Snoskred - Life in the Country

Being a mere $2.49 per packet from Aldi, may I introduce to you my Lemon Scented friends, of whom I recently brought home 8 packets.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that, right? A germophobe has to do what a germophobe has to do. These packets generally last me a month or so.

I have been trying to buy these for some months now. Each time I would go to Aldi I would look for them and when I did not find them I would put on the sad face. It seems that they are not a regularly stocked item but something that appears from time to time. I didn’t know when I would see them again, so I stocked up.

This is one way you can really save money by shopping at Aldi - the cheapest I have ever seen the equivalent thing in Coles and Woolworths is $4.99 and that is on special.

They smell amazing - much better than the ones I used to use - I can’t even remember the brand name of those now.

When I go to sleep at night, the road back from from the place I want to live flashes before me. Big tall trees on either side of the road but it’s like I’m flying so fast, they all blur. And my fear is, something’s gonna jump out in front of me and I’ll hit it. The faster I go, the more things I see threatening to jump out. I know I have to keep going. Moving forward.

I am not a perfect person. I am many things, and germophobe is one of them. You know those people who can’t go out of their house because they’re scared of germs? I’m not there yet, but I can see there from here. Germophobia is different for different people.

For me, I have trouble with -

- door handles
- sponges, teatowels, tablecloths
- food preparation - things have to be clean, clean chopping boards, clean knives, clean utensils
- needing to have clean hands
- people sneezing in my presence
- germ overload when I touch too many dirty things I begin to freak out
- getting to a place where I throw my hands in the air and say “I can’t deal with this” (such a place might be called germ overload)

I am in the process of making positive changes in many areas in my life, and today I have taken a big step towards a goal I set myself recently, which is having a cleaner house. You see for me, it is easier to live with dusty surfaces than to clean them. Cleaning becomes a big deal because if I am going to do it, I want to do it 100% all the time but I don’t have the energy to do this. An Olympic athlete does not have the energy to make things as clean as I would like them.

I have recently decided this all or nothing approach is a really bad idea. Spending 8 hours cleaning one bathroom is really not for me and in the past, it has been easier for me to just throw my hands in the air and say “I can’t face cleaning it” than to do a “lesser” job.

Carl Jung said - “We cannot change anything unless we accept it.”

I accept that I have a problem with cleaning. I accept that I am a germophobe. I accept that it is better for things to be somewhat clean than absolutely spotless or very unclean.

The serenity prayer says “grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference”.

I cannot magically snap my fingers and make myself a non-germophobe. I have to take baby steps towards making things better, and I have the courage and will to do this. I can create positive change. I cannot solve all the problems in the world, but this I can work on.

So recently I accepted that wiping things down with an anti-bacterial cloth once a week was a good idea and a positive change that I could make that would help me get to a place where I wasn’t throwing my hands in the air, unable to act. Over the past couple of weeks I have spent some time cleaning things obsessively.

3 days to do my bookshelves, come on you guys, that is NOT normal, it is not like I have an entire library here, there’s two book shelves with a total of 24 alcoves in them. Not only did I clean the shelves, I cleaned each book, each ornament on the shelves, all the picture frames, anything nearby. Obsessively. They are now spotless, and this means I can just wipe the shelves over, wipe the books which are getting dusty. If I do that once a week, I’ll feel a lot better.

Today I tackled the difficult subject of the bathrooms. I have been putting it off. The other day the other half said to me that he had no idea how someone who claimed to be a germophobe could live with such a bathroom situation. They were filthy. I said this germophobe could not live with having to clean these bathrooms. Whoever designed them is a real idiot. There are many spots for germs to hide. To clean the vanity tops usually takes me 2 hours alone and it is backbreaking because of the height of the darned things. They were designed for very short people.

That’s not even getting into cleaning the toilets. There’s not enough anti-bacterial hand wash in the world for me to cope with that. So I’d rather put it off, and put it off, and keep putting it off until I can’t take anymore.

When one does put in the hard yards and does the work, one feels a real sense of accomplishment. Now, I intend a quick wipe over once a week, and then I won’t have to do this evil backbreaking hours of work chore because it won’t get that bad. The trouble is having stuff on top of the vanity means you have to move all that stuff when you want to clean it. That’s what was stopping me from cleaning the bookshelves for so long. Too much stuff in the way which I’d have to move, and clean. I’m thinking a box with a lid would be a lot easier.

I just went into the bathroom before to wash my hands, and took great pleasure in the clean surfaces. I have to remember that when I start to think I can’t reach this goal. I can reach it. I know I can. And who put can’t in my vocabulary? I don’t like that word. Will not, sure. May not, fine. Do not, okie dokie. Can not - it has to be one of the previous three.

I’m so tired. I’ve been up since 7:30am and most of the afternoon was spent in a cleaning frenzy. I’m going to sleep for hours. Tomorrow it’s weekly wrap up time.

