I have stumbled upon a phenomenon I can barely get my head around, and it seemed important enough that it could CHANGE LIVES – so naturally, I’m blogging about it.

Did you KNOW…your house will stay clean if you turn off your computer? Yeah. Crazy shit, I know. But hear me out. It turns out, if you spend just one hour a day cleaning, your house will sparkle and shine. Who knew? Now, I’m not talking about “picking up” or “straightening the front room” or anything like that. I’m talking about actual c-l-e-a-n-i-n-g.

I performed this little experiment this week. Every day, I picked something to focus on for a solid hour. One day, I did the kitchen – REALLY scrubbing the surfaces, shining the appliances, actually moving the table and chairs out of here to mop – all of it. Another day, I vacuumed every inch of carpet in the house, including the stairs, and using the crevice tool to get around everything. And on another day, I dusted everything. Cough. Choke. I didn’t realize what a pit this place was. But you should see my house! It’s soooo cleeeeean! (Underneath all the toy clutter.)

If you spend one uninterrupted hour every day with a sponge or a vacuum in your hand at all times, your house will shine. For reals.

Until your kids walk in the door from school, anyway.

That’s a Snoop Dogg lyric, did you know that? Betcha didn’t. I don’t imagine Big Snoopy D-O-double-G was considering the plight of the stay-at-home-mother when he wrote it, but I can sure relate to it.

Things are swell. Things are great! Things are a train wreck and a half! I keep thinking that if I just embrace it and own it and realize once and for all that this is our normal, I’ll deal with things better. So that’s what I’m going to do. I’m just going to write about it so it all makes sense for me, because I really think it’s scariest when it’s inside my own head. Once I get it out in the open, it’s like, eh. No biggie.

My oldest child is seriously struggling in school. We’re almost mid-way through freshman year, and thing’s aren’t going well. She’s so painfully unmotivated, and it’s something we’ve been dealing with for the past four years now. I can’t even begin to list all the many ways we’ve tried to light a fire under her ass. She’s just so damned apathetic, and it’s something I see over and over with kids her age. We want so badly for our kids to have what we didn’t have, and to not have to struggle or go without, and because of it, they value NOTHING. My husband grew up poor, and actually was homeless several times as a child. He’s mentioned many times that he wishes our kids could go through a safer version of what he went through, just so they’d know what it’s like to not have electricity or to have to sleep in the car. I don’t know that we need to go THAT far with it, but I sure wish there was a way to boot these kids in the ass a little, and make them realize that the world doesn’t revolve around them and their skinny jeans. I think I’m going to start dragging my daughter out on Saturday mornings to volunteer in a soup kitchen or something.

Besides the drama with the teenager, I feel like I’m losing my mind a little in this crazy house. Or my hearing, anyway. I’ve never been around such LOUD children before. From the time they wake up until the time they snuggle up and fall asleep at night, they are SHOUTING at one another. I’m sure it’s at least partially genetic, since I’m married to the loudest man on the planet. Normally, I’m not bothered by it at all, but it seems like they’ve cranked it up to eleven this week. We need to start a marathon round of The Quiet Game.

And when I left my house today, it was CLEAN. It even smelled good. Every bed was made, every inch of carpet vacuumed. Within an hour of returning home with four monkeys, the house looked like I hadn’t touched it. I found toys, shoes, books, and clothing on the floor in five different rooms before dinnertime. Erma Bombeck once said that trying to clean house when you have small children is like shoveling while it’s still snowing. I can’t think of a better comparison! Still, I’m thankful that I have my five monsters, and we have a roof over our heads. Things could definitely be worse.

Tomorrow, I think I’m going to take myself out for sushi.

It’s snowing like crazy here, which can only mean one thing: time to make green chile! Aww, who am I kidding. We eat green chile all the time. Sometimes my husband picks up a quart at La Casita, but mostly, I make it myself. I buy roasted green chiles by the bushel in fall, and freeze them in quart-sized Ziplock bags so we can enjoy them through the year. Here’s my recipe. Whip up a batch, and eat it alongside your bean or egg burritos.

