It's November Again, Isn't It?

So it is.  And so I suppose I dust this shelf off again, shouldn't I?

It's hard to be motivated to write every day for a month when 1) you've posted a grand total of 1 time since the calendar turned over, and 2) you've spent the day cleaning toilets.  Yes, I'm in a great mood over here.

Why are boys so gross?  I have a brother, but we mercifully didn't have to share a bathroom and I was never tasked with scrubbing his (thank you, Mom!), so I was relatively blind to the destruction the male form of the species could inflict on a bathroom.  If memory serves, I nearly bludgeoned my soon-to-be husband 2 days before our wedding when we were moving him out of his bachelor apartment into our new place and I ended up having to clean behind the toilet.  Seriously, it could have been over in just that instant.  I'm pretty sure both my parents had to hold me back.  I did my best, but we did not get that security deposit back.

And now: Boy Child.  Good gravy, Son, you can walk a straight line, fire an honest to goodness arrow right into a target, you even have a rifle shooting merit badge for heaven's sake - where is your aim?  Does the white porcelain blind you?  Does tile make you dizzy?  Do you get vertigo around shower curtains?  I will never understand, and I'm guessing that after 13 years, it's unlikely to get much better without some educational intervention.

An aside: A couple of weeks ago, said boy child was quite excited to go on a scout camping trip because he had the role of grubmaster.  Oh, what does that entail, I asked.   He told me he and his group had figured out the meal plan for the trip and he needed to procure all the food.  Translation: I would have to procure all the food.  Fine.  I didn't mind, since it gave me a chance to project manage their list and see how far under budget I could get (spoiler: 50%).  But the day before the trip, I discover 2 enormous foot lockers that had been squirreled into my trunk.  And they were full of the most grotesquely dirty dishes I have ever seen.  Like years of caked on grease just allowed to congeal and layer onto the pots and pans.  So nasty.

Well, I could not contribute to the disease exposure, so I rolled up my sleeves and went to town.  I scrubbed through an entire econo-sized box of SOS pads.  I broke into a sweat like I'd just run 5 miles.  They weren't in like new condition, but they were clean and usable again.  I packed those lockers like the finely tuned Tetris player I am and collapsed. 

So here is what I want to do.  I want to design my own merit badge (scout status unnecessary because this is too important).  A cleaning merit badge.  Example lessons:

• There is more dirt around than you are currently noticing
• Actual cleaning requires more effort waving a paper towel near something
• Introduction to brillo pads and other scrubbing mechanisms
• No, that's not clean yet
• Master class in toilet disinfecting: it takes more than swirling a brush around the bowl

This is just a sampling; I'm sure I'll come up with a whole lot more.  In fact, this is probably more than a merit badge.  Maybe a whole series of badges.  Or classes.  And they should be requirements for graduation.

Well, that got away from me for a bit.  I should probably go get the aforementioned boy child from school so he can destroy my hard work in 18 nanoseconds.  And then the homework can really begin.