To look at my room as a child - or even my dorm room as a college student - you’d never believe that I could one day become an out-and-out neat freak.  I was a terrible slob, and not just in my own space.  I wasn’t particularly good at leaving the kitchen or bathroom clean either, much to my parents’ frustration.

But now, I love to have a clean house.  Perhaps I’m shallow or need to get another hobby, but I get immense satisfaction from relaxing after having cleaned up the place.  And I like to do it myself - cleaning services just aren’t as thorough as I am.

My favorite cleaning implement are paper towels.  I’d much rather use those than a pre-moistened wipe or sponge.  Granted, there are some places where they just don’t work - such as the inside of the toilet bowl or while scrubbing grout - but I haven’t found a better all-purpose cleaning tool yet.

So it’s not surprising that I was happy to check out a sample of Bounty paper towels (even though I’m a Viva devotee) and write a 100-word essay over at Bounty’s One Sheet Challenge.  One hundred words is not enough to express my love for paper towels and all the ways in which I use them, so I had to settle for describing the weekend morning post-waffle clean-up.  If I had been allotted a thousand words, I could have gone on and on about my obsessive need to wipe the kitchen counters at least three times a day, spot-cleaning spills on the kitchen floor because I hate dragging out the mop and bucket, wiping fingerprints and noseprints from the storm door, my never-ending battle with the soap scum on the glass shower door, and many many more.

But the most all-encompassing reason for my love of paper towels is that they minimize the spread of germs even without using anti-bacterial cleaners.  Because paper towels are disposable, unlike a kitchen sponge, they are used on a single occasion and discarded.  Therefore, germs don’t get a chance to multiply between uses.  If you do use a kitchen sponge for wiping your counters, you should put it in the microwave regularly to kill those remaining germs (but I’ll bet most people don’t do that).

If you go to the One Sheet Challenge and tell of your own love for paper towels, you could win all sorts of goodies - a year’s supply of Bounty paper towels, a kitchen appliance upgrade (worth $8K!), or an entire kitchen renovation (worth $30K!).  Personally, I’ve been dreaming of granite countertops, so I’m going for the grand prize myself.

But I certainly won’t balk if they want to send me cases and cases of paper towels instead.

I’ll admit it; I put my own name down on the list of Parent Bloggers to review Get a Hobby! because I needed this book.

I have this ridiculous habit of turning hobbies into jobs.  Yes, yes - do what you love, the money will follow - yadda yadda yadda.  But the point of a hobby is relaxation, as Dr. Figueroa points out in the foreword to Get a Hobby!  And considering how many late nights I pull working on my so-called “hobbies”, I think I need to get a new one.

So I flipped through the book.  Beer brewing?  Hmmm…I like to drink it.  Docenting?  Well, I do enjoy museums.  Furniture restoration?  Maybe I could finally furnish my living and dining rooms.  Origami?  That reminded me of my friend who made all those birds before her wedding.  Soap making?  I couldn’t get “Fight Club” out of my head.

I decided to start at the beginning with the quiz, which informed me that I am independent (absolutely), outdoorsy (eh…), and patient (hahahaha!).  Considering that I agreed most closely with the assessment that I’m independent, I then flipped through the book looking for hobbies that fit that adjective.

And my next hobby jumped right out at me: Quilting.

I’ve been saving my daughters’ clothes that they’ve outgrown and cutting them into large pieces so that I can make them into quilts for the girls.  The idea was that I’d use clothes from birth through age two, and then I’d get started on the quilts.  My younger daughter is closing in on two and a half now, so it’s time to get busy on the quilts.  But I didn’t know where to begin.

Thanks to Get a Hobby!, now I do.

Growing up, I ate school lunches.

My parents felt it was easier to buy me a $1.25 lunch ticket each week - that’s right, five meals for $1.25 - than to pack a lunch.  And since I packed lunches for my older daughter at her day care back east, I have to agree with them.  Cooking veggies and chopping up fruit and making grilled cheese sandwiches EVERY. SINGLE. NIGHT. got to be tiring.  It’s no wonder that most of her classmates had lunches full of packaged preservatives.  I was about ready to succumb to Lunchables myself when we moved and found a day care that served lunch.

Sometimes I packed my own lunch, in my (shudder) Strawberry Shortcake lunchbox.  The thermos didn’t function well though, so I bought my own milk.  Seven cents for white milk, ten cents for chocolate - these were the days when a penny was actually worth something.

But most of the time I ate the school lunch.

I loved the pizza and the fish sandwiches.  Fish was always offered on Fridays, and I was an adult before I understood why.  The pizza was a rectangular slab with congealed cheese and specks of sausage, but it was pretty good.  I ate the corn and the so-called Texas Toast and would have a spoonful or two of mushy olive green peas.  Spaghetti was passable.  Salisbury steak was strange, but not inedible.  Tomato soup was a no-go.

When I got to middle school, they served nachos and ice cream bars in the cafeteria.  Guess where most of my lunch money went?

When I got to high school, they served pop tarts each morning.  And we had open lunch, which meant we could walk off campus to a local liquor store that also sold candy bars and chips.  When my friends and I could drive, we went to Noble Roman’s for pizza and breadsticks (also a good place to get served sangria underage at night - filthy-minded waiters there) or to Burger King (also known as BK Lounge for some reason that escapes me now).

School lunches aren’t inherently bad - it’s just all of the other add-ons that are offered that tempt kids away from the good stuff.  If they didn’t sell ice cream or pop tarts or soda, maybe more kids would eat more of the healthy foods that comprise a balanced meal.

Instead, schools want to raise money.  And sponsorships help them do that.  Even the high school DECA program would make money selling candy bars on those days that it was too cold to walk off campus.  I understand the need for fundraising, but couldn’t they sell something else, like carrot sticks?

We’ve still got another year before we’re faced with the decision to buy school lunches or pack lunches for our older daughter.  Granted, she’s now old enough to help pack her own lunch.  And she’d rather eat a bowl of peas than a school cafeteria fish sandwich.  So at this point, I’m leaning toward getting back in the habit of packing lunches.

After all, she’s got all that time at college to gorge on pizza.

Check out School Menu and its parental counterpart Family Everyday, two sites that work together with School Food Services Directors to provide and promote healthy eating and physical fitness for kids and their parents.