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[wombat]

I like your concept of doing the chores you want/volunteer to, but what about the nasty ones no one likes?

This is where we throw money at the problem.  There is no better application of hard earned cash to marital harmony than hiring a housecleaner. Ours only come once every two weeks but it makes all the difference in the world.

[theinevitable]

yeah, I know. she taught me hell of skills. I can such as cook ramen or kraft macaroni without destroying anything. Also, I have made her promise to teach me to make
tortillas, and her recipe for Salsa. 

my friends were aghast as I added things to my standard ramen, to make a new, delicious ramen. (small amount of corn starch, soy sauce, rice vinegar. Actually, I didn't have these ingredients, but I mentioned needing to buy them. and then explained.)

when cooking with a group of friends, I am always the middle example (mostly helpful, but no great shakes), and occasionally I point out some helpful idea ("um, dude, when you're pressing down the edges of a dumpling with a fork... do it horizontally. There's more than one tine." I was proud of that one.)

The real issue with my mom is that I am naturally a stubborn person. But only in certain contexts. One of these contexts is when I am planning on doing something on my own dang time, and someone keeps bothering me about doing it. I realize that it is her house, her rules, &c. But I am a teenager, and I reserve the right to disagree with my mom about one dang thing in my whole life. I guess she'd prefer I do hell of drugs, though. I am generally a very agreeable kid. Just for the record. The dish-washing thing just bothers me because she seems to assume that I'm just being lazy. Which is not the case... I don't want the pots to be all greasy any more than she does. That is just gross.

also, I find that keeping my room neat at home (when I have a whole house to live in) is not as pressing as keeping my dorm room neat. I am living in this room. with another dude.

ironically, I think I'm going to have to buy a basic pot and pan. because... the ones they have in the kitchen here are encrusted with hell of grease and stuff.

[Turbo Ninja]

But if you really need the dish-rinsing to be perfect, then you go back to rule 2 above: YOU need to rinse her dishes after she puts them in the sink.  Because those are your only choices: Doing it yourself or shutting up.  Or, of course, living alone.

I originally started my last rant by claiming that my girlfriend has "temporarily" moved in with me, but anyone who has co-habitated knows that the only way to un-cohabitate is to break up.  So I don't think I'll be living alone again for a long time.  And the kitchen does not permit the introduction of a dishwasher appliance, due to space and plumbing and basically being a repurposed bedroom (there is no vent hood over the range, and I have one HUGE cabinet on the wall instead of an array of them like a normal kitchen).

I've come to peace with the fact that I must do the dishes, because I'd rather do that than get all passive-aggressive about re-drying the knives, making sure the cups are all upside-down in the drying rack, or that the crusty edges are totally out of the saucepans.  She's caught me in the act before and that was worse than just taking matters into my own hands.

We definitely have a Do It Yourself Or Shut Up agreement about the housework, which is why she never asks me to vacuum the carpets or to mop the kitchen tile.  It's also why I never ask her to wash the cars.

[side_show]

TN - they have tiny "apartment" dishwasher's now.  Also, most of the non-built in ones have wheels on em, and all the take is having any old sink - no special plumbing involved. 

In regard to throwing money at chores, I actually brought three pairs of ****** to the tailors today -two for hemming, one for repair to a torn zipper.  It was really nice to bring my ****** to a friendly Italian lady.  So much nicer than the swearing and rage that my own sewing maching fills me with, followed by the even worse possibility of destroying them by hemming them too short, or hemming them too long and having to start over again.  The fairly meager amount it costs to have them done for me is nothing compaired to the potential frustration.  And I've been wearing these ****** for a couple months without hemming, walking around looking like an idiot with my cuffs rolled up.  I'm way too old to be depending on my mom to do this for me.  I felt like a really grown-up girl today.

[theinevitable]

*tries to unroll his cuffs subtly, without smells noticing.*

[V-Adore]

WTF!?! Was this the University of Penitentary?

This was Williams College, frequently ranked the finest small liberal-arts college in America. The short explanation for all of this is that this guy was an extremely crafty whackjob. The long version is... way long and kind of inappropriate for this thread.

