Thursday, July 14, 2011

Spinning Ceiling Fans Tell No Tales

Typing on my iPod so I'm not sure how this will turn out...

I'm not much of a housekeeper. I've gotten better over the last few years, but better doesn't always equal good.  An example is my ceiling fan. It never occurred to me that this is an item one must clean. We had no ceiling fan as a kid, and even if we had, not a lot of cleaning went on at our house, anyway.

This afternoon I was very pleased to have visitors to my home - a friend I'd met on an online forum and her children. My kids and I were pretty well prepared for this visit. We'd shopped for lunch items yesterday, then cleaned and straightened the house until all that was left to do was slicing fruit and tidying up a bit.

This morning, as I stood at my unusually neat counter cutting watermelon, I happened to look up and notice my ceiling fan. I've seen it many times, but rarely noticed it - and what I noticed today made me cringe.  I suppose the fan blades had been white at some time in the past, but time, humidity, grease and ash (have I mentioned that I'm a terrible cook?) have done their work well.  The blades are now grey and splotched.  I would even tell you that they look a bit fuzzy but I'd hate to lose any of my few readers.  I recall trying to clean the blades once in the not-recent past.  I applied a number of different cleaning preparations and tools, but nothing worked and I gave up.  The blades certainly looked no better this morning for a few more years' accumulation.

It's daunting to have visitors when you're a terrible housekeeper, particularly if they are people you've never met.  Over the past few years I've tried to adopt an attitude that showing hospitality is more important than absolute cleanliness, but when fuzzy fan blades are staring you in the face, those thoughts go right out of the window.  I had two options:  Stop preparing lunch and try to scrub the fan blades (guaranteed to fail), or ignore the fan blades and hope everyone else did, too (certain to blow my cover as a successful housekeeper).  In a mild panic, I stopped what I was doing to think.  I walked over to the door and flicked on the light, and that's when the perfect solution hit me!

Yesterday, as part of preparing the house, I'd mopped the kitchen and turned on the ceiling fan to help the floor dry.  The fan was on all day, and when the kitchen light was turned off at bedtime, the fan turned off, as well.  When I flipped the light switch, the fan again began to turn.  Voila!  My problem became imperceptible.

If only solving all of life's problems was so easy!

Wednesday, July 6, 2011

Not Nothing To Say...

but far too much.  Most of which will probably never refine itself into coherent blog posts.

Can't think of when I've ever been speechless before!