House Cleaning Blues.

I can clearly remember the days when my house used to be spotless all the time save for a few dog hairs here and there, and the hairy cat trees that got vacuumed once a month. It wasn't the kind of spotless that some people have, you know those folks that live in a house where you feel like you are in a museum and you can't sit on certain pieces of furniture, mine was the kind of place where you felt comfortable and might even put your feet on the coffee table and wouldn't be afraid to sit on the floor. Those were the days when I thought an un-vacuumed floor meant the house was REALLY dirty.

Then came school, my first semester I stressed about the state of cleanliness constantly and spent every spare moment scrubbing something. I felt so tired and stressed that semester...then I got comfortable in my dirty house. The hairballs in the corners became my friends and "I'll get to that later" became my mantra. When you have a schedule like mine something has to give and in my place the housework was it.

Now on my days off I go to school and or study all day so house work has definitely gone to the way side and the definition of a dirty house has been bent a little to say the least. These days to be considered filthy it must have vomit and or crap on it, those items get cleaned right away but the others can wait. The last time I managed to really clean my house was last Winter break and during that time I had a house guest so the cleaning wasn't nearly as intense as it has been this Winter and the dirt around here can definitely attest to that.

The last week of school as I was studying for my finals I remember taking short breaks and looking around at the mess that is my house and daydreaming about cleaning it. I even had dreams about vacuuming out corners and dusting the tables. My constant companion during my studying on the sofa was the filthy ceiling fan above me in the living room. That fan didn't seem so bad until it got cold enough to have to turn it off and only then did the real filth reveal itself. You see, when you have cats and humans for that matter with long hair the hair gets stuck on the leading edge of the fan as it turns and cools you off. Well you can imagine what one year worth of dirt looks like on the leading edge of a ceiling fan.

My last day of school was two weeks ago, I spent my first day off lazing on the sofa drifting in and out of sleep and watching movies I had saved on my DVR. Day two was more of the same, a trip to the dog park, a nap, some good snacks. Day three I felt rested and so in between TV, Face book and Farm Town I spent a little time picking up things and putting them where they belonged...putting my books away from the last semester, storing away notes and cleaning out my backpack. it felt great to transfer some of my things into an actual purse and not have to carry around the 100pound pack all the time.

Wednesday I actually went out and was social for a couple of hours and had fun having a couple of beers and some good laughs. Thursday morning is when it happened... I was sitting at the computer playing with the facebook and contemplating cleaning the bathroom, when it began, the systematic cleaning of the office. Everything off the desk, all the hairballs vacuumed from under the furniture, shelves dusted, uneeded clutter thrown away, ceiling fan cleaned and before i knew it I had a clean office. Not only does it smell better but it is so nice to relax in a clean space! I didn't want to go any where else in the house because it seemed that much worse. That day I had to go to work at 6pm and so I was finished for the week but now I have some momentum going.

This week I watched movies all day on Monday...I forgot what that was like...it is hard to relax when you feel like you have something to do all the time. It has taken me awhile to get used to the fact that I can lay on the couch for an entire day, not miss anything and not feel guilty. Tuesday I managed to get my bedroom cleaned up. The amount of dust in there was pretty amazing as well. I pulled my bed out from the wall and found many treasures including lip balms and a bunch of hair scrunchies...I wondered where those went...I had been blaming their disappearance on Stan but it seems he only ate about half of those I had originally assumed. I also remembered how much I shed...my hair was everywhere in my room. I got everything cleaned and dusted and I think I slept better in there last night than I have in a while. It is amazing how much better I feel when my house is clean.  Like the air somehow circulates better.

Wednesday and now I am scrubbing the bathroom...I am ashamed at how dirty this room has become! it is the kind of mess my grandmother would see and say "Oh Cassandra!" I have decide that the bathroom would be much easier to clean if I had all of the hair lasered off of my body. My behemoth of a tub is really hard to scrub and I have to turn myself upside down to get to all the corners. It is soaking in a film of comet right now.

I know i am gross.

Will try harder this year to keep up chores.

Thank goodness for hard wood floors.

dog beds, more hair.

I must find a way to make sure I can do some chores while I am in school.



You may be wondering what the hell is going on there at the end well, funny thing, I found this unfinished blog while I was going through and organizing and decided to publish it just like it is.  The first part is done and quite fabulously fantastic so I left it but the end is still in the beginning phases.  I thought I would leave it alone so you could see how this happens, how I put these together.  Most are not done this way, those ones about just regular stuff that don't need all that much creativity or thinking just get typed out, checked for errors and then published.  The rest however, the good stuff, the ones that make you laugh or cry are done in this fashion.  It starts with random thoughts blurted out on the computer screen, kind of like a list.  Then I go through the list and put it in a more orderly fashion, then I write a paragraph about each list item, and then revise,  leave and go do something else, come back revise, revise, revise, sleep for a night, come back revise and then publish it when I am satisfied.  Apparently I slept and then forgot about this one, which is too bad because it looks like I was on a pretty good role...I make myself laugh anyway.  Hope you enjoy it!