HELP! I’m trapped in my house … cleaning it!

Well, I’ll admit it … I have been putting off a number of general maintenance projects that have kept rising to the top of the job jar for the last couple of weeks … er … months … OK … years.

If you’ve ever visited here before, you’ll know that I like to cook. Unfortunately, I’m a rather messy cook, who hates to clean up his messes. So I’ve been putting off cleaning my oven for more than a while.  Actually, I purchased the oven cleaner last spring. So today was now or never, since the expiration date on the can  was getting close. After shaking the can of cleaner more than well, and holding the can at the correct spraying angle, I gave the interior of the oven a good spray coat of cleaner. Even though the can claimed that the cleaner was odorless, it wasn’t. I closed the door of the oven and prepared to wait the two hours it would take for cleaner to eat the grime and grease from the oven walls.

Then I looked at the oven racks propped up next to the range. Instead of the shiny silver metal I expected I saw a dull brown with black smudges here and there. Not wanting to gas myself by spraying more oven cleaner on them, I decided to take them into the basement and scrub them in the laundry tub. I knew there had to be Brillo pads or steel wool in one of the cabinets in the basement.

So I started going through the various shelves and cabinets searching for the Brillo pads. And along the way I discovered this box. My mother must have stored it  down there at least thirty years ago, because inside I discovered hundreds of photos I had been trying to find for about three years.

Like these pictures of my nephew Steve taken the day his Grandmother and I took him to downtown Saint Louis on the bus to visit the train station, the Arch and the now departed Saint Louis Center. The first picture shows him pouting. He was mad because I had stopped in a record store to purchase a cassette tape I needed for work and he thought the plastic cassette box was a new kind of Transformer and I wouldn’t let him see if he could take it apart. Does record store and cassette tape help date these photos? Well, they should, because my nephew is going to be 34 in a couple of months.

Well, I suppose you probably think I spent the rest of the afternoon going through the lost but found photos in the box. Well, I didn’t! I found the Brillo … scoured the oven racks … and went upstairs to finish cleaning the oven cleaner out of the oven.

Oh, how it glitters and gleams so!

That will last until the next time I attempt some more creative cooking.

Then I had to clean up the mess I made while cleaning the mess in the oven. This involved pulling the range away from the wall where I just happened to discover this …

This is one of the many antique cookie cutters my Grandmother used to make cut-out sugar cookies when I was little. Actually she probably used them to make cookies for my uncles and aunts, too. She had given them all to my mother, and the Christmas my mother died I made one last batch of sugar cookies from my Grandmother’s recipe. I gave a plate of cookies, a copy of the recipe and one of the old cookie cutters to each of my brothers, their wives and all my nephews and nieces. I saved the chicken for me, and hung it from the spice rack over the range. Apparently, it had fallen behind the range and I never noticed it was missing.

So I guess it was a good thing I decided to do one of the messy cleaning jobs today.

IT’S MY LIFE …

AND WELCOME TO IT!