Make It A Good One!

I am not the best housekeeper in the world. In fact, I am pretty much a sucky housekeeper. I don’t clean my house at all – I pay to have someone else come in and do it. I manage to keep the surface of things picked up pretty well, but the interiors of my cabinets, drawers, and shelves mostly have all sorts of junk stuffed in them higgledy-piggledy. My desk at work is no better, and neither is my car.

My car is probably the worst of the three, because I have no cleaning company or janitorial staff to take care of it for me or to force me to pick it up in preparation for the deeper cleaning of their visit. In fact, I am often guilty of leaving a half-empty bottle of juice, a handful of receipts, or an unwashed lunch container in my car for several days (geez, I hope it’s not weeks, but time does fly….) at a time. In my defense, though, it’s not just me: my kids help contribute to the mess by leaving candy wrappers, fast-food bags, school papers, and dirty socks in the back seat, too.

So, although it doesn’t happen all that often, it’s also not horribly unusual for me to get in my car, breathe in, and say to myself, “Whoa!! Time to clean out the car!!” Yesterday was such a day.

I picked the girls up early from school for an appointment to go get flu shots. I picked Cyd up at the high school first, and then went over to get the twins at the junior high. I parked in the visitor’s space and asked Cyd if she wanted to go in with me to get her sisters.

“How long will you be?” she asked.

“Well,” I said, “Not that long, but I’ll have to get them checked out and everything so it might be a little bit.”

Cyd decided to wait in the car.

I went into the school and walked to the attendance office. It is run by students so it’s kind of a slow, laborious process to fill out the papers, have the student look up the class, call the teacher on the loudspeaker, and repeat the process for the other twin. Then, of course, both girls are on opposite sides of the school, about as far away from the attendance office as you can get. They finally appeared, and then we had to stop by the locker to drop off books and pick up backpacks, too. So, by the time we got back out to the car, probably close to 10 or 15 minutes had lapsed.

As soon as I got in the car, I immediately noticed a rather unpleasant odor. As I prepare to pull out of the parking lot, I have my "time to clean out the car again" thought and begin mentally running through the checklist of things I may have left in my car that could be the origin of such a funky smell: hmmm, haven’t been through a fast-food drive-in for a while, didn’t take my lunch to work today, Mychael washed her gym clothes over the weekend…what could it be?

Then it dawned on me. “Cydanie,” I said, “while I was getting your sisters, did you make a fartie in Mom’s car?”

There was a long pause, and then she finally replied.

“Well,” Cyd said, “it was only one!”

So, the moral of the story is, if you’re only going to make one, make it a good one – whatever it is.