Frumpy Mom: Precision is not my specialty

My house is messy. I don’t care. I never check the air pressure in my tires. NASA conducts science experiments in the mold in my bathroom. I wash my car once a year, whether it needs it or not.

I tried making a pieced quilt once, but it came out as bunchy as a – well, I can’t think of anything that bunchy, but you get the idea.

Let’s just say that I am not a persnickety person. I’m more of a relaxed, live-and-let-live kind of person.

That spider who built a web in a corner of my ceiling isn’t bothering me. So why should I bother him? Maybe he’ll catch a fly.

This attitude used to drive my late mother out of her mind. Okay, to be honest, she was already nuts, but this made her Almond Roca nuts. See, she lived to clean. It was her hobby and her passion. After she left my dad, she went to work for an evil credit bureau that treated its employees abominably.

And when she wasn’t working for them, she was cleaning hospital rooms. Yes, she got paid for it, but also she just liked the job because the hospital wanted her to clean as thoroughly as possible, to pulverize every last germ from existence. This was her life’s mission.

Bleach was her friend. In fact, she taught me to clean with bleach on the rare occasions I actually clean anything.

I suppose I’m making myself sound disgusting, but my house isn’t dirty. My weekly housekeeper sees to that. It’s just … cluttered. My attitude is that a cluttered house is the sign of an active mind.

Watching my mom vacuum living room floors that she’d already vacuumed the day before while I was trying to watch TV ensured that I would never own such a device, and I never have. I own a broom and a dustmop and they work just fine.

When I sat in my childhood living room, I had to hold tight to my glass of iced tea, because if I dared set it on the coffee table, Mom would snatch it away and wash it, despite my desperate cries of, “Hey, I was drinking that!”

Nowadays, I suppose, in rebellion against this, I’m messy, but I feel guilty about it. It’s not true that I don’t care. I would like to be tidier, but really at my age, you just have to roll the dice you’ve been given.

Even though he grew up in the same house, my brother is the opposite. He does check the air on his tires. Every time he gets gas. No matter how late we are getting somewhere. He once showed me a spreadsheet his colleague made detailing what everyone owed from a restaurant lunch they’d shared.

Yes, he’s an engineer. If you know an engineer, or you’re married to one, you know what I’m talking about.

They are extremely precise human beings who march to their own drummer. Now, this is a good thing for society. You want the person who designs your bridges to be obsessed with precision.

In 1999, the $125 million Mars Orbiter burned and broke up after a 461-million-mile journey to Mars because…wait for it…someone made a math mistake. (Again, I was miles away.)

So, yeah, we want our engineers to be persnickety. Extremely so. And thank you to all of you who annoy the heck out of us but at the same time make sure our construction is safe.

The only thing that I’m detail-oriented about is the English language. This is because I’ve been a professional writer for four decades now.

And, by the way, the word is oriented. Not orientated.

I won a spelling bee in the third grade, and a lifetime of reading means I really get aggravated by dumb mistakes, even when I’m the one making them.

So please stop saying “very unique.” Unique means one-of-a-kind. So you don’t need the modifier. And “partially destroyed.” Was it destroyed? Or was it damaged? Pick one and stick to it.

So when you come over to my house, don’t expect it to be tidy. There might be Costco boxes piled in the foyer because I haven’t figured out where to put them, and I’m not sure why we needed 420 boxes of mac and cheese anyway. And, yes, let’s take your car because mine is dirty. And the tires might be low on air.

But if you need to do a word puzzle, I’m your gal.

Note: You can write to me at mfisher@scng.com. I especially like it when you point out mistakes and tell me what I’m doing wrong.

And join my Facebook page! We have fun on there. Find me at facebook.com/FrumpyMiddleagedMom