Monday, August 27, 2007

The Manly Art of Cleaning: Part 4

The kitchen is actually the easiest part of the apartment for me to clean. This is because I rarely do anything more complicated than heating chili in the microwave. The kitchen serves more as a soda repository and chili-heating-station rather than a place where actual food is cooked.

Another great idea: a combination refrigerator/microwave/cabinet/trash bin. It could be called BachelorPod (tm, copyright, etc). You take your can of chili off the top shelf, open it with the attached opener, pour it into the bowl on the lower shelf, insert the whole thing into the microwave, grab a soda from fridge and a spoon from another shelf and then eat the now hot chili right from the microwave. Everything is then deposited in the trash. Now if there was only a way to have the chili automatically restocked and the trash automatically emptied, it would be perfect.

So to clean my kitchen, all I really have to do is give the counters a cursory wipe, as I clean up the chili spills as they happen (I am not a complete slob). There is not much counter to wipe, either, as the primary use of my kitchen is to store my mail.

When I receive mail, I open it in the kitchen. Obvious junk mail is thrown in the trash. Important mail, such as the bills and death threats, go on my desk. Everything else which is important enough to read, but not immediately dangerous like a bill, goes on the counter. Theoretically, it will be read at some point, just not right now. Or this year.

My kitchen is therefore 90% mail, 10% counter, which is only used for chili. One does not need to clean mail, so there you go. A quick wipe with a sponge and maybe some sort of cleanser and the kitchen is good for another round.

And there you have it. I think I will start a business called Manly Cleaning. I come to your house, glance around, and say something like looks good to me and leave. All it will cost is a can of chili.

Cheers,
-Jason

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey, Jason, how about exercising a bit more responsibility and recycling? Both your junk mail items and those chili cans can be recycled. I don't know your state of residence, but I'd be very surprised if there wasn't either a city- or county-level recycling program.

Save energy, oil, gas, the whole blueberry muffin, by recycling. Does the carbon footprint reduction thing, too.

Jason Janicki said...

I do recycle. I'm not sure where you got the idea that I didn't (perhaps from the Bachelor Pod), but let me assure you, I do.

Thanks for the reminder to recycle though. We all need to be doing it.

Anonymous said...

I wondered about the recycling, too.

So, I have these friends in Montreal, see, and they are software guys, and one day they realized that the closet in the office was full up with used pizza boxes. So they took the stack of pizza boxes out, and behind it was another stack. So, they took out those too, and.... it turned out there was an entire kitchenette in there.

Obviously, they should have stuck to chili. Or was it blueberry muffins?

Jason Janicki said...

Did they build a fort with the pizza boxes? Because that's what I would have done.

Also, did they look behind the kitchenette? There might have been something even cooler back there, like an Aztec temple.