My fridge is very clean right now. I hosted a rave/baby shower with some friends last night and I had a ton of stuff to get done to be ready. Bathroom to clean. Games to plan. Carpet to vacuum. Food to bake. Gifts to wrap. Disco ball to hang. Glow-sticks to ignite. Plastic babies to freeze in ice cubes.
I went to get some ingredients out of the fridge and noticed what I’ve been noticing for the past few weeks but haven’t cared much about until I had a million other things to do. My fridge was absolutely disgusting. Some unknown substance had spilled and it’s sticky brownness had been spreading throughout the various shelves and racks. As I’d move a bottle from one place to another, the sticky brownness would follow it, make friends and multiply.
What if one of my guests asked to put something in the fridge and saw the mess? This would not do. So instead of cleaning my bathroom, vacuuming or making food, I spent over an hour cleaning every square inch of my fridge. Then I ran around like a decapitated chicken for the last hour before the party, neglecting to feed the kids and begging Dan to take them somewhere offsite and feed them.
Oh the lengths to which I will go to procrastinate. It’s like the time I redid my filing system before the Today Show crew came out to film at my house. What if I needed to put a piece of paper away and they caught it on video? Never mind that the windows had greasy fingerprints at Magoo level and I had absolutely nothing to wear. The files needed to be reworked!
And the kids were twerked off about the party too. The house was covered with balloons, streamers, lava lamps, glow sticks and chocolate and they could have none of it. They should know by now that fun things are only for mommies.
“fun things are only for mommies”!!! I’m laughing about that one.
My mom and I do a similar thing. Our families call it “piddling.” It’s when you are doing one last thing because you can’t possibly do X without that being done. So, I was loading the dishwasher to run it so that dirty dishes wouldn’t be in the sink while we were on vacation. Or I was washing clothes so we wouldn’t come home to laundry besides what we brought with us. Etc.
I have to admit to being very impressed by you redoing your filing system before the Today Show came. I’d have hired cleaners. Or something.
It makes so much sense. Like the time I decorated my son’s room instead of getting ready for a two week trip to California because my BIL was going to be sleeping in it. Like he cared.
I have that same sticky brown substance mocking me from the bottom shelf of my fridge and I’m avoiding it like the plague. What is it about the cold, plastic and ooey brown stuff that makes it harder to remove than super glue?
I had a RS teacher talk about this once. She hated preparing lessons so she would clean out her fridge, or take her carpets out and beat them (do people still do that?) so she was grateful for her calling because it made her house cleaner. Hee hee
And seriously, what if they had opened the fridge? You were right to clean it out.
definitely the fridge comes before vacuuming. In my house, washing the bathroom rugs comes before vacuuming.
i hate cleaning the fridge. it’s something that i generally do once a year or so. for a while, when we were more transitory, i would only clean it when we moved, but now that we’ve bought a house that doesn’t work so well. i call my fridge my “dirty little secret” and hope that no one looks in it. these days (i got a new fridge last summer) i do try to keep it cleaner, so it still looks new. maybe the problem before was that i only had used, handed-down-or-bought-on-craigslist kind of fridges and i took no pride in them.
in college, every time i had to write a paper, i’d clean the bathroom. especially the floor. that darn bathroom floor mocked me from afar until i’d scrub it. but only when i desperately needed to write a paper.
no one said we were rational creatures!
That is too funny. I do crazy stuff like that too- and somehow it ALWAYS is at the last minute and I make myself nearly sick for how stressed out I get!
Okay, what’s this about the Today show and where is a CLIP?
Amen. I will clean baseboards before finishing laundry. Or scrub down kitchen chairs before doing dishes. Or organize a pile of papers before dusting the house.
I’m proud of you for running around in the last hour to clean. That is my forte! I teach piano lessons, and I forbid my students and their parents to see my living room/kitchen/family room in a mess (usually). But do I clean in the morning when I have time? Heck no! I wait until 30 minutes before the first student comes and then I go crazy. My kids hate it because it’s “Hurry, clean! Clean!” but then they get to play when it’s done so they don’t stay too mad at me for long.
Procrastination cleaning is the best, I tell ya’!
ooh, do you have any not-lame game suggestions? I’m hosting a shower next weekend and since it’s brunch there will be no rave, unfortunately, but the guest of honor has requested games and as far as I know, all baby shower games suck. Help!
But the kids got to eat left-over delights and play with baloons, streamers and glowsticks the next day, right? Let’s hear it for the joy of leftovers!
Ooh, I do this, too! Nothing makes me want to put off a task like *having* to do it–and nothing makes a task seem more appealing than having to do a different one.
I SHOULD clean the fridge – someone spilled sesame oil fragrantly all the way through it. Feh.
my fridge needs to be cleaned. I’ve been doing bloggy stuff instead. Maybe I need to host a baby shower…
Haha… that totally sounds like our fridge most of the time. I live at home, so sometimes I do it, but my mom leaves stuff until it can pretty much throw itself away. 🙂 I love that you did that rather than clean the windows.
Ah, Sticky Brown Substance. I know thee well.
Thanks for the reminder. I don’t want to let the fridge in this house get that way… oh, look! Shiny blogs!
Call me shallow, but the last time I took the treat for book group and I had to put it in my friend’s fridge to stay cool, I noticed that her fridge was spotless. I noticed and I said something about it. She had just cleaned it that day. Not that I’d think less of her if her fridge had been gunky, but I still remember how she had a whole, clean, open shelf just waiting for me to plunk my treats on. My fridge never looks that clean (unless I have something else even more distasteful I’m procrastinating doing).
my husband has this down to a science. if we have guests due to arrive within, hhm, 1/2 an hour, he will decide that we definitely need to reorganize the junk drawer in the kitchen, or the shed, or any other inconspicuous place that only ourselves and GOD are aware of.
I’ve done the same thing many times before.. actually it’s the only time my fridge gets cleaned- ever
Loved this entry. An even better suggestion though: leave town with your husband, don’t clean fridge ahead of time, leave children home with Grandma, and come home to a clean house and a cleaned out fridge! Works every time (OK, we’ve only done this once which was last week and it worked great that time, I’m hoping to try it again next time my fridge needs a cleaning!)
OH, and if your friend still needs a baby shower game idea, I have a really fun one.