Good Enough...

I cleaned out the oven this morning. Cleaning the oven is one of the worst chores on my list. It's hard. Everything has been baked on. Multiple times. There is always a spill on the bottom floor of the oven (partially because I have never been able to get it all cleaned up). The door of the oven, the inside glass, is particularly tricky. There is the splatter and drips from everything that has baked, and that is somehow sticky. Why do oil and grease get sticky like that? And not just sticky to the touch but sticky like you are not getting this shit off. But not only do you have to get the glass cleaned, there is the metal around the glass, and the ridges that hold the glass into the door.

It sucks as a chore because it's hard. And because it's hard there comes a point where you say "Good enough."

When I was growing up I hated cleaning the oven (nothing has changed) and part of it was because it wasn't cleaned until it became a fire hazard not to. And cleaning it at the time involved spraying it with Easy Off, heating it up, then inhaling toxic fumes while you worried about the residue eating your gloves off. Or getting a splatter on your skin, or on your clothes. Which always happened. The clothes part, not the caustic burn on your skin. Though sometimes that happened too.

I can remember telling my mother that cleaning the oven was a waste of time because they used heat to kill germs so nothing in the oven was actually in need of being cleaned. It might look bad, it might catch on fire, but it wasn't really dirty.

That didn't work.

I don't use Easy Off now. I don't run the self clean cycle, which really is my old way of thinking that if heat kills germs then just burn it all up. But if you burn it all up your whole house smokes up and is a mess and your oven is still pretty gross. But because I don't do those things it's all elbow grease and at least one ruined cleaning item. I know that the scrubby sponge is done after a round of oven cleaning. And then the heat cycle (which is running right now) that lets me know I did not in fact get all of the soap rinsed out.

But the worst part of cleaning the oven is that after all of that hard work you cannot show it to someone and say LOOK WHAT I DID! Because of the aforementioned Good Enough. I know what it started out looking like. I know the layers of grime and grease and baked on mystery spill I got off, but I can't show that part to anyone. All they will see are the parts that I didn't get off. The Good Enough residue. It doesn't look brand new. I have never gotten an oven back to brand new. The best I've even done is gotten it to Good Enough.

And that's life.

It's hard. We are all doing the best we can. There are years of grime and grit built up. We can clean and scrub our intentions but the best we can get to is Good Enough. I joke with Brent that I should get credit for all of the shit I don't say instead of blame for the things that I do. And sometimes I don't joke, sometimes I tell him what I would have said and make him tell me it was the right call not to. Because that desire to strike out at people is baked on and it's sticky.

I will never be perfect. That's not even the goal. Nobody is ever going to be as pristine as they were before the world got to them. We've all got our shit we are dealing with. And some of it is a real fire hazard. And some of it is better than it used to be even though you can still see the residue from some nasty spills.

We are all doing the best we can.

And that's Good Enough.