My Least Favorite Chore

I’m sure you have heard those famous words from Albert Einstein, “Insanity:  doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”  It took a true genius to boil human nature down to it’s most simple when explaining people being stupid.

Today I had to do my least favorite household chore, defrost the garage freezer.  I knew before I went on vacation that it needed to be done, but I ignored it.  Then, while we were away our house sitter, texted me that the ice in the freezer had grown to the point of pushing the door open.  Thank goodness she brilliantly duck taped the door shut.  That act bought me not only the next week we were away, but also a few more days at home to continue to ignore my most disliked job.

I don’t know why I hate this job so much.  It is not that hard.  It really only took me about an hour from start to finish today and provided me with a lot of squatting exercise opportunity.  I think the reason I hate it so much is that I know if I would have dealt with the problem when I first noticed the ice dam build up beginning it might have been a fifteen-minute job.

The good news was I did not have too much food in the freezer so I was able to put it all in two coolers while I used both a portable heater with a blower and my most powerful hairdryer to melt the three inch thick wall of ice that accumulated on the bottom of the freezer.  I also took this occasion to throw away five containers of leftover soups/stews/chilies that never should have gone in the freezer to begin with.  I am great at cooking too much and horrible about eating food out of the freezer.

Have I learned anything?  Will I change my ways?  Probably not.  Last year I put a monthly reminder in my calendar to change all the furnace filters.  Each month the reminder chimes and do you think that makes me change the filters.  No, it just makes me feel guilty about not changing them.  I could just go ahead and do it and kill two birds with one stone that of not creating more guilt and keeping my HVAC system is better working order.  It just is not that exciting or horrible so it gets over looked.

That’s the thing about life.  There is just a lot of boring stuff that you need to do and you really can’t get out of it.  The dishes need to get cleaned out of the dishwasher because there are new dirty ones that need to get cleaned.  The cars need to get their oil changed and be inspected.  Dull, but you’ve got to do it.  Russ has a good trick when he wants things in the house cleaned up; he plans for us to have a dinner party.  It is amazing what gets cleaned because people are coming for dinner.

So now I think I need to plan a dinner party that involves guests needing to use my garage freezer, inspect my filters and check the cleanliness of the oil in my car.  I’m sure I can throw in about forty-two other monotonous chores that have been on some list somewhere that I am avoiding.