rachel@home

Utah

When we were driving through Utah, it took a good hundred miles or so before I became aware of the symbol on the highway signs and started wondering what it was. Before that, I had been sort of idly thinking it was boxer shorts, or swim trunks, but, once I applied a little bit of reasoning to that, it was pretty obvious that no self-respecting state was going to put boxer shorts up on their state highway signs.

So I looked a little more closely at it, and my second best guess was that it was an igloo, which really, made even less sense than boxer shorts. Then I asked Abby what she thought it was, and we went back and forth and she finally said it looked like a beehive. I couldn't see what on earth Utah had to do with beehives, so I remained unconvinced. Eventually, we made sure we took pictures of it and then we promptly forgot about it as we moved onto states with less cryptic highway signs.

Last week, the girls stayed with grandma and grandpa, and they got stuff to make scrapbooks of their trip, and one thing Abby got was stickers of all the states, and she very cutely decorated her scrapbook cover with a trail of all the stickers of all the states we'd been to. I was admiring it this weekend, and flipped out when I saw that the sticker of Utah had much more recognizable beehive on it, with little bees buzzing all around it.

I explained the backstory to my mom, who said, well, yes, Utah was the beehive state. This is a little bit of apparently common knowledge that I failed to obtain in the last 30-plus years.

So with a little bit of research, I discover that not only is its state nickname 'the beehive state' but that it's also got a beehive right on its flag! The things I never knew I never knew.

Down the Drain

Two weekends ago, a friend of mine who I hadn't seen forever was coming to visit. And because my basic mode of operation since I've been back from vacation was something like, get up, go to work, come home, go to bed, get up, go to work, my apartment was sort of feeling the effects of all that working and not cleaning.

So I had great plans to really clean everything up. I spent a lot of time buying new cleaning supplies, because you know, buying cleaning supplies is a whole lot more fun than actually cleaning.

On Friday night, the day before she was to arrive, I decided that my carpet simply must be shampooed before anyone saw how grungy it had become. Nevermind that probably cleaning the kitchen and bathrooms and just vacuuming would have really made a much bigger difference than having clean, yet still damp carpeting, I was on a mission.

Saturday morning, I went to Target and bought a carpet cleaning machine, then went home and thought about cleaning the carpet for a while. After that, I leapt into action and dragged furniture around and vacuumed and put together the carpet cleaner and had finished cleaning exactly half of the living room when my friend arrived, a couple of hours earlier than I thought she'd be there.

As it turns out, when she said early afternoon, she really meant it!

With all of that, it wasn't until last night that I put my new can of bathroom cleaner, scrubbing bubbles, to work. (I know, cleaning the bathroom on Friday night is almost too much excitement, but I'm just that wild and crazy.)

While the can promised all sorts of miraculous no-effort cleaning, I was highly unconvinced. My usual method of cleaning the tub is to sprinkle a whole bunch of comet in it, then scrub and scrub and scrub, growing crankier and crankier all the time. (It took me a long time to discover that it wasn't just that cleaning the bathroom made me cranky, but that I was having a mild allergic reaction to the smell of bleach, which made me feel all sneezy and congested in the head.)

So I removed all my shampoo bottles and sprayed the so-called scrubbing bubbles all over the tub, (with two fans running, to help with the smell!) and by the time I finished spraying the tub, I could actually see the grungy parts running down the drain. It was just as miraculous as it promised! All those wasted years of endlessly scrubbing out the tub on my hands and knees -- down the drain.

I totally would have cleaned the tub before my friend came, had I known that it only took five minutes.

In other news, I still have two more entries I want to write about my trip, and, I really need to change the look of the site, now that I'm home again. But both of those are going to have to wait a while.

I'm also thinking about ordering some larger prints of some of my pictures, and framing them. The ones I'm considering are here. What should I do? I'm decorating impaired!