I had some brilliant goals for this weekend. I mean, firstly, let me say that this was my first weekend at home where I didn’t have big sad plans for, oh, say 6 weeks. my apartment was a DISASTER SCENE. papers everywhere! hadn’t swept in months! at least my dishes were clean, but that’s just because washing dishes is about the easiest and most rewarding form of housecleaning you can do. hey presto, all of a sudden things are totally clean.
saturday I went to a Society of Women Engineers conference for work and manned the career fair booth. I told so may people how great MyCompany is as a place of employ. it is pretty good, I have to say. and then I went back home and had a fancy spa pedicure and watched tv on the internets until I passed out on the couch.
Sunday I woke up full of energy and drive. I spent FOUR HOURS cleaning the kitchen. FOUR HOURS! it wasn’t even THAT dirty! and it’s definately not that big! but I went through my cupboards and tossed open packages of grains and nuts and seeds and beans that were older than 2 years. I wiped off the counters and did the dishes and put things away and rearranged shelves and I even sorted through my plastic bags. that’s right. I sat on the floor and pulled out all of the plastic bags I’d saved from the grocery store and sorted them by size (tiny ones to my car for garbage bags, really big ones got their own container). And I cleaned out a spot under the sink to stick them.
[[side note No. 1: a friend of mine pledged this year to only accept 13 plastic bags from stores in 2007. I was like: oh, but I use mine for my garbage sacks, and she said she’d rather support recycled plastic bags by purchasing them than getting them from the shop. and that makes total sense to me. and THEN, when I sorted my bags, I realized that I’ve got about 10,000 plastic bags (give or take a hundred). I have so many! So I’m making it a huge No. 1 priority to not accept any more bags from the grocery until I use up all of my old ones.]]
So the exciting part about the cleaning of the kitchen is the part where I got on my hands and knees and scrubbed the floor for, like, 2 hours. I hadn’t scrubbed it at all, not even when I moved in, and while I HAD mopped it, there’s something for getting out the wash rags and the sudsy water. And THEN, to really get the job done, after scrubbing with the soapy water I scrubbed with a “magic eraser” (from the japanese dollar store), and then I wiped it down with clean water. I had to change the water, by the way, like, 10BILLION times. maybe not so much of an exaggeration.
[[side note No. 2: these magic erasers? they are awfully amazing. I used one on my tub that was all stained black in the bottom when I moved in and which I couldn’t clean with normal mildly abrasive cleansers and elbow grease – I had reconsiled myself to a black tub and told myself that at least the DIRT was clean, after all the soap and scrubbing I’d given it. but with the magic eraser the tub came magically clean! amazing.]]
and now I’m trying to talk myself out of polishing my kitchen floor. it’s such old linoleum, you see, and it’s all matte finish and sad and dirty looking. maybe floor polish would rock it’s world? maybe it would be fabulous and incredible! but if I AM going to polish it, I need to do it right away, because I don’t want to have to scrub that floor again. (is it REALLY bad form to polish around the furniture?)
After I let my dishpan hands recover, I went to the living room and threw all of the papers in the whole house that were not put neatly away where they were supposed to go onto the floor. All of them. And then I sat there for hours and sorted and filed and recycled and tossed and made ready for the shredder. I got nearly every paper in the house sorted and put away! now all that are left on the floor are stacks of books, magazines I haven’t read yet, and a box of odds and ends that I might as well toss, because I don’t miss anything that’s in it and probably won’t in the future.
And THAT was my very busy, very productive sunday.
