Tag Archives: cleaning

I Am Adult; Hear Me Roar.

13 Mar

Tonight I had a bit of a chocolate craving and I didn’t want to give in so instead I went out for frozen yogurt and then bought 5 bags of M&Ms and ate 3 of them.

It happens.  I don’t like it, but it happens.

I still have to do the last day of Level 3 from Ripped in 30 tonight, so right when I’m going in and out of Table Top and my triceps are screaming bloody murder and the pot of jelly I store in my belly is rattling around on top of my human table, I will certainly regret this.

Oh, and there’s a string cheese wrapper right beside me too, I just realized, so I guess I ate that too.  I must have trance-chomped that to death. Add that to the jelly pot as well.

Roar.

Roar.

I’m having one of those days where I don’t want to do anything but I have a lot to do so I only pick the things that are fun and leave the rest “for later”.   That means that in a few days when I’m really under the wire, I’ll slam out all the things I have to do like super woman and then retire to play video games as a reward until I pass out in a pile of my slobber and Doritos crumbs. When I wake, I will question my ability parent another human being in the future.

For example, I needed to do laundry today. Like, really needed to.  Like, wearing my last pair of even remotely acceptable underwear needed to. Tomorrow I’ll have to wear a skirt and keep a no-underwear secret all day, fashion a new pair out of some scrap fabric, go to the store to get more underwear, or go out tonight after Jillian Michaels, get cash from an ATM, go to the store and get quarters, and then come home and do laundry.

Instead of doing any of those things, I’m watching Pretty in Pink. Poor Molly Ringwald and her thrift shop taste. If she only knew that a few decades later, Macklemore and Ryan Lewis would validate her opinions on secondhand clothing and rich schoolboy Blaine’s friends would find her quirky and cool in a topical sort of way.

I also need to do the dishes.  I’ve been neglecting them for so long that they are starting to develop a funk. I will continue to neglect them until I am unable to feed myself without first washing dishes. Then I will curse my childish ways, wish I would maintain a stricter dishwashing regimen before they get overwhelming, and again question my ability to parent another human being in the future.

My days are full of self-doubt. Underwear and clean dishes and trying to eat less than 5 bags of M&Ms a day: adulthood is a high calling.

Well, now I’ve put it out there.  I’ve just pushed it into the magical world of the Interwebz and now I look like a big, unambitious sloppity slop.  I feel all accountable and whatnot.  So here it goes – I’m going to close this laptop, do Jillian Michaels, get so angry from my jelly belly and her constant yelling in my face that I take out my rage on the tower of dishes in the kitchen, and then I will clean the house until I find enough quarters in the cracks and crevices of my hermit nest to do a proper load of laundry.  

And tomorrow I will wear my clean underwear and eat off my clean dishes and rub my less gelatinous stomach in pride.

I am Jackie. Hear me roar. ♣

P.S. I’ll soon announce the details of the 30 Day Challenge or the Lollipop Tuesday challenge for you all to take part in. I’ll also announce a prize related to said contest. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, go here to read more and vote on which adventure you would prefer. Polls close soon.  Try not to pee yourself with excitement. If you have any questions, I’ll be in the kitchen.

 

 

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Therapeutic Cat-Washing

27 Jun

Yesterday I was so upset at the world that I washed my cat.

I think it had something to do with working a ten hour day and having my boss call me the moment I left the office.  Twice in a row.  And then text me seven times.  Right in a row.

There is something about the beeping that my phone makes upon a new text delivery that I am unable to check that feels like a hamster is nibbling at my insides.  When I know it’s my boss and I’m behind the wheel and helpless to know what the emergency is that inspires her to plague me so, that hamster gets upgraded to a gerbil.  And by the time I got to the grocery store, called her, handled said emergency, drove home, unpacked everything, changed my clothes, and saw that the house was a mess beyond livability, I would have had a more relaxing evening had I just set myself on fire and run out of my office building before it all started.

But I didn’t.  So instead, I took my cat for a walk.

Hobbes is an interesting creature of habit.  Once upon a time, Dave had a pang of guilt about man’s domestication of felines and their tendency to remove their manhood once domesticated.  And so to give Hobbes a taste of loveliness, he took him to the park, where I sang him a lively rendition of “A Whole New World”.   Ever since, when Dave gets home from work, Hobbes paws and meows at the front door until we either let him out or shoot him.

We don’t have a gun.

So since I was at my wit’s end and wanted a breath of fresh air anyway, I decided to kill two cats with one walk and bring Hobbes into the great wide open.  He doesn’t require a leash because all he does is roll around on the concrete like he’s on ecstasy and the concrete is neon silk.  The neighbors tend to stare.

And while Hobbes was relishing the highlights of neon and softness in the sidewalk, I sat beside him stewing about all the work I had to do that evening and how I really just wanted to play video games and eat cookies.   I imagined the carpet that needed to be vacuumed several days ago and the cat litter that I just scooped this morning that already needed to be scooped and the dusting, dishwashing, counter-cleaning and general exhaustion that was about to ensue.  It burned like a fiery pit of filth in my stomach, right beside the once-gnawing gerbil.