Green Chile

• 1 lb. cheap boneless pork roast – buy it on sale and freeze it!
• 1 quart-size ziplock bag green chiles – roasted, peeled, seeded, and chopped
• Several jalapeño peppers, seeded and chopped – optional
• 1/2 to 1 c. flour, seasoned liberally with salt, pepper, cumin, chili powder, and garlic powder
• 2 quarts chicken stock

Cut pork roast into small pieces. Dredge in flour. Cook in a small amount oil until brown and crispy. Remove from pan; leave drippings. Add a little more oil to the pan and add the rest of the flour, and maybe even a little more.  Add chicken stock a little at a time, stirring constantly with medium-high heat. Add all other ingredients, including the browned pork. Simmer about 2-3 hours. If chili is too thin, thicken it up with a little flour or cornstarch.

This is one of those things you just learn how to make from experience – it’s kind of hard to write down all the ingredients and instructions and the quantities and techniques without losing a little something in the translation.  The most important thing to remember is to have fun with it, and don’t be afraid to improvise a little. I’ve used pork stew meat, pork tenderloin, pork chops, pork cube steak – whatever I have on hand or can find on sale. I’ve also made it with a big can of green chiles instead of fresh – still yummy.

I don’t have any Thanksgiving decorations. I always see them in Walmart (around, uh, AUGUST or so) and think to myself, “I really need a wreath made out of fake orange leaves.” And then I talk myself out of it, because I know I’d take it down the day after Thanksgiving and promptly lose it. I KNOW where the Halloween stuff is, and I KNOW where the Christmas stuff is: stuffed into about thirty boxes in the rafters of my garage! One little wreath just doesn’t have a home, y’know? I’d lose it, and then be all angry and bitter the next November, when I couldn’t find it. So I don’t.

And then I find myself in this no-man’s-land between Halloween and Christmas. I still have about nine boxes of Halloween costumes and decor, neatly stacked up in the living room, just waiting to make their way back out to the garage. I can’t drag the tree in until that stuff is GONE. And, since this is our first year in this house, I’m excited and can’t wait to decorate. Hurry up, husband! Put away the Halloween stuff so I can break out the Christmas stuff! (Translation: move your motorcycle out of the way so I can get to the ladder.)
The kids and I were talking about Christmas yesterday, and came to the realization that it’s a mere six weeks from right now! I think we should get that tree up THIS WEEKEND. Seriously. I’m going to be worn out from cooking all day on Thanksgiving, and probably won’t be in the mood to do it then. Why not now? I missed having a tree up last year, since we moved over Christmas weekend – I should get to make up for lost time.

The only thing bringing me down is that damned Dora Christmas CD the kids keep listening to. It might get lost soon, I’m thinking.

Hey, it’s a brand new blog! But…why? Why would someone walk away a well-known blog, where they’ve written under the same name for a decade?

Well, it’s weird. Our family physically moved in 2008 between Christmas and New Years, and as of this writing, we’ve lived in our new home for nearly ten months. And I STILL haven’t unpacked everything. To this day, my favorite purse is still in a box in my closet; I’m just not sure which box it’s in. Last night, I made a meatloaf, and it took me nearly twenty minutes to find my roasting pan. You know, the one with the wire rack, because nobody wants to eat meatloaf when it’s been sitting in it’s own melted fat in the oven. Bleah! I dug through the storage room in the basement, sure that it was there, but it wasn’t. I found it in a kitchen cupboard, behind the griddle. I spent twenty-eight dollars on new floaties for the kids during the summer months, because I couldn’t find the four brand new sets of floaties I had purchased at the end of Summer ‘08. We had a massive garage sale in the spring and got rid of lots and lots of toys, clothing, and housewares, and I am STILL drowning in my own clutter. In my house, in my head, and on my blog.

So, why not just let all this internet stuff GO, fer fuck’s sake? Walking away from the internet would certaily afford me the time I need to get my house together. OMSH did exactly that, around the first of the year. She evaluated her life, decided that blogging wasn’t a good use of her valuable time, and she just…stopped. I’ve thought of doing that, many times. I’ve even justified the amount of time I spend online, telling myself, “I’m just going to check Facebook real quick before I get dinner started,” or “I just need to look up the ingredients for this recipe,” Excuses. All excuses! The web is such a huge timesuck for me (and probably you!) that it’s a massive source of contention with my husband.