So I figured yesterday I would do a little cleaning of my bookshelves, because it’s been a while and I wanted to add all my books to librarything. Being the germophobe that I am, a cleaning task which seems simple to most can turn into absolute Kaos without me even noticing, but at least there has been some order in how I’ve been doing it.

I bring each shelf full of books over to my desk. I catalog them in library thing. I then wipe the books over with paper towel which has a little anti-bacterial spray on it, taking off any dust which has settled there. I then put the clean books to one side and go and clean a shelf for them to go back to. Then, I put the books away.

There’s no point trying to have a logical order to my bookshelves, this I have learned over the years. I’ve tried various ideas, grouping by author is probably the most organized things will get here. Even that isn’t 100% because some of the books are too large to fit together, so I have little pods with the larger books.

I still have a lot of work to do but I can see the light at the end of the tunnel now. The room is starting to feel a lot cleaner to me. Here’s the bit I’ve finished, sort of. Click for a bigger view. Check out my librarything author cloud - it shows who I have the most books of by size of text, which is kind of cool. I’ve doubled the amount of my books on there over the last 24 hours - going from 110 to 220 books.

But before you go all crazy and start your own library thing, I got up to 200 books then found I had to pay if I wanted to add more. I did pay $19US for a lifetime membership, because having worked in insurance I know the value in having these kinds of things listed in a location other than your own home, and because I like the easy way librarything works and how it shows the covers of books, and yes, partly because I was in the middle of the job and I wanted to finish it, and I was a bit annoyed about it but when I checked the home page it did state it clearly on there. I probably didn’t spot it.. If only I could find something for DVD’s that was as good.

I have to do The Other Half’s books next. He doesn’t have as many as me, though. It’ll still take me most of today, I’m thinking. I’m in night mode at the moment, sleeping during the day. Today I made a huge error in picking up the Gene Kranz “Failure Is Not An Option” book when I finally crashed into bed around 10am - it grabbed me and I read solidly for 2.5 hours, getting up to the point where they landed on the moon. Wow. The amount of work that went into doing that - this is the first book I’ve read that really gives you an idea of that. Which is why I imagine those guys must be really upset by the “they never landed on the moon” conspiracy theories. Imagine having your life’s work questioned in that way?

I’ll be back a little later with two posts, one about the little cards I have on my desk, and the weekly wrap up.

How does one tell one’s mother that her cooking is making one ill?

I’ve mentioned before that I am a germophobe, you know this. My mother is *not*. My mother never did year 12 catering at school, where they take a black light and show you how many germs are on your hands, then they tell you to go and wash them, then they show you again with the blacklight and you can see the spots you missed. My mother has no care whether chopping boards are clean, whether things are kept properly in the fridge, and my God, the woman uses tea towels instead of paper towels to wipe her hands. I must be adopted or something.

I ate there Friday evening, and was so ill for the next 24 hours, I do not even want to go into the details. Unfortunately this is not the first time this has occurred. Suffice it to say that the experience has me thinking I have to say something, or else avoid eating there all together. She will be very offended, this I know. She gets pissy at me enough about my germophobia, she says “Well you survived it for the first 20 years of your life”. I don’t like to mention that one of the ways I survived it was sneaking out to the kitchen in the middle of the night and madly cleaning everything I could find.

She’s also mad at me over the whole sister thing. I sent my sister an email, which I thought was actually fairly reasonable, and in fact got Sephy to check it over for me and remove anything potentially nasty. This caused my sister to cancel her visit here last Monday. Because I’m a bitch. I sent her another email telling her that after everything Mum and Dad have done for her, she could at least let them have a Christmas with their grandkids, and the other half and I would stay well out of her way, she would not even have to see me. This did not result in a visit.

Mother thinks I should have said nothing and left well enough alone. Well I’ll be honest, I’m sick of saying nothing. My mother’s main way of dealing with things is saying nothing. I don’t like it. And if my saying something means my sister never speaks to me again, that’s too bad. I’ve been there for her anytime she needs me but I also have been honest with her and I’m not going to stop doing that because she doesn’t like it. She’s put this family through hell since she was 16.

She wasn’t speaking to me after her trip down here, well now it’s me not talking to her, because I cannot believe she would deny Mum and Dad and the kids their Christmas. I think she’s an ungrateful bitch. My first two emails to her have been nice and not called her any names, but the next one will NOT be so nice.

In other more scary news, I may be doing a television interview soon. Yes, this scares the living bejeezus out of me. At the same time it is a big opportunity to get the word out about these scams, and I feel like it is really important to do it. I’m hopeful my identity can be kept secret.. but I may have to consider taking a few steps like removing links to my blog from various places, etc. The other interview brought some unpleasant things my way, and I’m a little worried this will happen again.