annoyance or freedom: good for cleaning?
May. 10th, 2005 10:22 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7Got up early, puttered around, got ready for work, got a lift with Dave. Stopped at traffic light on Parkside: "What time do you get out? 4:30, right?"
"Let me check," I said, as the scheduling people can never make up their mind about that opening shift. Some weeks it's 9:00-4:30; some weeks it's 9:30 - 4:00, and then there are the possible permutations in between. So I get out my dayplanner, with my schedule scribbled in it.
"Er," I said, "is today the tenth?"
"Yes," Dave said.
"Er, I get out at 9:30."
"Huh?"
Next week I am working 9:30-4:30 on Tuesday. The seventeenth. Today? 4:30-9:30, not 9:30-4:30.
Well shit.
So Dave took me back home and i looked up the bus schedule. So much for my plans to have Dave pick me up this afternoon after work so we could finish up the garden shopping.
I am so fucking sick of being the scheduler's bitch. When do I work? Whenever Tom feels like it!! Which includes them changing my shifts up until pretty much the day before I work them.
If I had a car perhaps this wouldn't be such a big deal. But I DON'T. This is a PAIN IN MY ASS. In fact, I think it would always be a pain. So there.
So I came home and couldn't decide whether I was annoyed, infuriated, or exhilarated. It's gorgeous today, 75 outside already.
So I scrubbed the mildew from the shower curtain and let it hang in the sun for 2 hours. I scrubbed the tub, which I cleaned recently but it's dirty again. I washed the bathroom floor. I washed the bathroom rugs and hung them out in the sun. I cleaned the dinette, which involved removing debris predating Christmas from the table, and scrubbed the table. I fixed the window in the dinette so the screen is in the right place, and put the curtains in to wash so I could hang them in the sun as well. I cleaned the dinette floor, and rearranged the furniture in it, dropping the leaf on the table which we only ever use to accumulate clutter anyway. Discovered the remains of one of Dave's craft projects in the cracks of the table, and cleaned that out. Retrieved and scrubbed our good placemats to hopefully keep the table from getting as shittified as it was. Have pondered additional cleaning, but don't know if I can handle it. I told Dave I'd do all the rest of the cleaning if he did the dishes, but I've been doing the dishes of late as well, and so it doesn't really matter. We live in filth and that's just the way of it, because I can't bring myself to care for two. I am a clean person, but only if my roommates make some sort of attempt as well. Otherwise i'm just the sort of person who occasionally can't deal with how messy it is, but not the sort who's going to keep cleaning it up.
So, bad combination.
But, two rooms cleaned out of, what, four? (It's a small goddamn house.)
I might spend some time on the sunporch doing a bit more writing, if this productive urge lets up. Otherwise, there is a carpet in the living room that needs attention. (I can't make myself care about the living room, though; I never go in there except on my way someplace else. Dave uses it as his study and it's just all clutter. I took my papasan chair out of it and have it on the sunporch instead.
"Let me check," I said, as the scheduling people can never make up their mind about that opening shift. Some weeks it's 9:00-4:30; some weeks it's 9:30 - 4:00, and then there are the possible permutations in between. So I get out my dayplanner, with my schedule scribbled in it.
"Er," I said, "is today the tenth?"
"Yes," Dave said.
"Er, I get out at 9:30."
"Huh?"
Next week I am working 9:30-4:30 on Tuesday. The seventeenth. Today? 4:30-9:30, not 9:30-4:30.
Well shit.
So Dave took me back home and i looked up the bus schedule. So much for my plans to have Dave pick me up this afternoon after work so we could finish up the garden shopping.
I am so fucking sick of being the scheduler's bitch. When do I work? Whenever Tom feels like it!! Which includes them changing my shifts up until pretty much the day before I work them.
If I had a car perhaps this wouldn't be such a big deal. But I DON'T. This is a PAIN IN MY ASS. In fact, I think it would always be a pain. So there.
