This may not sound that awesome to you, but to me it’s awesome. I love a clean house. I loooove it.

I like cleaning fine, I guess, but I love when everything is clean. I feel so calmed when I know everything is put away and all the dusting and sweeping and vacuuming has set us back to starting position for at least a few days.1 And believe me when I say that we haven’t been at starting position for a while.

Em wants me to point out here that I take an inordinate amount of pleasure watching cleaning scenes in Studio Ghibli movies. I don’t know why so many have them, but they do. Characters are always tackling huge messes and doing a great job.

Spirited Away takes place in a bathhouse, for crying out loud.

Me watching these scenes is like Em watching a commercial for brownie mix or something. I feel all warm and content inside. My fingers and toes starting curling up in waves, and I bite my lips in anticipation. It’s so much more satisfying than watching Hoarders.

Sophie passes herself off as a cleaning lady in Howl’s Moving Castle. (There’s also a great cooking/eating scene.)

After cleaning, I feel like soaking in the bathtub for a few hours, which, incidentally, also happens in a lot of Miyazaki films.

In My Neighbor Totoro, the Kusakabe family gives their new country home a good scrub, and then they all take a bath together (a bit racy here in the States, but over there it’s all good).

You know, living in Asia really ruined me for feeling clean. There, for a few bucks, you could visit a bathhouse and get so good and clean that you could walk home in freezing weather in nothing but a towel, the steam rising off your sparkling body. Not that I walked home in a towel, but I could‘ve.

(Hmm: future awesome thing…….? [the bathing, not the streaking])

My great thanks to Emily, who does not share my enthusiasm for cleaning (though I do think she likes the result). Thank you for letting this be an awesome thing, even though for you it’s just work.

Thing #12: Clean the House—ACCOMPLISHED!

Now for that bath…

Emily covers this one on her blog.

But it’s only the beginning…

The problem with being a teacher is that school lasts longer for you than for the students. I’m talking about grading, people.

To a teacher, grading is as concussions are to a pro football player, an occupational hazard. You love your job, but there’s just that one thing that you’d rather not do. Here’s a bit of SAT test prep for those of you trying to get into college:

grading : teachers :: cleaning up : pyrotechnics experts
grading : teachers :: depressurization : submarine crews
grading : teachers :: sending contestants home : Tim Gunn and Heidi Klum
grading : teachers :: doing that chore you hate most : you

So even though school is out and all our assignments are long turned in, Em and I have been grinding away at the mountain of grading left to us. Until today. Today, we finished. We’re officially free.

In pre-celebration, we went to Home Cafe for lunch. Home Cafe is our favorite restaurant in Lubbock because it has crazy operating hours, only stays open until they run out of food (which they always do), and is filled with old tables and chairs bought from thrift stores or stolen from old McDonald’s playplaces or something. It’s run by a husband and wife team who create a menu based on what they feel like cooking and what they can find fresh locally—nothing is pre-packaged; everything is made from scratch except maybe the butter. And it. is. good. You’d expect a place like that to give you small portions of sissy food, but that ain’t how they do it at Home Cafe.

Ain’t much to look at, but the food is amazing.

Unfortunately, Home Cafe is closing on June 1st. Fortunately, the proprietors are opening something new in a few months, and we’re excited to see what it is.

I don’t have pictures to show you (eating in a restaurant while passing a baby back and forth is hard enough), but Em had the vegetarian sandwich—griddled homemade sourdough with sliced ratatouille (eggplant, zucchini, tomato, red onions, red and yellow peppers) and basil mayo, served with potato chips—and I had a pulled pork sandwich—hand pulled roasted pork, home made barbeque sauce, grilled red onions, and pickles on a home made soft bun, served with home fries. They were delightful, especially the homemade potato chips. For dessert we had a lemon-lime tart.

As a second pre-celebration, I made French onion soup for dinner. We have a great recipe from America’s Test Kitchen that takes like 4 hours, but the amount of actual work is minimal and the result is awesome. It’s always a little crazy to fill a dutch oven to the top with sliced onions and then see them slowly reduced to about a cup and a half of caramelized mush, but the taste is worth it.

I’m always surprised by what French onion soup tastes like at my first bite, like, “Whoa, is that what this tastes like?” Then I’m like, “Yeah, that is what French onion soup tastes like. Mmmm.”

We’re toying with the idea of grabbing some peanut buster parfaits as a post-celebration—we have a complicated relationship with food.

Thing #10: Finish Grading—ACCOMPLISHED.

Em takes this one on her blog.

If you’re concerned about the differences between snocones, snowcones, shaved ice, and shave ice, you’re too concerned.

Yesterday, Hollie sported a ‘do that made me think of Pat Benatar or maybe Jem. Check it out:

Real 80s rocker hair: the girl mullet.

Also, she has the trademark tiny mouth of a true Grover.

She’s been sucking in her bottom lip, which reminds me of Charlotte.

If you’ve never been to Lubbock before, there are three things you need to know: (1) it’s 6 hours from everywhere,1 (2) it has more stray dogs per capita than any other walled city in America,2 and (3) it’s dirty.