That’s when Hobbes’ ecstasy binge led him to a soft pile of dirt and he began to roll in a frenzy, overtaken by the spirit of a chinchilla.

He rolled and rolled.  I’d venture to say it was the happiest moment of his life to date.  It may have even made up for the fact that his ancestors had been torn from the tundra and domesticated into prissy little eunuchs.  

But I was not happy.  My mind was chock full of filthy things needing to be cleaned and even if I did every single one of them, my E-crazed chinchilla was just going to deposit a sack of black dust all over my living room anyway.  And since I had nothing inanimate near me on which to take out my sometimes compulsive cleaning habit, I instead grabbed the offender by the scruff of his neck and the tub of his tummy and carted him to the bathroom.

I think this is where I did the most harm.  Hobbes loves the bathroom.  He loves the sink and the tub and the perfectly Hobbes-sized carpet I apparently bought for him.  He loves the shower curtain and the occasional drip from the tub’s faucet.  He lives like a king in that sacred room.  But he doesn’t like water.  I know this because when, in my fury, I splattered the water all over his dirty behind, his eyes turned to saucers, his tail went stick straight, and he engaged every fiber of his being into actively escaping the porcelain death trap I had set for him.

But I’m a human.  And humans trump cats.  Hence the domesticated nutsack-stealing.

I rinsed about a half pound of black dust and dander down my tub before I started to worry I’d genuinely give him a heart attack so I turned off the water and convinced myself he was clean enough. I smothered him in a towel and then made a note to do a load of laundry because I had just used my last clean towel on my cat.

Freshly toweled cats are hilarious, angry little things.  I highly recommend it on a rough day.

I followed up the traumatic session with a gentle brushing, which was actually in my favor more than his but he’s too stupid to know the difference between a proper petting and a wire brush.  Another point for the humans.  I then nursed the wounds he’d inflicted that, due to my nerdy cat allergies, had swollen to look like boils all over my skin.  Point for the cats.

But I felt better.  I had cleaned something.  Not just that – I had cleaned something that fought back – and I had won.  I mean, I tend to take out my stress on my dirty apartment from time to time, but that’s just a hurricane of cleaning that ends in my sweat and tears.  This! This was fantastic.  Five minutes of cat cleaning and I’m good to go.  I can dust a little, vacuum a little, pick up a few cups and be done.  The filthiest thing in my apartment had already been conquered and it was now so upset at the violation that it was cleaning itself. Perfection.

Therapeutic Cat-washing, folks: I highly recommend it. ♣

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Battling the Mess Monster

5 Nov

The Mess Monster.

Last night I went Monica Geller on my apartment.

I don’t know why, but I couldn’t. stop. cleaning.

I cleaned absolutely everything.  I went through junk drawers, cleaned out closets, scrubbed carpets, wiped down furniture; I was overtaken by a serious disease.  I started at 7pm and didn’t stop until after 1am.  I didn’t even want to clean. I just noticed the next dirty thing while I was working on cleaning something else.  Most of the evening was a blur but I faintly recall a long, yellow, rubber glove.

That means things got seriously, seriously, serious.

I can’t help but think that if I could only get to the root of what overtook me last night, I could replicate the experience in the future.  Perhaps I could extend it to something other than the house.  With that kind of overwhelming dedication to completion of a task, I could do anything.  I could build a tree house.  Or take up upholstery.  Or write a novel.

No, scrap that last one.  I’m writing enough this year.

I’m disappointed that I didn’t take a blood sample during the whirlwind.  I could have sent it to a lab for some tests.  Maybe it would reveal something in my system that led to this awesomeness and I could recreate it in the future.  Maybe I could even have it synthetically engineered and put it on the market for others.  Wouldn’t it be awesome if you spend 6 hours yesterday on something you haven’t wanted to do in a really long time but needed done?  I reorganized my pots and pans.  Do you have any idea how much time and frustration that will save me in the coming months?  Things had escalated to the point where I couldn’t even nudge the cabinet door the mess of metal inside would clamor about and fall out to the floor.  My carpet had a variety of mysterious spots on it that needed some thorough treatment. And the junk drawer that had too much junk in it for me to be able to locate the junk I actually needed? Fixed.  

I know you’re thinking about those areas of your place right now that need some hard love.  I know because yesterday, I was you.  And let me tell you, today feels glorious.  I might just dedicate the rest of my life to attempting to recreate the happening so that I can take blood, test it, synthetically recreate it, and sell it to you.

Listen, I have bills.

So tell me your dirty hiding places.  Really, I’m curious.  Where is the spot in your house that you need to seriously get a handle on but haven’t made the time?  I appear to have had many: junk drawers, closets…but the big winner was the pots and pans cabinet.

Tell me, dearest readers: where’s your mess monster hiding? ♣

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