(no subject)

The more time I spend cleaning the apartment, the more I realize it really needs it. It's not just clutter. There's honest-to-goodness dirtiness behind it.

The kitchen's a good example. The kitchen counters have been mostly covered for a long time, for the simple reason that we have too much stuff. Two blenders, for reasons that could make their own separate blog posts. A great big microwave and a great big toaster oven. A carton holding various boxes of teas and drink mixes that don't fit in the cupboards. Excess spices because I lay a seasoning side, then can't find it, then buy a new one.

Some of these things haven't been moved in some time. Today I cleared off the counter for the first time in a long time and realized that the spaces behind (and beneath, for those that don't sit flush) these things had not been washed for... I don't know how long. I honestly don't know how long. The visible counterspace would get wiped down, spills would get cleaned up, but any crumbs or gunkiness or whatever that was in the shadow of the bulk build-up just stayed there.

Yeah. It was gross.

There have been a few different people in and out of this place over the years, with myself and the roommate from New York being the only constants. But none of us have exactly been the domestic sort... we've all been somewhat impulsive, and we've all had some packratish tendencies. I have thrown away a lot of junk this week, and set aside a few things to haul off to a donation center when the wheels are available again. There just hasn't been space for everything we have, and without that space it's been hard to keep up on the cleaning, or even realize all the places where the cleaning was falling behind.

So, while I think the impetus for all this cleaning... that being the stack of boxes that were in the center of the living room... is not quite as bad as the apartment complex's letter made it out to be, the end result is something good, even if it's cutting into my writing. My living space (which is also my working space) is becoming more and more habitable, to say nothing of hygienic. I'm damn tired at the end of a day of lifting and shifting and scrubbing, but I've also been sleeping well as a consequence of that.

I've got the "public areas" pretty well taken care of now, though I need to clean the ashes out of the fireplace from the last time we used it (two years ago? three?) and I'm going to run the oven through a cleaning cycle as long as all the plastic and flammable stuff is cleared away from it. Tomorrow, though, my big project is going to be tackling my bedroom, which is perhaps the worst room in the apartment because I've been treating it as nothing more than a place to store my stuff and crash.

We've made it through a total of three business days (Wednesday, Thursday, Friday) since I turned in the requested paperwork on the cats and haven't heard any complaints or requests for more information. Hopefully that means we've satisfied their requirements. Hopefully it's also a good indication they're not actually out to nitpick us to death.

Of Priorities

Y'know, I just want to take a minute to make one thing explicit, just in case it's not clear to anybody. This is because I just got a complaint left on a Tales of MU chapter... and while the person who left it is a bit of, well, a chronic complainer... I always assume that each person who comments represents an indeterminate number of other people who are reading but not commenting.

If it's just one person commenting, that's probably a small number, but under the circumstances the concerns of even a small number of fans need to be addressed. After all, so many of the donors and well-wishers took the time to beat it into my head that I hadn't been communicating enough.
( Long post is long. )

To put it succinctly, I feel like I'm Peter Freaking Parker and I got bit by a radioactive fandom. You have given me great power, and I feel the responsibility. I can't wait until this apartment nonsense is behind me and I can start fulfilling it.

Digging Out

In the past when I've missed updates, I've tried to make them up with at least one new story on Saturday... this is just a heads up to let all the refresh monkeys out there know that they can relax their trigger fingers. It's going to take waaaay too much time and work digging out my bedroom.

I said before that it's been little more than a place for me to crash, but because of that, it's also become our de facto storage room. Even stuff we had boxed up with the intention of putting in storage somewhere or giving to a donation center or even stuff we had tentatively made up our minds to chuck in the dumpster has ended up being shoved in there until we were "ready to deal with it".

Some of the boxes have been knocked over/spilled, and because there hasn't been enough room to really maneuver anything around in there, there's quite a lot to be cleaned up. I've also got to figure out what's garbage, what's necessity, and what to do with everything in between. Gonna be a busy day... I've already cleared out the wall from the door to the closet, and my back is already aching.

Surprising Finds, Plus Free Books

In cleaning off the floor in my bedroom/the backroom/the store room, I've found some surprising things... things I didn't really expect to stumble across. Here are a few of them.

1. The floor. Hey, how's it going? Long time no see!
   
2. A lot of forks. Apologies to the roommate from New York. Apparently that is where they were disappearing to.
   
3. Barely-filled garbage bags from previous failed expeditions into the Heart of Darkness. See, one reason I've never been that successful at cleaning is all it takes is a glimpse of a book I've been thinking about but couldn't find, or hadn't thought of in years, or thought of a little, and I get distracted. This time I pressed on, despite some really interesting finds.
   
4. Twenty-some dollars in folding money and an uncounted amount in Change You Can Believe In™ I'm not the sort of person who gets rid of change when out shopping; I never stop to think "Oh, I can make exact change." I never proffer an extra nickle when the total is $5.05 and I pay with a ten. (Though I rarely use cash for anything these days, anyway.) All of this is going into a jar in the kitchen for mad/emergency money, though the quarters may end up being reserved for laundry.
   
5. Spare keys. I lose these like crazy... apparently mostly in my room... so we've had a lot made over the years.
   
6. My friend Sonya's Evangelion DVDs. Wow. I had no idea I still had these. Sorry, Sonya!
   
7. A load of Marx Bros. and Mel Brooks DVDs. My floor breeds classic comedy.
   

And of course, numerous books, though they were not collectively a surprise.

And that brings me to the real reason I'm posting. I have a lot of books. In particular, I have a lot of old juvenile/young adult fiction. When my parents moved from the home of my childhood to their present dwelling, I took a day clearing out my old bedroom there, which was in about the same state as my bedroom here. Rather than sitting down then and there and making the determination "Oh, I have to keep this book! Oh, this book can be gotten rid of!", we just packed 'em all up and brought 'em here. Most of them are in a big plastic storage tub.

Some point in the future... probably after we move and I know how much space we have to work with, I'm going to go through and figure out if there are any (apart from The Chronicles of Narnia) I absolutely need to keep. Some of them I'm going to give a final read (Space Demons and The Plant That Ate Dirty Socks, I'm lookin' at you). And then I'm going to putting up an inventory of them, in order to find them new homes.

If anybody's got a suggestion for sites that facilitate that kind of thing, feel free to let me know. They aren't all in the greatest condition, but I'll be screening for ones that are incomplete/damaged to the point of being unreadable.

Like I said, that will be after we move. Probably April.

And my break's just about over.

Back to the junk mines.

Edited To Add, as I find my third copy of F. Paul Wilson's The Tomb: While juvenile/young adult is going to make up the bulk of the books I get rid of, I will also be paring down duplicates and triplicates of my more mature material.