Through the years, I’ve done a pretty fair job of keeping things together, I think. It’s not easy raising five children. It’s kept me busy. Those years of having four in diapers? Not the worst thing I’ve ever gone through in my life, but still – kind of a drag. I used to think it would get easier as they got bigger, but the truth is, the challenges have just changed. It’s true that I’m no longer up at night making bottles, pushing a quad stroller through Walmart, or spoon-feeding babies in high chairs. Instead, I’m trying to figure out high school math I can’t remember how to do anymore, navigating my autistic son’s IEP, dropping my daughter at Girl Scouts, and homeschooling the two I can’t afford to send to preschool.

And even though life has been WORK for me these past few years, I’ve always had my blog. Pouring my heart out to my friends has been cathartic and therapeutic, and it’s something I’ve treasured immensely. Have you noticed, though, that the landscape of the web has changed over the past couple of years? It used to be that as a blogger, I was in this tiny percentage of the population. I didn’t even tell people I had a blog, because inevitably, they didn’t GET it. They didn’t know what a blog was, or if they did know, they thought it was weird. Nowadays, nearly everyone knows what a blog is, and damned near everybody writes on the web, at least on Facebook.

It really hit me how much things have changed in that regard when my oldest daughter went to homecoming a couple of weeks ago. Within seconds of her walking out the door, I had pictures of her in her sparkly dress and heels uploaded to Facebook, and my parents were on the phone with me, ooohing and ahhing over their beautiful granddaughter. What? MY parents online? How can this BE? But it is. My parents, and probably your parents too. And everybody else we know, who a couple of years ago thought the internet was weird and scary and complicated. Everybody loves the internet now. And it’s a beautiful thing! But for me, it’s absolutely sucked the joy out of blogging.

I wrote about this a couple of times on my old blog, how Facebook and Twitter have sort of destroyed blogging – by the time you finish reading everyone’s status updates, commenting on their cute kid pictures, taking the ridiculous quiz du jour, and plowing your virtual farm, you’re just…done. Who wants to sit down and write a thoughtful, introspective blog post after all of that? Who has it in them to pound out three paragraphs, when they’ve Tweeted what they need to say all day long, in 140-character increments? And, almost as importantly, who wants to READ a long, blathering blog post after all of that? Facebook is like chips before dinner. We’ve ruined our appetite for the main course.

So, I’ve felt a little unsatisfied lately with my web experience. I miss blogging. I miss what blogging used to be, and I want it back. Even if nobody else is seeing my pretty blog because they only access me through my RSS feed. Even if nobody comments. (Please comment!) Even if the rest of the world is happy connecting with one another through Facebook and Twitter. I want more than that. I want to remember, in detail, what happened with my kids on a random Tuesday. I want to document it with pictures and dialogue and commentary. I want it all. I want it, and I NEED it. I need this outlet. The fact is, I need to write. I’ve been journaling my life since I was a child, and it’s not something I can just walk away from. But it is something that needs a bit of pruning. I want my life to unfold and fall into place a bit more neatly. If I’m going to carve out some time to spend online, I want to enjoy that time. I don’t want to just piss it away, I want to leave something behind.

Soooo…that still hasn’t answered the question. You KNOW why I blog! But…why a NEW blog? Well…my old one is just a hot mess. It’s got some notoriety, and it gets some traffic, but it’s basically a tangled heap of barely organized blog entries – it’s seriously all over the place. And it’s GIGANTIC. I’ve been writing there for years, and the idea of tackling thousands of posts, organizing them and tagging them and pruning out the ones that are just fluff – I can’t even bear the thought. I’m not going to take it down or anything, but I’d like to leave it on the shelf like a giant overstuffed scrapbook, and start fresh. (I do intend to close most of the archives – I’m feeling awfully conspicuous lately, since I keep running into people over and over again who read my blog, but also know me at the bus stop – it’s a weird thing, for me anyway.) A big part of it is the name, too. It came from another time in my life, and even though folks still call me by my nickname, I’m ready to drop it from my blog. After ten years, I’m allowed to change my blogging name, right? Right? Whew. Okay.

So, that’s it. Hello and welcome!