Thoughts

I've spent the last hour or so in the kitchen, scrubbing pots, scrubbing counters, and dealing with rancid food that didn't get cleaned out of a pyrex dish soon enough. Let me tell you, rotten curry is NOT a good smell. I also cooked spaghetti for my lunch. By the time I was done with an hour of running the hot water and boiling more water in a pot, the kitchen was so hot that when I opened the freezer to get ice cubes out, the clouds of "steam" that poured out of it were so thick that I couldn't see.

These are the things I learned today:

• When my kitchen is clean, I feel dramatically better about life in general
• It is always better to wash things immediately after they get dirty, especially if you are OCD and prone to minor panic attacks about touching mold or rotten food. (You'd think I would have internalized that one sooner. Sorry, mom and dad.)
• Cooking isn't as much fun when it's only for me
• If you don't like pears, but you buy them for your husband and he eats all but one of them and then loses interest, eventually that lone pear will start to rot, until its insides liquefy and turn into something that smells very much like vinegar, and looks very much like maple syrup. This will drip out of your fruit bowl and onto your cutting board, and you will feel stupid when you finally find it under an avocado and realize that that's why you can't get rid of the fruit flies in your kitchen. Ew.
• Housework is much better when, upon its completion, you can flee back to your air-conditioned bedroom

This is what God is teaching me about marriage, love, and dying to self: that I, who hate making beds (especially beds that are merely a mattress on the floor and are up against a wall), will make the bed when I get up, not because I was asked, but because when my husband comes home from work tonight, I want him to have an inviting place to lie down and rest.