So I came home and couldn't decide whether I was annoyed, infuriated, or exhilarated. It's gorgeous today, 75 outside already.
So I scrubbed the mildew from the shower curtain and let it hang in the sun for 2 hours. I scrubbed the tub, which I cleaned recently but it's dirty again. I washed the bathroom floor. I washed the bathroom rugs and hung them out in the sun. I cleaned the dinette, which involved removing debris predating Christmas from the table, and scrubbed the table. I fixed the window in the dinette so the screen is in the right place, and put the curtains in to wash so I could hang them in the sun as well. I cleaned the dinette floor, and rearranged the furniture in it, dropping the leaf on the table which we only ever use to accumulate clutter anyway. Discovered the remains of one of Dave's craft projects in the cracks of the table, and cleaned that out. Retrieved and scrubbed our good placemats to hopefully keep the table from getting as shittified as it was. Have pondered additional cleaning, but don't know if I can handle it. I told Dave I'd do all the rest of the cleaning if he did the dishes, but I've been doing the dishes of late as well, and so it doesn't really matter. We live in filth and that's just the way of it, because I can't bring myself to care for two. I am a clean person, but only if my roommates make some sort of attempt as well. Otherwise i'm just the sort of person who occasionally can't deal with how messy it is, but not the sort who's going to keep cleaning it up.
So, bad combination.
But, two rooms cleaned out of, what, four? (It's a small goddamn house.)
I might spend some time on the sunporch doing a bit more writing, if this productive urge lets up. Otherwise, there is a carpet in the living room that needs attention. (I can't make myself care about the living room, though; I never go in there except on my way someplace else. Dave uses it as his study and it's just all clutter. I took my papasan chair out of it and have it on the sunporch instead.
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no subject
Date: 2005-05-10 03:11 pm (UTC)Our apartment has gotten so bad that there is no haven from the mess. It’s definitely reached the point where I feel so overwhelmed by it that I don’t even know where to begin. When I lived alone, I could spend one full day straightening up all my shit, and that would be that. When it’s two people, it’s a lot more complicated. Just last night, I was thinking to myself that, if we’re serious about having kids in the next couple of years, this kind of messy, disorganized behavior needs to change--I mean, how the fuck are we supposed to manage a house of tiny, crazed humans if we can’t even manage just ourselves??
no subject
Date: 2005-05-10 03:57 pm (UTC)Made worse when I visit my mom's house and it's so spotless.
And then I think back, back back to the days when I was a child, in that same house.
It was filthy. There was stuff everywhere. We had a running joke about putting things on Daddy's desk for him to take care of, that the younger ones of us couldn't reach the top of the pile on his desk even if we stood on the chair. I do vividly recall putting a broken toy on his desk and having it slide off the side of the pile and come to rest against the wall.
We also had a running joke about how we didn't need to lock our doors (actually several of my parents' doors don't even have locks; when they go away for extended periods they simply barricade them shut, so it's not that they lock their doors even now) because if a burglar got in, he'd trip and kill himself on the mess.
The place was a disaster. Mom did the dishes every day but that was about it for reliable housework. She tried to vaccuum once a week (which was necessary because there were three cats, four children, two dogs, and up to 20 other pets if you count the livestock, which we did), and there were times when all of us working together would spend all day cleaning the house.
Part of it is that when things are messier, i.e. when there is Baby!Disaster everywhere, you have to clean more just to keep up, and so the house tends to be... not neater, but more often cleaned. That was the secret to my mom's housekeeping success. And the only reason the place is spotless now is that my youngest sister is OCD and cleaned the whole place repeatedly top to bottom after the other three of us left for college, and so by the time she left for college, you'd never even know there had been six people in that house because she'd thrown everything away. She's heartless like that.
My parents just made my room into a file-storage area.
I just did the dishes. That's a major triumph. Not all of them, but I did remove the pitcher of limeade from the back of the fridge, and dump out the living being that had taken up residence in the nine or ten months since we'd made up the pitcher. (You think I'm kidding, but I'm not.)