Mid-Week Musings: High Maintenance

Mid-Week Musings: High Maintenance

by | Apr 18, 2012 | Preparation Stage

I’ve never been the girl who spends hours in the bathroom or at the mall. In fact, most days I can be ready to leave within about 20 minutes of waking up (or at least I could before I had to prepare a miniature person too.) If I’m really being honest, I have nursed a certain pride about how much time and money I’ve saved by not getting my hair and nails done, foregoing makeup most mornings, and wearing the same dry-clean only outfit multiple times before finally giving it away.

This year for my birthday, most of my gifts were money/gift cards to clothing stores. Was my family trying to drop a hint? Possibly. Anyway, I went on a general shopping spree for some new summer clothes, including a shirt that I didn’t realize was “hand wash only” until I had taken the tags off and worn it. Ugh. Rule #1 of clothes shopping: don’t buy anything high maintenance!

And then it hit me: my whole life is about to become high maintenance! Every article of clothing will suddenly become one of two options: hand-wash or no-wash. Not only that, but all those “maintenance” chores that I hate so much are about to become much more plentiful. If I think laundry,* dishes, and mopping the floor are a pain, what about checking the bilge every morning, varnishing teak, and yearly haul-outs on top of making my old chores harder? Just a reminder that we aren’t planning on going on a permanent vacation, but living a new life, complete with all the chores!

Of course, if I’m gonna do chores, I’d rather do them in a tropical breeze.

 

*I hate laundry. To me it is the least efficient of all chores: unless you are naked, you will never complete it.

Mid-Week Musings: Convenience

Mid-Week Musings: Convenience

by | Mar 28, 2012 | Preparation Stage

So, last night I was getting a glass of water for myself after dinner from our refrigerator. We have an ice maker which has a dispenser on the freezer door for our “convenience”. The problem is that it actually isn’t very convenient at all. In fact, I stood at my freezer door for a good thirty seconds and had exactly 3 pieces of ice plop into my glass. I realized, as I was standing there dehydrating, that it would have been significantly faster to just open the freezer door and scoop the ice out manually. The funny thing is, our ice dispenser has been this slow for the last 4 years, and I still continue to sit and wait for each piece of ice to make its way into my glass.

This got me thinking about the illusion of convenience. How much time and money do we spend for something to be more convenient, when it would have been faster and easier to do it the “hard” way? Our dishwasher is another good example: I completely clean off all of my dishes in the sink before I put them in the dishwasher because I don’t trust it to wash my dishes properly. Then what is the point of the appliance I continue to use every day?

Sometimes it’s just too easy to get suckered into the marketing tactics that say the newest gadget will help you save time because we agree with the basic assumption. You need more stuff to deal with the fact that you don’t have enough time. Personally, I know I don’t have enough time, that’s why I want to get rid of the stuff.