My Unemployment Bucket List

I’ve mentioned before that my job is going away soon. We haven’t been given an exact date. We just know that our office will be completely closed by sometime in 2019.

I’ve given a lot of thought to what I’ll be doing once I’m unemployed. I toyed with the idea of another job like the one I have now.

That lasted about five seconds.

Writing, of course, is what I really want to do. I’m not sure if it’ll work out, but if it does, then I’ll be working from home and have way more flexibility than I do now.

With more flexibility, comes more time to do things I might not have had time for when I was working a “regular” job.

I made myself a short bucket list of things I’d like to do when I’m unemployed and have more time.

Delete My Emails

Am I the only person who hoards emails? I don’t open and/or read many of them except the ones from the school or the utility companies, so why do I keep them all? It’s truly a mystery.

I have so many questions. Do I need an intervention? What if the show “Hoarders” did a special just about my type of hoarding?

Do the 1-800-JUNK people from the show come out and clean out your Inbox for you? Is there an electronic equivalent of a shovel they can used to scoop the trash out of your email and into an electronic dumpster? Do they send a counselor to my house to walk me through each piece of mail?

I can picture it now. The camera pans to me sitting in a lawn chair in my front yard while they bring out all these emails.

Me: You can’t trash that one. I haven’t read it yet.

Counselor: Now, Kat, we can’t possibly look through each and every email before trashing it. There are just too many.

Me: But that one looks important!

Counselor: That one is dated March 2, 2009. If you haven’t needed it since then, you probably don’t need it now.

Me: You’re putting too much pressure on me. I can’t do this. You promised me that I was in control.

Would The Husband Dude be like the spouses on that show and get angry about my lack of progress?

The Husband Dude: You care more those damned emails than you do about us! You can’t even use that Inbox anymore. You had to open a Gmail account just to get emails for your blog. I don’t even think you open Yahoo anymore! I can’t live like this!

Shane (talking to the camera): I can’t have friends over because I can’t let them see that my mom spends all day on the computer at work and all night on the laptop, or her tablet or her phone at home but her Inbox is still a mess. It’s embarrassing. Nobody at school knows we live this way.

Guy from 1-800-JUNK (talking to the camera): I’ve been doing this for years, but I don’t think I’ve ever see anything quite this bad. I mean, I once had to help a lady who still had AOL, but at least she had everything organized into different folders. This lady (pointing to me in the background)? I found an email coupon for a dot matrix printer. (Shakes his head). It’s sad. It’s really sad.

Redecorate My House

I’m about to make an embarrassing confession. Even more embarrassing than hoarding emails.

I’ve lived in my house for almost ten years and I haven’t done a thing to change it, other than to pull up some carpet in two bathrooms (whose damned bright idea was it to put carpet in bathrooms?!?), replace two toilets and change out all of the major appliances.

But that’s it.

The house was built in 1989. The original owners sold it to us in 2008. They made some updates in the kitchen with granite countertops and a pretty backsplash and they put a new countertop, faucets and mirrors in the master bathroom. They painted a few of the rooms some beautiful colors.

But that’s it. The rest of the house is like a time capsule for the year I graduated high school.

My downstairs powder room has a Pepto Bismol pink countertop and matching floral wallpaper. I’ve hated it since the day I moved in.

Yet there it sits, mocking me. It says, “Nineteen-eighty-nine called. They want their wallpaper back!”

We even still have the window coverings that belonged to the previous owners. I’m not joking. They aren’t even my style. The ones in the living room are cream colored and frilly.

FRILLY!

I’m just so not a frilly person. I’m girly, in a blingy sort of way. But frills? No way.

This probably explains why I describe our decorating style as Modern Transitional meets The Munsters meets Comicon. On one hand, we’ve got frilly curtains and folksy wallpaper borders. On the other, we’ve got skulls and KISS memorabilia, and Star Wars stuff.

There’s a wallpaper border in Shane’s bedroom that is appropriate for a five year old. He’s fifteen. Maybe THAT’S the real reason he doesn’t invite anybody over.

Shane (to the camera): My wallpaper border has kites and teddy bears on it. Posters can’t cover it all. I’m just lucky I’m not in the Green Room. 

The “Green Room” is our third bedroom. The walls are bright green, as though St. Patrick’s Day threw up in there. I half expect a leprechaun to jump out of the closet, defending his pot o’ gold. I never worried much about it because we sort of used that room as a home gym with exercise equipment in it, which means I rarely went in there. However, I’m now eyeing it to be my “office” so the green walls need to go.

You’re probably asking yourself why we bought this house in the first place, if it’s so ugly.

The bones of the house are not ugly. Some of the decorating choices were questionable and seemed easy to fix at the time. But you know what they say about the best laid plans. About the time we moved in, The Husband Dude got laid off for the second time in 9 months. Less money combined with me working longer hours led to the disaster I call home.

