You know when you are thinking about doing something but you keep putting it off and putting it off and then it just seems too momentous to bear? Sometimes that’s how I feel about blogging. I’m not really sure why – I love writing and I love sharing my writing. But for some reason I feel a sense of obligation to constantly update my blog, which makes the posts obligatory. And once they become obligatory, I don’t want to do them anymore. Of course, this guilt/anxiety is 100% self-inflicted. My new goal is to update when I feel like updating and stop feeling shitty about not updating. Hopefully then I will post more often than every three months.

What has happened since November? Not much. I do have a new obsession, and her name is Pinterest. Oh, Pinterest! I spent the entire weekend pinning, searching, admiring, swooning. Yes, I’m late to this bandwagon – but better late than never, of course. Actually, the slew of new ideas may be just what I need to keep me blogging. Maybe I’ll make brilliant crafts and post pics. Maybe the projects I find will go horribly awry and I can post about that. Either way, it provides something to talk about besides the dog.

Ryder is doing splendidly. He has a few behavioral issues that we need to get taken care of, but for the most part he is a good boy. His first birthday is coming up in March and I intend to have a full-fledged party with cake and balloons. And dog treats.

The point of this post isn’t to ramble on and on about how I’m going to write more. The point is to actually write something, which is why I am sharing my incredible story of oven burners, ammonia, and Google.

We moved into our house in June. It didn’t take long for us to realize that certain things had been left, shall we say, uncared for. The bathroom was unusable. The kitchen cabinets were filthy. There was a mouse living in the dishwasher.

We hired a professional cleaning service, and they did an impressive job transforming the house from practically uninhabitable to comfortable. They even revealed to us that our kitchen floor was really light tan, not brown as we had originally assumed. The one thing that they could not solve was the oven burner problem. The burners on the stove had so many layers of baked on, caked on grease and food spills that they suggested we buy new ones. The cleaners had spent a good amount of time and an entire package of Magic Erasers to get one burner semi-clean. It simply wasn’t worth the effort.

Unfortunately, these burners are $60 a pop, and there are four of them. So the past six months I have been trying to ignore my repulsive burners and hope that guests think they are black (they’re light gray). The other night, on a whim, I decided to use Google to figure out how to clean them. I think it was the Pinterest inspiration, actually. I discovered that all you had to do was put each burner into a Ziplock bag with 1/4 cup of ammonia, let it sit overnight, and scrub it off the next day. It seemed too good to be true, but ammonia is cheap. It was worth a shot.

The pictures don’t lie. Not only did it work like a charm, the grease that had “demolished 10 Magic Erasers” literally washed right off with hot water. It’s a little sad how excited I got over this cleaning mini-miracle. I had to use a scrubber sponge in the corners in order to get them perfect, but remember these things hadn’t been cleaned in approximately 50 years. I’m sure someone with a reasonably dirty stove wouldn’t have to use a sponge at all.

That’s it. That’s my story. Wasn’t it worth waiting 3 months for?