years in this house. The house itself is 130 years old and I don’t think during that time it was ever emptied out. I can sit at my kitchen table - my mother’s mid 1950s Gamble Store formica is still as good as new - at age 70!! years, and I can see two things that came with the farm when my parents bought it in 1950 (75 years ago). The things I can see right now that came with the farm are the old gun - from whatever war? WWI or older, it’s totally non-functional and very heavy. It has an octoganal barrel and it is held up by some big spikes my husband drove into a piece of his own remodeling circa 1980?) And the place rack that has always been on the kitchen/dining room’s south wall. Plus to give you an idea of what came WITH the farm, I have memeries of my brother and me dismantling a piano AND an organ that had been taken out of the house and thrown over the same hill where my kids and grandkids sleigh rode circa 2010!!! (and videoed and posted on YouTube!!! There are not enough !!!!)

Thus I”m saying my house has never been emptied out. It’s always had stuff in it. I look at people who start from scratch and while I do not envy them, I am not one of them. I have my own Vose and Sons Boston piano that’s been in the house since the mid 1950s. My mother bought it for me so I could have piano lessons because she was too poor. It cost $50 and came from a fancy house in town. It’s a semi-lovely piano but it’s in bad shape. My brother had it for a while for his own daughters to use and he traded work with a piano tuner/fixer who tuned and fixed a bit but however that helped the piano, it’s all gone now. I have a couple hundred pounds of books stacked on top of it and a toy Amish barn I bought myself soon after … when? after the Amish moved into our area - which was I’m sure 20 years ago, more like 30 or 35.

When I quit working around 2017 I intended to neaten up the place a bit and I worked at it for a while. I found that the house is like a museum. It’s just full of stuff, of interest, of significance. I organized a bit - I can still see results of that organization. I have a stack of ‘city’ phonebooks - Cedar Rapids, Twin Cities, LaCrosse - stacked on top of one side of the cupboard that was between the kitchen and the dining room before that wall was taken out.

Just a thought. I still have my hot curlers that I got as a premium from when my husband worked at Thermogas in Cedar Rapids. I used them a lot but I got lazy and they got a short and I had to be careful I didn’t get a shock. They are in the bottom of that cupboard that has the phone books on the top. I used to clean that cupboard periodically but I quit doing that around 2000.

On the house’s one downstairs closet whose door faces me as I sit at my mother’s Formica table, hangs some glittery red and green (Christmas) streamers that came from an old diary friend who lives in NYC. I’ve lost contact with her because she’s in Facebook and I’m not anymore. When the furnace blower flows the streamers come alive. I need a different word there but can’t come up with it.

Oh well. Nothing is easy. And things get more difficult as time goes on. There are almost always new things that don’t work. I think my stainless steel sink = installed by my husband during the grand remodel to celebrate Jim’s 1985 high school graduation - party!!! you know now leaks from the left sink so I pretty much have to do everything in the right sink.

The nicest new-ish thing in the house are its new windows. They are lovely. And of course the gas furnace in the basement is also wonderful. The kitchen linoleum has holes in it - what you say? holes in the linoleum? well, yeah, just believe me, I pretty much never lie.

So anyway. Let’s call this a Rate A Day. There’s still a bunch of day left. It’s not even 8:30 am yet. Jim’s gone to county supervisor’s meeting to deflect/usher something from his committee on control of solar electricity. I listen to what he has to say. I don’t really interupt him much… unless I want to.

There is neighborhood news about one of the families who’ve been here since the 1920s - we are a multigenerational place with stories my dad told and my kids riding on the school bus with their kids and before that the country school we all went to.

The sun is shining. The house is quiet. I haven’t taken my morning blood pressure yet. I doubt this has excited me a lot.

My granddog Hans is at the end of his life too. Damn. He was a good dog. Enthusiastic. He lived a contained life in a suburb. He would sleep in my bed when he came to visit. He liked to go for walks. I wish I’d taken him on more walks. Once when Joana and I were taking almost daily early morning walks and he and Gracie of course went along, I met Joana and she was upset that Hans had gome home and she hadn’t had a chance to tell him goodbye. It seemed so typical of Joana and of Hans.

Have a good day everyone.
It’s all we’ve got.