Mutterings

I wish I had more exciting rants to share, but staying indoors/near home every day kind of limits the amount of crazy I was exposed to with my daily bus rides and many hours spent at Target. No more crazy backing in stories, or weird-o bus riders to silently curse on my way home. One thing I did learn from being a bus rider is that I have an uncanny talent for knowing whether or not I like someone just from watching them in line or on the bus. It's quite amazing how much you can dislike someone that you have never talked to just because they chomp their gum in your ear for the entire 40 minutes bus ride.
What I have learned since being home is that there are some crazy disgusting people in the world. I have discovered a couple of shows on BBC America. The first is How Clean is Your House. I should start off by saying that I am not a clean freak, or remotely close to the world's best house cleaner, but I do clean my toilet when it needs it (ring around the bowl), and when we run out of forks, I'll do the dishes. However, this show makes me feel like the world's tidiest person EVER. I can understand not vacuuming for a couple of weeks, or even dusting (who likes to dust anyway?), but the people/families they have on this show have not cleaned their homes in over a decade or more. Now when my house is dirty, it's because the junk mail has piled up on the counter, or the pile of clothes I have tried on is on the floor...but for these folk when their house is dirty they have food on the floor, garbage spread throughout, toilets with poo caked on, dead animals (mice, rats, bugs) and piles upon piles of stuff everywhere - it has to be stepped on to walk through a room! The two hosts of the show go in and basically teach every day cleaning skills and also take samples of the grime and dirt to inform the homeowners just how dangerous it is to live in their house. Usually the lab finds e coli, salmonella, listeria and lots and lots of fecal matter (usually from the kitchen...how it gets there I don't know, and I don't want to know). So the hosts and their team of amazing people come in, clean the house and hope to high heaven they don't contract some awful illness. It always amazes me how they find people for this show, but apparently there are plenty of dirty people out there.
The second show is You Are What You Eat. This revolves around those with bad eating habits... not just the occasional ice cream cone or chocolate bar, but people who never eat a fruit or vegetable in a week (yes, I know, Mark would fall into this category if I didn't force him to cook veggies with dinner or take a banana for lunch). The host of this show will have someone keep track of what has been eaten in a week by the "star" of the show, and then they lay it out on a table for all to see. I always think it is so disgusting, and SO much food... but then I try to think about what I eat in a week and wonder what it would look like. I feel better because I know I eat fruit and veggies every day and I don't eat fast food 3 meals a day, so I think I would do alright. The best part of the show is that the host requires the star to give her a poo sample and she then analyzes it. The part I think is hilarious about this is that they blur out the poo!! Go ahead and show sex and violence on TV, but heaven forbid we see a chunk of poo. Anyway, the host puts the person on a very restrictive and colourful (fruits and veggies) diet for 8 weeks and requires them to do some sort of exercise and then at the end of the 8 weeks they tell how much weight they have lost and how much better they feel. It's always interesting to see the changes that can occur in just 8 weeks... kind of makes you think a little more about the food you eat, or at least how much and how often you eat it.
The one other random pet peeve I had this last week was why don't cities put sidewalks in everywhere. It seems so arbitrary. One block has a sidewalk and then it ends... and then 2 blocks later, it starts again. On one of our walks last week, I took a few wrong turns and realized how much easier it is to walk with a stroller on a sidewalk. Is it only newer subdivisions or streets that get sidewalks? Our street doesn't have a sidewalk, and the main street off of ours has a sidewalk for part of the street...but not all of the street? Did they run out of money? I think if I won a pile of money I would put sidewalks in everywhere.
I realize I am not up to par on my random rants (in my book anyway), hopefully I will get back into the swing of things soon... I was just tired of being reminded of Mark's hatred for pretty much everything. Maybe next time he can open up and not be so shy with how he really feels.