4 posts tagged “cleaning”

I was late to work this morning, because--as hard as this is to believe--I got too organized over the weekend.  After two weeks of being sick and cranky and disorganized, I decided that this was the weekend to get my shit back together.  Clean house, organize, put things away, return to my previously orderly existence.

Only problem, after weeks of disorganization, it's hard to re-acclimate to organization.  It's as though our nature is chaos and so it's easy to slip into chaos and live there, but hard to crawl back out of the sucking cesspool of clutter and procrastination.

Here's what made me late: all my clean clothes are put away, so I wasted time going downstairs to get clothes out of the dryer, where they have been for weeks.  All the dishes are put away, so I wasted time opening the dishwasher, looking for a spoon, before I realized the dishes in the dishwasher were dirty.  I wasted time trying to find the contents of my backpack, which have been scattered all over my desk, before I remembered that I'd organized them and put them in the backpack already. 

Is this the same problem with America?  Every time we try to get our shit together, we just stumble over the sudden, shocking, totally confounding state of non-chaos, and then plunge back into chaos.  We never stay in a state of organization long enough to learn it.  We're always looking for change (Hi, Barack!), but we never adapt to it.

You need a paper towel for the job.

Sippy seems to prefer the tray under the litter box to the actual litter box.  And this is why I never understood the urge to put cutesy things on paper towels.  Aren't you basically going to use them to clean up things you don't want to foul a dish cloth with?

Here's my goal for the end of today:

I hate coming back from a long weekend to a messy desk, so my goal is to get my desk back to this orderly state.
Failing that I'll just stand and look out my glorious, enviable window.  It even opens--although inward, as it's a post-Charles-Whitman anti-sniper window.  Still, I am one of the lucky souls in Brain Tumor Hall who actually have a view.

Sunbeam--check
Velvet cat bed--check
Curtains open--check
Cuddle partner--check
All nap systems are go.

Life is good, even for a hairless cat in Kansas during the winter.

As for me, I didn't nap today.  What I did was try to undo the last five months of horror and filth.  We bought our house on September 20th.  The day after, we cleaned the place top to bottom and moved in.  Brace yourself, people, for the kind of confessions you can only get on daytime talk shows.  Until today, I hadn't cleaned the bathroom since the day we moved in.  Five months of basement remodeling=five months of doing no other housework.  Five months! 

I'm the sort of person who likes clean, prefers spotless.  I have never gone more than a few weeks without cleaning the bathroom, so suffice it to say that the last five months have been a kind of abysmal freak show existence.   Turns out, the linoleum in the bathroom is white.  The tub is white.  The sink is white.  The toilet is white.  Hubby, I think, had actually started to believe that the bathroom was done in shades of grey and brown, because he was startled to see it after I finished cleaning. 

I still find it hard to believe that we've been back in Kansas almost eight months, and I've been at my new job for seven months.  (My six-month probationary period ended on February 3rd.  Just try to fire me now, suckers!)  It's true what my grandfather told me: time speeds up after you turn thirty.