Chores and other stuff

See? Only 3 posts into this blog and I've already skipped a day. My excuse is that I wore myself out yesterday cleaning the house. By the end of the day, I had this post all written in my head, but no inclination to type it.

I have this weird method of housecleaning. (No, I don't mean the fact that I don't clean until I know someone is coming over. That's not actually all that weird.) I'm talking about my random chore generator. First I make a list of everything I feel needs work, down to the little tetchy bits. For example, I write "Take out bathroom trash; scrub tub; clean toilet; wipe counters; and wash floor" instead of writing "clean the bathroom." On average, I spend about 5 minutes walking around the house before making the list, surveying the messes and deciding what needs doing and what I can skip.

I assign each chore a set of numbers, from 0 to 999, divided evenly, and get someone from FFXI to /random* for me. I have to get someone else to pick the number, otherwise I'm inclined to cheat, leaving chores I don't want to do for the very end in the hopes that they will go away. When Justin is home, he ignores the system completely. I'll go to do a chore and it's already done! This leads to more cheating on my part, which never works out the way I hope. Also, over time I discovered that it is pointless to put either the dishes or the laundry into my lists. Both those chores involve returning to complete them after an hour or two; not suitable when the chore is picked randomly.

Odd as it is, this system really works for me. The chores are so tiny that they only take 5 to 10 minutes each. Then I get to come sit at my computer and joke around for a few minutes until I feel like going back to work. Sometimes my friend Kaze will try to skip ahead and simply give me a new number the second I sit down, but I can just chat for a few minutes and then go do the chore he /random'ed. I don't have to work straight through, I can see the end of my list, and I get to make everyone in-game laugh about crazy Shrugged and her housecleaning. It's a win-win-win situation. I use my chore generator every time I have a lot of housework to do. It even works for packing boxes. When we are moving, the list consists of closets and rooms that need to be packed up, rather than chores to do.

The random chore generator stems from a parenting method my mother used to teach my sister and me household responsibility. Mother would make out chore lists for us, one unique list for each girl. I liked the chore lists a lot because they provided a clear ending point to what seemed like infinite cleaning. I didn't have to worry about when I would get to go play; reaching the bottom of the list meant free time. Also, separate lists delineated which chores we each were assigned. There could be no "Mommy said you have to..." when it was written clearly who did what. The only thing I hated about the lists was when my mother had to add things. This was worst was when I was more than halfway through my list. I was already estimating what time I would finish. New items lengthened the time I'd be spending on chores, and I would have to completely recalculate.

Besides working on my random chore generator list yesterday (it had 12 items, plus laundry and dishes), I also met Justin for lunch at Baja Fresh, baked an apple pie, ranked up to Second Lieutenant in assault**, and tried out two new assaults with Justin and Dragonx. No wonder I was exhausted!

The apple pie turned out okay. It's the first time I tried making pie crust from scratch, and it wasn't as difficult as I had heard. The crust is actually quite good, even though I don't have a blender or a pastry-making-tool-thing. I used a potato masher instead. I've never made apple pie before, either. I was disconcerted by the spiced liquid that came pouring out of the pie when I cut it open. The pie filling tastes really good, but I can't figure out where all the liquid came from! Did I just not cook it long enough? Perhaps it would have evaporated if I cooked it a bit longer. The apples aren't crunchy, so I thought it was done, but I suppose they could get a bit mushier. Is this supposed to happen?

Today should be less busy; my sister and I are going shopping, possibly dragging Justin along. We have to buy gifts for our baby nephew and our father. I also am planning to attend Limbus with Dragonx and Elhaym this evening. Of all the FFXI end-game activities, my favorite is Limbus. It's short, it doesn't require a whole lot of studying strategies ahead of time, at least not for the Bard, and there's always the reward of Ancient Beastcoins at the end. Much better than Sky or Dynamis, where you might only get a reward every 3-6 weeks, and even then only if you are high on the point list. Also, I like that it can be done with as few as 8 people. If all 18 don't show up, we don't have to cancel!

What I'm reading now: Greenwitch, the third book in the Dark is Rising series. I liked the first 2 books much more. I'm actually considering putting this one down for about a week and coming back to it. Hopefully, the fourth book, Grey King will be better.

There, a nice long post to make up for not writing one yesterday. I'm still not sure I can keep up a blog, but it's nice to not quit during the first week!

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*/random: FFXI allows you make your avatar emote through one word commands preceded by a forward slash. For example, /smile makes your character "smile warmly" at whatever you targeted. /bow makes your character bow to your target (it is a japanese game, after all). /random makes a set of pretend dice roll a number between 0 and 999 and announces the results to everyone around you.

**Assault: an element added to FFXI during the expansion 2 years ago. In a party of 3 to 6 players, you go into a special zone with an objective to achieve in a limited amount of time. Sometimes the objective is to kill the monsters, sometimes it's spy work, and sometimes you have to rescue a computer generated character (NPC). There are 10 ranks modeled on army ranks. You start with rank 1, Private Second Class, and work your way up to the 10th rank. Second lieutenant is rank 9. Each rank gets a new set of assaults to try, though you can go back and repeat old ones.