My cleaning lady is crazy. That's not really a bad thing, since she's crazy in fairly harmless ways, like carrying on conversations with herself (or perhaps unseen individuals) while she cleans. But she's also unbelievably obsessive compulsive about cleaning, which is a very good trait for someone who makes their living cleaning houses. The first time she cleaned my house, I had been laboring under the delusion that the house had been fairly clean to start with. Yes, I'm the kind of person who cleans the house before the maid comes, and I pretty much was just interested in having the bathrooms, floors and kitchen cleaned. However, when she came to give me an estimate on the house cleaning before I hired her, she gave me a withering look when I informed her that I only wanted the aforementioned cleaned, and said, "Look. Just let me clean your house."

But when I came home that first day, I was suddenly brutally aware that my house had been nowhere near clean. She worked on my house for seven hours, and cleaned things I had no idea needed cleaning. The house glowed. I loved it. You see, I am not a neat freak. At all. I don't live in filth by any stretch, but I tend to surround myself with clutter. Even the clutter was clean and carefully arranged. I suddenly had a house that I wanted people to see.

So anyway, back to my cleaning lady's craziness. I had asked her to make a special trip to my house today to clean up before my stupid party tomorrow, and last night she called me up. "Diana, I need you to turn on your oven tonight for the self-cleaning, so that in the morning I can just wipe it out, because I noticed before that your oven was a bit icky and I wouldn't want someone at your party to see your oven and go 'eew'. I'm sure you know how to do that on your oven, right?"

Ok, first off, I am fairly positive I never told her it was a Pampered Chef party, so my first thought was, What kind of anal retentive FUCK looks in somebody's oven at a party??? However, I am not in charge of cleaning this house anymore, so I meekly agreed and said that I would. So then I went ahead and looked in my oven and saw that yes, there were some blackened drippings on the bottom and on the door that I never would have noticed in a million years until they were oozing out the oven and onto the floor. All right, so I guess I could accept that the oven was not as pristine as it had been when it had first been installed in the house and since there were obviously people in the world who made a habit of inspecting ovens when they visited people's houses, it behooved me to do my part in making the world a better place and get my oven cleaned.

Which brought me to the second part of her statement, i.e. the reckless assumption that I knew how to do the self-clean on my oven. Fortunately the oven is very new and is marvelously easy to use and has a button that says, "OVEN CLEAN." So, I took a chance, held my breath, and pushed the button. Instantly the little panel lit up and said, "START CLEAN?" I considered this for a moment, and then decided that pressing the START button would probably do the trick. Therefore, I pressed the START button, at which time the panel said "CLEANING 3:30" with the time beginning to tick down.

It was at this time that the thought occurred to me that my darling husband had the occasional habit of leaving pans in the oven after he had taken food off of them, and I suddenly had the image of my oven being clean but having a puddle of molten slag mixed with carbonized tomatoes at the bottom. So I tried to open the oven to check. Door was locked. I held my breath and pressed the STOP button. Fortunately the countdown on the panel obliging cleared and was replaced with "CLEANING STOPPED." I felt like I'd just stopped the countdown on a ticking bomb.

Opened the oven. No pans. Closed the oven. Pressed the CLEAN OVEN button. Pressed the START button. Countdown began again at 3:30. I went to bed.

At 4:45am I woke up to the very very faint sound of beep beep beep beep and then about a minute pause, and then beep beep beep beep and then a minute pause, and so on and so forth. It was just barely on the edge of being audible and so it took me a while to even believe that I was hearing it, and the only thing I could think that it could be was my pager, but the repetition didn't make sense because usually the pager will beep several times and then stop, and then only give a solitary beep once every five minutes or so just to tell you that it had gone off. So I gave up and got up and trotted downstairs to see that the panel on the oven was reading "END." And beeping. The oven was cool so it had obviously been off for quite a while, but that oven wanted to be sure that I KNEW that it had finished cleaning. I pressed the STOP button and it ceased its beeping, content in its accomplishment. I looked inside and instead of blackened drippings, there was grey ash, which, according to my cleaning lady, she would wipe out today.

And I am much calmer now, knowing that should some cleanliness-obsessed guest at my party take it upon hersef to sneak a peek into my oven in the hopes of being able to gloat about my shoddy housekeeping skills, I will be able to smile serenely at being able to thwart said gloating. Of course then I will kick said guest out of my house because who the hell wants to associate with someone like that and their next step would surely be to look in my laundry room which looks like a clothing bomb went off in there. Thank god for doors that can be closed. And thank god for a two story house so that I don't have to clean the bedrooms. I won't have to do that until the day before my cleaning lady comes again.

Come to think of it, I'd better start now. I'm not sure I can take too many more of her withering looks, and it's safer not to mess with a crazy woman.

This day: 1998
This day: 2001