The life of an OCP librarian

It’s been a crazy month.  (More to come on that in the next post or two.)  But, yesterday I had an experience that made me thankful for one of my OCP tendencies.  For my entire life, I have refused to put knives in the dishwater when washing dishes because I was afraid of accidentally cutting my hand.  So, yesterday, I was ready to wash the knives and put them into the dishwater, and decided to quickly scrub the cutting board first.  Ironically, scrubbing the cutting board led to jamming my hand into the dishwater too hard and fast, and managing to slice open my pinky finger.  So, now I have a justified reason for this OCP trait.  Never again will a knife enter my dishwater!

Is it OCP to always load your dishwasher the same way?  If someone else loads it, I always have to move the dishes around before I run it.  I claim “it’s because it gets the dishes cleaner,” but maybe it’s secretly an OCP trait.  I have had two people comment about it this week.  Hmm, maybe I should stop letting other people near my dishwasher altogether. :D

I think all OCP people have some sort of obsession with numbers, even though it varies by person.  One of my weird ones is with checks and bills.  I love to write even numbers on checks and for bills.  When I go to a restaurant, I almost always try to make the check with the tip as even as possible ($6.29 is annoying, $6.50 is good, and $6 is perfect!).  When I write checks to pay bills like the electric bill ($79.84 or something), I always want to write the check for $80.  I have no idea where this obsession comes from, except maybe being left over from the days where my checkbook was actually in a book and not on the computer.

David and I have a queen-sized bed.  As a result, it takes two people to change the sheets on our bed.  Since both of us are OCP, this can take a while.  A few months ago, David insisted we buy some little straps to help hold the bottom sheet on the bed, since it had a habit of coming off in a few of the corners.  These consist of a little elastic strap with a fastener at each end.  You hook the fastener onto either side of a corner of the sheet, and then tuck it under the mattress to hold the sheet down.  Since these have to be aligned properly to work, this takes 5-10 minutes.  Then, after the bottom sheet is on, the top sheet has to be put on the bed with the exact same amount of fabric on each side.  This usually results in both of us walking around the bed several times pulling on the sheet.  Then, we tuck it in, and David comes behind me and fixes the corners so they are perfect hospital corners.   Next, the comforter also has to be perfectly aligned.  The entire time we make the bed, I mourn the fact that the sheets and comforter are so wrinkled and wish for an industrial size dryer so they would be perfectly smooth.

20-30 minutes later–we have a nicely made bed!  (OK, it doesn’t really take that long, but it certainly feels like it sometimes!)

My apologies to anyone who’s tried to use the subscribe link on my blog recently–my husband has been doing some updates and apparently the link stopped working at some point–but it works now. :)

My extended family and I have spent the last few days running to the bathroom to take care of one end or the other due to a nasty flu bug we passed around.  Personally, I spent quite a while throwing up, and I’m pretty sure I threw up about 15 times.   How do I know the exact number?  Because I’m OCP and track things like that!

I know there are people in the world who proofread for a living, and those who proofread as part of their job.  However, for me proofreading is not a job–it’s a lifestyle!

For example, on Sundays when I attend church, while I am in the service I almost always:

-watch the screen for errors in song lyrics, announcements, or sermon notes

-proofread the bulletin and any inserts throughly (and generally find 3-10 errors)

and so on.  This is true no matter where I go–I am always watching for spelling and grammar errors.  As a result, I would like to recommend one of my favorite new blogs:

The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks 

I am not sure if it is an OCP trait or not, but I am obsessed with saving money at the grocery store. First, I clip coupons, which saves me about 20% off our normal grocery bill. Then, I always try to stock up when something non-perishable or freezable is on sale.

Last week, my brother was nice enough to bring me my parents’ old stand-alone freezer, which they’ve had in their basement for a while but haven’t been using. So, when we made a big grocery store run this weekend, we knew that we had extra space and could stock up a little if we wanted.

At the first store we visited, I used 36 coupons, and 14 of them were doubled. This saved us $34.90. We also stocked up on Healthy Choice frozen dinners, which were 50% off, as well as Healthy Choice soups, which were also 50% off, plus we got the 11th one free. (These soups are already $.50 cheaper at this store than anywhere else.) Buying things on sale saved us $51.85, for a total savings of $86.75. This was a savings of 38%.

The next day, we visited two more stores to get the items the first store was sold out of. At the first store, we picked up some normally very expensive orange roughy that was 50% off to stash in the freezer. They were also having a great sale on the organic milk our son drinks, so I bought a gallon and a half of that. We ended up saving $35, or 32%. But, as we were leaving the store, I discovered that the milk had rung up about a dollar more expensive than advertised. So, I stopped by the customer service desk, where they informed me that because they rang up wrong, they would refund the entire purchase price of both items. Since organic milk is expensive, this saved us another $9.78, bringing our total savings to 40%!

We then briefly stopped at one more store to buy more 22 cans of Healthy Choice soup because we had bought the last 10 cans at the store we had been to the previous day (and 11 cans were for my in-laws). We threw in some frozen vegetables on sale, and ended up saving $46.82, which was 53%.

This means that the few minutes I spend a week coupon clipping (maybe 10 minutes tops), plus watching for sales saved us 34% on grocery items and means I shouldn’t have to buy anything but some fruit and milk type items for at least a month now that our “new” freezer is nice and full.

From what I’ve heard, most perfectionists are clean freaks.  They’re the type who vacuum their house every day, always have clean bathrooms, and never leave the dinner dishes sitting in the sink.  Well, somehow I think I missed that trait when God was handing them out.  I like for things to be clean, but I always have better things to do than actually do the cleaning.  Maybe someday I will be rich enough to have a maid!

Both hubby and I love organization!  We love it so much that we have a file folder for everything.  Right now, I can count over 100 labeled file folders in our file cabinet.  (Remember this is mostly only stuff from two years worth of marriage.)  This means I can find almost any paper in a matter of minutes!  Of course, that is unless it’s in the “to-be-filed” stack on top of the filing cabinet that sometimes is as tall as many file folders…Whoops.