So. The 'rents are coming home this evening. Heaven answered me (or more likely, my parents know me only too well) and granted me a grace period-- D-day was originally supposed to be Monday, but bad weather and a couple of other things conspired to push their arrival date back to today. I've spent the past week and a half in major house-cleaning operations. And just to complicate my life further, we've had horrible weather all day and lost power twice, so I didn't even get to the vacuuming...
It's not that I'm mes-- well, okay, I am messy. I'm very, very fond of books, and I own a lot of them. Unfortunately, there are only so many places in the house (and not many at that-- I've had to get creative at times) to put bookshelves. So my books lounge casually about the house in little... no, BIG piles. Add to that my hatred of the noisy vacuum cleaner and my general indifference to "putting things away," and, well, you get a cluttered, messy house.
Don't start making Augean stables comparisons-- I *do* clean. The house isn't dirty, just dusty. I clean the kitchen regularly, and the bathrooms, do my laundry (well... semi-regularly), collect and take out the garbage, harass the dust bunnies with a dustrag when they get too menacing, etc. But I also have the tendency to cover any flat surface in my living quarters with stuff, so after awhile, it's not so much a matter of walking around a room as navigating... *sigh*
And since I don't have to share my living quarters on a regular basis over the summer, my stuff sort of... expands. It strikes out from the crowded jungle that is my room and seeks new habitats in the guest bedroom, the office, the living room, the kitchen... and then autumn comes, and with it my parents, and I must suck it all back in to my little room, sort of like a 200-lb woman trying to squeeze into the size 10 jeans she wore in high school.... and they wonder why my room is so cluttered. :D
When I clean, I can't just go around and clean... first I have to put everything away. And putting everything away sometimes means going out and purchasing new bookshelves and putting them together at 2 in the morning so I can get four months' worth of books off the bed (which, though springy, is a wonderfully large flat surface...). And it means exploring fifth-dimensional space in the already-crowded closets. And it means breaking down lots and lots of boxes for recycling just to get them out of the house, and discovering the hard way that cardboard can be REALLY slippery underfoot when you step on it and WHOA, ow, that would be the floor under my butt...
But, whew... it's clean for now. Except for the vacuuming, anyway. And boy, is my room crowded....
Posted by gris at November 19, 2003 08:49 PM