Dirty dirty. As in Em-and-I-know-we’re-getting-close-when-driving-home-after-a-long-trip-because-things-are-flying-in-the-air-that-don’t-have-wings. Bags, cartons, flyers, stray dogs. I’ve never lived in a city that was so full of loose trash. And here’s the thing: Rexburg? Just as windy (according to this map). Athens? Just as overpopulated with college students.3 Lubbock was even built with alleys running east to west between every block so that no one has to share a back fence with their neighbor. These small roads behind all our houses are filled with dumpsters for our garbage; the trash collectors don’t even have to show their faces out front. I’ve never seen a city so well prepared to deal with its refuse. I’ve even been out to the landfill, where I saw nothing but beautifully piled dirt covering the mountains of garbage slowly decomposing and an old dude with stunningly long hair and a frazzled beard wearing a day-glo vest and running a bulldozer.

So why, why is there so much garbage in the streets?

We don’t know, and we don’t care. But we were on a mission today to clean up the streets. Or at least our street. Which we did.

We find a surprising amount of beer cans in our yard for people who don’t drink beer. Em practices her sexiest (?) face while picking it up.

This bottle of sugar cookie-flavored vodka still smelled like vanilla. I hope they had sugar cookies to dip in it when they drank it, whoever they were. (True to my word, Mom, I got my haircut. Next is the beard.)

This belt was lying across the dead center of the street. Why do leather belts always get that hilarious bend in them? Why does Emily look so happy to be handling some drunk stranger’s belt?

Cleaning the streets usually happens after our sidekick’s bedtime. Either that or Hollie is channelling Jon at age nine.

Our neighbors drink a surprising amount of vodka, especially considering that last week was Cinco de Mayo. And by “drink” I mean “smash the bottles of.” We went from our house down the block to the park (the site of the infamous “drunk driver smashes car, gouges concrete, jumps roadblock, tears up yard, and stops inches from someone’s living room at three in the morning” episode) and then came back up the other side.

Not a bad haul from a single block. Highlights include a toothbrush and a lot of blue glass.4

When we moved into this house I spent one Saturday cleaning up the yard. I raked out those bushes you see above for a few hours and eventually threw away three big black trash bags of garbage that had blown into the bushes over the past x years. And I seem to regularly wake up to old pizza boxes in our back yard—not even our pizza boxes. The irony is that we live on one of the nicer streets in one of the nicer neighborhoods. What ever happened to drinking responsibly and not messing with Texas?

Thing #8: Clean up the Streets—ACCOMPLISHED. ~~Sigh~~

Note: The following Awesome Thing did not happen today, but we never promised that our thirty things would be done one per day.

On Saturday afternoon it occurred to me that I probably needed to get something together for Mothers’ Day. Earlier that week my mom had asked me what I was going to get Em, and I answered “flowers.” She said that wasn’t enough, and I countered that that’s what I always got her on account of her birthday being the same week and it made a nice splitting of the loot. But on Saturday afternoon I started to think my mom had something there (why is it always much later that her words seem so wise?).

Luckily, Em was gone when the wisdom struck, so I put in a call to the florist and arranged an arrangement to be picked up later that day. I thought, since I’d be going out on one errand, and since I’d need a cover for it anyway lest Em figure out what I was leaving for, I might as well “pick up some groceries” too. Then I got the idea for a real Moms’ Day breakfast. Here are the notes I jotted down:

I think best in pictures.

Then I thought Hollie and I’d take a walk while we waited for Em to get home. We had lots of rain all last week, so the temperature was just right for babies. At the park, we found that the place had a few new gigantic pond-sized puddles, so we sat down next to one and looked at the birds bathing there. That’s when I saw them: four wading birds I’d never seen before. The word that came to mind was “ibis,” but I couldn’t think of what an ibis looked like. Curlew? Blast! I didn’t have binoculars, camera, or a field guide to help me, just a baby.

As I just said, I didn’t have a camera at the time. But this shot gives you an idea of how much help Hollie was at the time. I don’t think she knows what a curlew is either.

Anyway, I did the best I could in the situation—I made a quick sketch on the back of the only paper I had on me, the Moms’ Day grocery list.

The next day was Mothers’ Day, and as Em has already said, we decided to go for a walk to see birds rather than finish Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. We loaded the girl in the stroller with binocs, camera, and toys and took off for the park.

They were back. This time, seven of them were wading around the pond-puddle, enjoying the temporarily marsh-like conditions of West Texas. I watched them with the binocs while Emily scooted in for her first ever attempt at bird photography. Unluckily, we don’t have a zoom lens. Luckily, the camera’s got so many megapixels crammed into it that we could crop these images and still give you a sense of what we saw:

This one seemed to be drying its wings or something; he kept them up in the air the whole time we watched.

Em would like you to notice the reflections. She worked hard to get them there.

This one’s being ganged up on by grackles.

Just like I drew them, right?

We looked them up: White-faced Ibis. I should always trust my instincts.

Thing #7: Spotted a new species—ACCOMPLISHED.

We also spotted some old favorites that we hadn’t seen since last year:

The Western Kingbird is cute and fearless—Hollie and I watched one harass a Great-tailed Grackle nearly 4 times its size.

Mississippi Kites do acrobatics all over Lubbock, eating bugs.

You know where to go to get the scoop by now.

My speciality.

Once again, Emily’s blog handles the details.

In broad daylight at that.

This one was also written up by Emily at her blog.

Birthday present!