[smick]

I look forward to the appropriate thread.

[side_show]

*tries to unroll his cuffs subtly, without smells noticing.*

*slams hand on desk* I saw that!

theinev, you are a young enough pup that these things still fly, but me... sigh... I am too old for improperly fitted #####.  It is a sad state of affairs.  Enjoy your youthful cuff rolling days, for one day,  apparently ten years from where you are now, you will be as Adam and Eve were in the garden of Eden, except instead of looking down and realizing you're naked, you'll look down and realize you have to pay a professional to hem your trousers.  Or maybe I've just watched too much What Not to Wear.  Jesus... am I really ten years older than you?...it only seems like yesterday.

Thanks a lot!  Now I'm having an existential crisis!

[Doc]

Oh don't watch what not to wear SS. You are better than those people.
If it's the british one I'm thinking of anyway.
I'm sure any equivalent show would be just as bad too.

[theinevitable]

yeah, I was lying. My ##### are all too short to cuff. Because of my small waist. Also: cuffing jeans is different maybe?

[V-Adore]

I pay attention and know that V I just wanted the inappropriate story...

Well, fine! After this, the thread should get back to being about chores, though.

Sean (as I will call this young man, because it was his name) could be summed up in one word: "townie." He was a western Massachusetts native, by which I mean that he was extremely weird. He became very famous for his hat, which was a sort of hunter-green fedora with a feather and various other bangles. He would also wear kilts not-infrequently, and somehow he managed to talk other guys into also wearing kilts so they could have some sort of Man-Skirt Solidarity going on.

The mead story, unfortunately, is pretty much as it sounds: Sean decided he wanted to attempt to make his own mead. He talked another friend of ours, who will be known as Hank because it is a serviceable pseudonym, into letting him borrow an empty, clean garbage can for the fermentation of this mead. Presumably fermentation occurred, and then Sean decided to drink this stuff out of a ram's-horn vessel. I wasn't there for this part, but apparently this led to substantial vomiting later in the night; I can't say whether this was a consequence of volume of alcohol consumed, the fact that he was basically drinking jailhouse booze, or a combination thereof.

Damn good times!

Now, to get back sort of on the real thread topic: I hate the various little tasks associated with communal bathrooms. I hate realizing that, despite all standards of human decency, someone is using my goddamn soap and making it unusable to me in the process (by, say, breaking it, or leaving nasty hairs all over it). As I appear to be in this situation for one more year, do people have suggestions, or should I just do the sensible thing and not leave my stuff in the bathroom when I'm not actively using it?

[Turbo Ninja]

Save your soap by either getting one of those plastic snap-top soap travel coffins and keeping it in there, or get all fancy and replace your old-school bars of soap with liquid/gel bodywash.  I use a bar of Dial if I'm legitimately dirty/sweaty, but I use an eucalyptus/mint gel product by Anthony for my day-to-day personal hygiene.

[side_show]

V, most joke shops carry a soap that deposits a black dye onto the user.  When I was a kid, I think it was called dirty soap or tar soap or something.  Buy some, and leave it for the soap thief while coveting your own actual soap in a special holder as noted above.  Or buy a bottle of body wash - I use this instead  of soap with a little exfoliating puff thing, and since it squirts out, unless someone is trying really hard, you will not have curly-whirly's in your soap anymore.

[wombat]

Eeeuw, I would never leave my supplies in a communal bathroom.  Ash is right, get something to carry stuff back and forth.  You can buy something girlier than he suggests if that helps.

CHORES, since you asked:  I just bought the greatest sponge mop.  You push the handle down and it squeezes the sponge out by folding it in half.  This is better than the old kind where there was a flat thing to squeeze it out, and better than the other newfangled mops I have tried and discarded.  It is excellent!  I could mop all day!

[CortJstr]

Paying the rent. Mainly because the realtor's office is on the way home for the SO but she won't drop the rent off so I have to got out of my way to do it. She tried doing it once but accidentally took our rent to the South Korean Embassy instead of the realtor's office.