If you give a mouse a snow day...

If you haven’t been living under a rock, you may have heard that Denver has gotten some snow over the past few weeks. If by some, you mean “85% of our normal snowfall and March and April are the snowiest months”. I’d like to say a couple of things here. One is that if the past month is just a taste of what our “snowiest months” will bring, well, we’re screwed. The other thing is that actually, besides being tired of snow in general, I’m pretty tired of staying home.

The first blizzard was a novelty. I didn’t have to go to work, Chris came home early, and we spent the next couple of days in our pajamas watching t.v. and taking naps. It was pretty fun. The second blizzard I kind of groaned about because Chris was out of town and so I had no one to amuse me while I was snowed in. Didn’t have to go to work, watched t.v., took naps, read a lot. Eh, whatever. Third time, I was like “you have GOT to be KIDDING me.” Chris was still out of town and frankly, I was tired of being trapped in my house. I didn’t have to work and I was bored out of my mind.

I talked on the phone to my mom a lot, and during one of our many long conversations about nothing, she suggested that I put my oven on self-clean, because it would add some warmth to the house and I wasn’t going anywhere anyway. I did, and that’s when the madness set in.

Have you ever read the book “If you give a mouse a cookie”? It’s basically saying that if you give a mouse a cookie, he’ll want some milk, and then each thing you give him makes him think of something else he wants until it comes full circle and he wants a cookie again. Everyone has done it – you paint a room and then decide that you need new curtains. The curtains look great, but now the bedspread looks kind of icky. A new bedspread means new throw pillows, etc. etc.

This was what happened to me when I put the oven on self clean. I decided I’d just clean off the top of the stove and it snowballed into cleaning the counters and the sink and the floor. Not just the everyday kind of cleaning, but BIG TIME cleaning. After cleaning out the fridge and reorganizing the pantry, I then moved onto my bathroom (which included using an old toothbrush on the grout and the baseboards and the dusting off of the lightbulbs, among other things), the guest bathroom, the living room and my bedroom. It took me most of Friday and some of Saturday, but was it ever tidy. The whole house had awesome vacuum tracks, which to me just says “clean”. And luckily, there weren’t even pine needles anymore, as my brother finally rescued me from my personal Christmas tree hell. The best part was that on Friday night, “The Princess Bride” was on – twice – and so I could listen to it as I compulsively cleaned and said the lines to myself. Actually, the best part was all of my cleaning supplies, but I thought saying that the movie was the best part made me sound less lame. Did it work?

It’s supposed to snow tomorrow, and so now I’m wondering what the hell I’m going to do if I have to stay home all day.