Chaos Attraction

Industrial Cleaning Weekend

2014-05-27, 4:56 a.m.

Saturday: It's Memorial Day weekend, and instead of being out having fun and swimming and whatever else everyone is doing, here I am doing Industrial Cleaning of my apartment, weeks after the fumigation, because this is the lone weekend since March-ish where I haven't had anything scheduled to do. I am also pet sitting for Merry this weekend while she goes out and camps on some mountain with people who have to pee in a pit. (Otherwise known in her parlance as "the camping trip I don't invite you to." PortaPotties are as rustic as I get, thanks.) Which means that I have to go over there twice a day to feed the cat, other furry pet that I shouldn't mention in this state, and the chickens. Oh god, the chickens. I realize this is sacrilege for me to say on Tour de Cluck weekend (yeah, that's a thing here), but once you've seen the fucking nastiness of living with chickens, I don't know how anyone wants them just freeroaming your backyard or patio. There's amazing amounts of poop and nasty, flies are everywhere, they lay eggs in totally random places (so much for nests, they don't do that) and Merry has some kind of...thing....set up on the backyard tree to prevent the chickens from climbing it and then going on the roof. Yuuuuuck. I'm enjoying eating the eggs, mind you (if not actually fishing them out of the coop), but I think I could spare the $1.50 a week to get eggs rather than deal with that. Oh yeah, and the chickens get fed at 7:30 a.m. and between 6-7 p.m....so no sleeping in this weekend. Well, she said I could go in later "like ten," but so much for lounging around all morning in the pajamas watching Netflix this weekend.

Also, there's the Industrial Cleaning. So far I have done the following:

(a) Emptied out the living room of dishes that were being stored in it. DONE.
(b) Put back everything in the bathroom. Bathroom is DONE.
(c) Put back everything in the bedroom. Bedroom is DONE. I'm pretty much down to one hugely messy room left here.
(d) Done two loads of dishes with many more still to come. I am not gonna waste time on drying them all by hand, so they're air drying....which apparently takes about just under 24 hours to finish that up. Doing the dishes is going to be the last thing I still have going here. Though I have found my skillet, pot lid, and apple peeler/corer, so there's that.
(e) Started piles of "stuff to get rid of," though I don't know how I'm going to dispose of stuff yet. But the "too many dishes alone" thing is enough to make me want to start chucking things. Preferably before my mother notices. Too bad I still have to wash them before getting rid of them so no one dies.
(f) Went out and got a spare key made for Merry's house because she never got around to making one before she left for the weekend and gave her her own house key. I got one with Hello Kitty on it, she should love it.
(g) Cleaned out my car, which has been getting pretty messy between car class and car repairs. Threw out all of the broken sunroof parts (sigh).
(h) Washed all of the dirty clothes.
(i) Washed all of the towels.
(j) Have done about 2/3 of the sheets in the house.

The last three had...issues.
I figured reasonably that all the college students and the like would be AWOL this weekend, so I could get allllllll of the laundry done. So I started in Friday night because nobody ever does their laundry on a weeknight except for nerds. I did three loads of clothes in the washer...and then discovered that of the four dryers, one was labeled broken and two of the remaining three no longer worked. Well, they'd take your money, but not turn on, because when someone randomly steals the lint trap out of them, they will no longer work. No, I didn't know that and no, I found this out the hard way. However, since no one else was around, other than the laundry taking twice as long to dry, it wasn't as much of an issue. I e-mailed management, but of course they're gone for the weekend. I got the idea that I could perhaps do a load or two at Merry's--put one in when I got there in the morning, then go to the gym and come back and switch to the dryer, and pick them up again during feeding #2. (Probably could have done more there, but the mess at my house is too bad to spend the day sitting around at someone else's waiting on laundry.)

On Saturday morning, I put the towel loads in a 7:30 and then went to do feeding #1 and load up her washer with 1/3 of the sheet load. Then I came back and put the towel load into the lone dryer and put the second batch of sheets into a washer. I went back to clean stuff and when I got back to the laundry room, the freaking towels still weren't dry and I had to dry them AGAIN and leave the soggy sheets sitting around. I went and got the key made and when I came back from that.... crap, someone else was just finishing a load in the washer. And of course she walked in. So I had to relinquish the dryer so as to not be an asshole like the asshole who ruined all the dryers, and brought load #2 to Merry's. I am happy to report that unlike the dryers at my complex, sheets actually got dry after one run through the dryer, so that has worked well. I'll finish the final load tomorrow.

I did flake out during the middle of the day to go visit Melinda at her new house, though. (She was similarly flaking on unpacking, though it looks like she's about 95% done by now.) It's a very nice house. I also met her kids for the first time, which sounds pretty bad since I met her over ten years ago. However, given her husband drama and that her kids have medical issues, she generally doesn't socialize with family around. I was rather nervous about meeting them, but they seemed to be okay with me, wandering in occasionally but mostly they were off doing their own thing. Phew.

Tomorrow is probably going to go about the same, schedulewise, except I think I might shoot for the free Memorial Day play that night. Other than the dishes...god help me... I can hopefully put everything back in the closets, at least.


Monday: I finally finished doing the majority of the cleaning up of my apartment around 4 p.m. on Sunday. I still have an infinite number of dishes to do, but in general everything is put back as it was, and I've started a pile of things to get rid of. Huzzah.

After that, I talked to Monica for awhile, and then developed an insane craving for an Icee. I then ran around to convenience stores and ended up getting two of them. Yum. After finishing the laundry and animal feedings, I took the night off and went to the annual free play in town. This year it was The Tempest. I am sorry to say that man, I was just Not Into This Show. i can't recall if I've ever seen the play before (perhaps not), but I was just not feeling it, for whatever reason. It was a bit hard to hear the Shakespearean dialogue without mikes (it's a small outdoor show) so I was having a hard time following what was going on. But even then I was kind of all, "why are we watching drunks being drunks for 20 minutes now? What does that have to do with anything?" Which is a dumb thing while watching Shakespeare because that happens in like, most of his plays. I did think the scene in which Miranda and Ferdinand met was very well done and they kept it wordless and cute (like she's trying to figure out how his sword works...and heh heh heh, phallic imagery going up and down), and the kid playing Ariel was charming everyone. But mostly I was all, "what the heck is this plot and why is it wandering off?" I wanted to bust out a book during the show, for fuck's sake.

This morning...uh, yeah, it really sucked to get up early this morning. I went over to feed the chickens and they were already making a racket at 7:40 in the morning. I thought they were laying eggs (according to Monica, "well, human women make a lot of noise when having a baby..." so it makes sense that chickens would make a racket while laying eggs), but when I got out there, apparently not. They were just making a racket. I feel very sorry for the neighbors. After that, I left the spare keys ... somewhere... and then went home and went back to bed for 2 hours.

In the afternoon, I got gas and groceries and another Icee and then found a quiet bit of park in the greenbelt to sit around and read a book in. I got a very good book on Lenormand divination and tried a lot of it out myself...I still find it confusing. Especially when I was trying to do divination on "if I take a trip, what should I do?" or "should I do it at all," and got results ranging from "OH HELLS NO" to "YOU SHOULD TOTALLY GO." What? For that last one, I did a decision spread and both yes and no came up with happy shiny symbols. I am confused. I eventually went to the gym and took a class I normally never go to because it's at 6:45 and I don't really want to wait around for nearly 2 hours after work to go to a gym class. It was pretty good, half step class and half circuit training. I don't know who comes up with these things.

Merry is very happy with her Hello Kitty key. So yay for that.


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