Housekeeping

2010 opened with me having a renewed interest in the care and upkeep of my home ("renewed" indicates that there was a previous interest that had gone stagnant... well, I'll just let you keep thinking that), and over the past weekend, I spent a lot of time in my living room, bedroom, and bathroom. Since I apparently have lost the ability to single-task effectively, all three rooms were looked at and worked on at the same time; none of them has been finished just yet. Maybe this will be an ongoing project. I suspect that's all housework is, anyway.

So I got out all my vaccuums (for some reason I have three, and none of them is all that great): the little hand-vac for small jobs, the slightly larger red one for slightly larger jobs (it's the best for kitty litter), and the medium-sized green one for the one patch of carpet in my whole house (living room). I bought a couple new microfiber cloths for dusting, refilled my Swiffer Wet Jet, and had my sister pick out a mop thing for me (she is better than Martha Stewart at keeping things clean, and the model for my new life as someone who cares about cleaning). I went through all my books and the bookshelves in the living room, and rid myself of things we had been collecting for no apparent reason and the things I was hanging onto for sentimental reasons but it was time to let go of (my decrepit, dusty, and disintegrating bridal bouquet, for example. Now, if I had handled it correctly from day 1, I could have kept it as a treasured memento from a beautiful day with my husband and family; unfortunately, the thing was just too fragile and jacked up to keep. Pieces of it were all over the place. I took a farewell photo of it, told Patrick, who probably didn't realize what event that particular graying bunch of roses was even from, kissed him, and then I unceremoniously dumped it in the trash.

I don't have a ton of books, but I decided it was time to let go of some of them, and so I filled a couple of paper grocery store bags with the ones I don't want anymore. I mostly kept the ones I've read more than once, and even after culling out the losers, I have quite a few more books than I probably should (and man, how'd I get so many Philip Roth novels? I must have like 15 of his books). I always said I'd I never get rid of any books, that they were all treasured friends, but some of them were just embarrassing (though: I did keep my high school copies of "Atlas Shrugged" and "The Fountainhead" - two examples of bad writing/thinking that for some reason I have a soft spot for that Ayn Rand probably wouldn't appreciate). It is time to lighten the load, and then maybe in a little while, get some more.

Last night, Patrick was out at a band rehearsal so I stopped at the library on the way home to see if I could find any CD's for an iPod I'm planning on loading for my mom's birthday. Surprisingly, they had quite a lot of music I think she'll enjoy (and I need to figure out how to get her music into my iTunes but not on my iPod - believe me when I tell you that nothing will piss me off more than cruising down the freeway and having, I don't know, Tony Bennett or Sandy Patti come streaming out my stereo speakers), and when I got home, I started uploading CD's. While that was going on (my laptop is slow at this), I took a look around the living room, and decided it was time to tackle: The Crickets.

I think I wrote about the crickes awhile ago. They've sort of invaded our living room, but they're not visible or annoying except for doing that thing crickets do. It doesn't really bother me when I don't think about it too much, but last night I started thinking about it.

(Time out here: I admit that Patrick and I have sort of been living like sloppy college students all these years. Every once in awhile I get inspired to clean, but we never really keep things clean. We run the dishwasher, but we never empty it, so new dirty dishes pile up. We do laundry, but unless I do it, there's always a basket full of clean but slightly wrinkled clothes around. If we're having company, we clean up, and the place looks nice on the surface... but hidden away in closets and various cubby holes, if you looked closely, you would find all our mess, ready to take over again once the guests leave. I would like to be more like my sister, and my friends who have homes that would be presentable even with no notice or a special cleaning crew beforehand. Yeah, it's a big change, but I'm gonna try.)

So I moved a few bookscases, got out my trusty hand-vac (it's perfect for crickets and cat food; not necessarily one and the same, but sometimes...), and found a couple teeny tiny crickets hiding behind the TV. Franny was a big help in this venture. Just saying "Franny! What's that?" put her in huntress mode, and my kitty is no scaredy-cat. We conquered some of the crickets (but I'm sure there are more. Hiding. I'm not really strong enough to really move the TV), and then I was walking behind the couch in this big open space we have there, and I saw what I thought was some fluff from the carpet. It was black (we have some black in the carpet), and it looked just like those fibers that come off the kitty scratching posts. So I aimed my hand-vac at it, and... right before it got sucked in, it moved.

Turns out that piece of fluff was some kind of large bug (disturbed, probably, when I moved the bookcases), now trapped in the tiny body of my hand-vac, along with who knows how many baby crickets and whatever else had been caught up in there. And suddenly I acquired an irrational fear of my hand-vac.

I set it down without folding it up (it folds up to go live on it's base) in the middle of the living room floor. Franny came sniffing around, and we both just looked at it. Here's the thing I was envisioning:

Being in the hand-vac was probably heaven to that stupid bug: all the crickets he could eat! Lots of dust and hair and what-not to roll around in, and did I mention the crickets? So I pictured the bug swelling to astronomical un-bug like proportions, and then me forgetting the bug was in there, opening the little side door to empty the little canister, and being confronted by super-bug.

"Ewww" was the only word I could muster out loud. So I gingerly picked the thing up, took it outside and set it on the back steps, and waited for Patrick to get home so he could be the one to empty it. He didn't want to (poor guy was beat up after that band rehearsal, wherein he utilized his crazy new mega-bell ride cymbal for the first time, which is practically gong like but crashy and fucking loud), but he finally did it. He brought it back in the house and let me examine it. There was no trace of the havoc I had wreaked on the animal kingdom earlier that night. I put it back on the base, pushed all the bookcases back up against the wall, and went back to uploading CD's for my mom.

This weekend I plan on finishing, finally, the living room, bathroom and bedroom, and then I'll set about tackling the kitchen, which shouldn't be too difficult - we never use that room. Then I'll have to set my sights on my office, which is chock full of crap to be shredded and painted and we need new blinds, and I'd like a smaller desk and less computer equipment, and maybe a sleeper love seat, and...