I’m really looking forward to making a giant leap out of Folksy, 1989 Hell and into the twenty-first century.

That Domestic Stuff 

When I first got married, I wowed The Husband Dude with my homemade Mexican food. Growing up in El Paso gave me an education in South of the Border cuisine. That was when I worked less hours and came home at a decent hour. I was pretty good at keeping house too. Things for the most part were orderly and clean. 

Life changed dramatically when I started working in corporate America. My hours and shifts were radically different and I just didn’t have the time to devote to domestic chores anymore. It’s not that The Husband Dude doesn’t help out a little, but he has a very physically demanding job, so the last thing I want him to have to do is come home and spend another eight hours on his feet keeping house. Shane helps out with dishes and vacuuming and dusting, but the rest is kind of neglected.

It has been a little depressing because cooking and filling people’s bellies makes me really happy and so does having a neat, organized house.

I’m no chef, but I’m actually a pretty good cook, despite being birthed by a mother who would’ve rather set her own hair on fire than to actually do anything domestic.

You think I’m joking? She worked full time to pay for a maid/nanny, who ended up being the Alice to our Brady Bunch. When I was four years old, I asked my mother if she was ever going to learn how to iron like Santos.

Mom took one year off from teaching middle school to stay home with my brother and me and ran screaming back to the middle schoolers at the first chance she got.

She was a good mother in many ways, but domestic is not an adjective you would use to describe her and Stay at Home Momming would’ve eventually led to a straight jacket for her.

The irony in all this is that Mom took Home Economics in high school. All girls were required to take it back then. She learned how to cook, how to bake, and how to sew. Out of all of those, sewing was the ONLY domestic type thing she enjoyed. She said it was relaxing. She had her own sewing room in the house I grew up in, and she used to make nearly all of my clothes and many of her own clothes until I was well into elementary school.

Having grown up poor, sewing was a necessity for Mom. My grandmother made most of her own clothes and my mom and aunt’s clothes when they were growing up. When she was old enough, Mom made all of her own formal dresses for special occasions. She even made her own wedding dress and the jacket that went over it. I still have the long red and white  dress she made for our “Fiesta Day” in the fourth grade.  

Cooking, though, was not something Mom enjoyed. Despite this, she loved collecting recipes. When she died, I inherited her ginormous Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook. It was stuffed with clippings of recipes that she had taken out of newspapers and magazines. There are also dozens of recipes scribbled in her own handwriting and the handwriting of other long-gone relatives and friends. The book, in fact, was so overstuffed that she kept it in a plastic Walmart bag to keep everything together, and I still keep it in that bag in the cabinet.

Some of the recipes are things that I do remember her making, and she made them well. It didn’t matter that she didn’t like cooking. She was still pretty good at it.

Except for that Turkey Casserole thing she made one year after Thanksgiving.

We don’t talk about that.

Many of the recipes are things I’d love to try, if I had the time. I obviously inherited this recipe fascination from her because I’ve clipped my share of recipes as well.

Once Pinterest came along, I started pinning recipes like crazy. I think I have around 300 on my personal Pinterest page. I haven’t been  able to try many of them, though. When your work hours are long and you don’t get home until late, you don’t want to spend an hour in the kitchen prepping and cooking something that you’ll have to eat right before you go to bed.

Maybe once I’m not working a nine to five job, I’ll be able to spread my culinary wings and give my house a good scrubbing. I think it’s too late for sewing, but I love to crochet and maybe I can do more of that too.

Until then, the house is probably going to stay a little messy and my slow cooker will be working almost as hard as I do.

 

The Husband Dude (to the camera): She cooks food for the dog. She decided the dog doesn’t like store bought food so she started finding all these recipes and making gourmet dog food. I come home, something smells good in the slow cooker and I’m like, ‘What’s for dinner?’ and she’s like, ‘That’s dog food. We’re having fish sticks’. Fish sticks! The dog is eating something called “Muttloaf” and I’m eating fish sticks? You know what the dog ate the other night? Tuna casserole, made with bowtie pasta. Frickin’ bowtie pasta. The dog is more *BLEEP BLEEP BLEEP* Italian than I am now!

Me (to the camera): Well, to be fair, he’s only half Italian anyway.

THD (to the camera, shaking his head): Fish sticks. And Aldi’s brand mac and cheese. Not even Kraft.

Producer off camera (speaking to me): Did you really make him eat fish sticks while the dog was eating bowtie pasta?

Me (looking uncomfortable, long pause): I’d rather not say.

Producer: He says you made him eat fish sticks with Aldi’s brand mac and cheese.

Me: Well…I mean, if I did, and I’m not saying I did, but if I did…did he starve?

(Another long pause)

Me: Did he starve?

(Camera fades to black)