two things I’m changing in my life right now

1. I am going to start watching movie previews, trailers, whatever you want to call them. For years I have avoided them because I feel they often just show the most exciting or outrageous parts of the film so when I go to actually watch the thing, it’s underwhelming because I just end up sitting through an hour and a half of preamble before re-watching a few moments that are cool but I’ve already seen. I still feel that way but on the other hand, over the last several years I have ended up sitting through too many piece of shit films that weren’t worth my time — if I had just watched even a few minutes of a preview, most of the time I would have realized the film was a piece of crap before committing to it. It happened again last night with a film called Deadgirl which I had seen on some ‘most disturbing films’ lists. Almost as soon as the thing started, I realized it was junk. I’ve gotten better at giving up earlier on these things so within 5 minutes I started skipping through it and confirmed my suspicions, and also confirmed it wasn’t even remotely shocking. I’m happy I didn’t waste much time on it but I’d rather have wasted even less time. So now I’m going to watch previews of every film on my ‘to watch’ list and probably remove about half of them from the list.
2. At age 42, I’m finally going to start dusting the house on a regular basis. I always hated dusting, and it’s the primary reason we hired a housekeeper several years ago. But they usually did shit jobs, charged way too much for it, and were notoriously unreliable so we recently gave up on the housekeeper thing. I just dusted the house myself this morning and it only took about 30 minutes and was really fucking easy. I don’t know why I was so dang reluctant to do this job in the past. It wasn’t bad at all. It was actually pretty enjoyable because it was so easy and makes such a difference — I love low effort/high reward activities.

That’s all for this morning.

i’m boring

You’re not going to believe this but we finally found a housekeeper who seems to be working out. She was recommended by a friend and has been cleaning my friend’s grandmother’s place for a few years now. Considering I couldn’t even get most cleaners to even show up once, I find that sort of resumé absolutely shocking. Plus the grandmother is apparently a miserable old bag and she never leaves her place so the fact that this housekeeper doesn’t seem to be bothered by working around her makes it even more amazing. I feel pretty lucky that she’s working for us now. She’s come out twice and so far, so good.

An interesting side effect of having a housekeeper is that I am now doing a lot of cleaning that I had been putting off for a long time. Even after our first housekeeper (who only came once and then said our house was “too dusty” for her to come clean it for $35/hr — holy fucking moly, that makes no sense to me) cleaned the place, I was suddenly motivated to clean and reorganize the cupboard in the laundry room — a job I had wanted to do since I moved in with Jenn 10 years ago but never got around to. And after our current housekeeper’s most recent visit, I dusted the Venetian blinds, the many leaves of a houseplant, and cleaned the windows of Jenn’s office door — all jobs I had wanted to do but never got to. Before, I didn’t want to start any of those jobs because there were so many other cleaning jobs I felt were more important so I should do them first, but I didn’t want to do any of those particular jobs, so I ended up not doing any cleaning at all. I was paralyzed. Now, I’m free to take care of those little things that bug me, guilt-free because all the big jobs I hate doing are already taken care of. It’s funny how cleanliness begets cleanliness.

Just another riveting post about my pathetic adult life.

Housekeepers are to me now what tattoo artists were when I was a teenager

In my teens and early 20’s, I was pumped on getting tattoos. I wanted to do the whole sleeves thing that every fucking geek and hipster grandma seems to have now, but I was perpetually frustrated by the fact that tattoo artists were so transient — all the artists I liked who did a piece on me were long gone by the time I went back to their shop six months later. It happened at least four times, and it sucked. I wanted a consistent, cohesive aesthetic to my tattoos but it was impossible with the artists moving around so frequently.

Now I’m in my late 30’s and am having a similar struggle with finding a housekeeper. I hate dusting and scrubbing so I contacted a bunch of housekeepers last month. Most turned out to be unprofessional and didn’t even get back to me, but one did and she seemed great. We talked on the phone at length, she came and checked out our place, and then she came and did some cleaning. She seemed nice and normal and reliable.

Then she emailed me last night to say our place is too dusty and she won’t be doing any more work for us. I think that’s weird since that’s the nature of her job but whatever. The point is I’m back in the thick of things, searching for yet another housekeeper — one who will actually respond, then show up, then keep showing up, and hopefully do a half decent job.

I’m not alone in my housekeeper complaints, either. Ben, Jenn’s parents, Liz, and some other friends have all found the same thing.

What is it about tattooing and housekeeping that draws people who are so hard to pin down? With tattooing, I think it’s because it’s generally a young persons game and young people are still figuring their lives out at that point — going to live with pals in Edmonton for a bit, meeting a girl and moving to her town, moving back to the island for a bit, etc. With housekeepers, I think it’s because it is an unskilled job that anyone can do, and I think that attracts people who aren’t invested in their career and don’t really care about being professional.

Anyway, it’s really fucking frustrating. But it’s also kind of funny because it shows where my priorities lay at these different periods of my life. I’m so typical.

I looked up ‘boring guy’ and found this. It works.

Bad first impressions of housekeeping services

I’ve been on a mission to find a housekeeper to help keep our place tidy, and it’s been a fruitless bastard of a three-week mission so far. Most companies I have contacted have either not responded, or only responded to say they’re too busy and can’t fit me into their schedule. I can’t believe it. In my whole life, I’ve only known two households that regularly have a housekeeper come do some cleaning, so who are all these people keeping the industry so busy that they can’t come to my place?

I admit that after a number of failed attempts, I put the idea on the back burner. But today I had another bright idea for where to look online for a cleaning company, and did indeed find a few more. But now I’m having my doubts as to who I should contact: some of these companies talk the talk pretty well and say they have lots of professional experience, but I notice lots of grammar errors in their ads and websites, like spaces between the end of words and whatever punctuation follows, lack of any punctuation, capitalizing the first letter of every word, that kind of thing. I know that a good housekeeper doesn’t need to be an anal English geek but I worry that it’s telling, that it just shows that this person or their company doesn’t pay attention to details, that they will do a lousy job of cleaning my house and I will be thoroughly dissatisfied.

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about:

Full Housekeeping Service, Clean Organize, Guaranteed Sparkling Clean ! One Time Spring Cleaning.

Or this:

Face it nobody really likes cleaning their bathroom.

I’m not completely writing off any companies that are guilty of this stuff but they’re not going to be my first choice. They’ll likely end up being my sixth or seventh choice.

However, with how this quest is going, those just might end up being the companies I end up with. Egad. I’m not terribly excited to see where this adventure ends up. I foresee it going poorly.

Jeez, what do you do if a housekeeper dies at your house? I’m sure there’d be a lot of paperwork. What a pain in the ass that would be.