masterofmidgets | Entries tagged with cleaning

Things I Did Not Know I Had In My Closet Until This Weekend:

a voodoo doll

two swords and a dagger (which is now residing on my night stand)

a packet of condoms, mixed in with my SAT prep tests and Italian notes (I have genuinely no idea where it came from, since the amount of sex I was having in high school was exactly none at all)

a video of a skit my girl scout troop put on where we made my knucklehead cousin play Zeus, complete with black eyeliner and a rosebud patterned sheet toga

no fewer than 6 incredibly creepy porcelain clown dolls, including one that was a MUSIC BOX WTF

SO MUCH PRETENTIOUS ADOLESCENT POETRY. I was such a melodramatic 13-year-old, I can't even tell you all. All of these (terrible, terrible) poems are full of sword fights and battles, tragically separated lovers, and romantic suicides. Lots of ladies throwing themselves off cliffs. Also, apparently years before I got into fanfiction I was writing ridiculously overwrought poems about Mulan and Rurouni Kenshin.

I am feeling very accomplished about clearing everything out, though. Most of those boxes have been in that closet since this house was built - some of them were stuff that got packed up when my mom moved while I was out of the country in high school, and haven't been unpacked since. I kept some of it, but I tried to be really strict with myself and make sure it was only things I was actually attached to or might want to use later, no hanging on to my notebooks from high school econ or weird little nick-knacks I bought at a garage sale and didn't even recognize. I ended up with four big bags of trash and about 8 boxes of stuff to donate/sell, and what was left all fit into my corner of the spare room. I think the biggest set of boxes I kept was just all furniture and whatnot for my dollhouse.

Next job: Organizing my books. Sadly not going to happen until I get a second real bookcase, because neither love nor money could get me to attempt to deal with that damn book-wardrobe again.

Roommate Guy: *looking into pot I've got boiling on the stove* Uh, what are you doing?

Me: Sterilizing (my cup, not that he needs to know!). And making French bread. And doing laundry. And don't go into the bathroom, I just mopped the floor.

Roommate Guy: ...wow.

Me: yeah, it's that kind of day.

It really, really was, I don't even know. Wednesday apparently has replaced Friday as my Official Day For Doing Stuff. I'm even getting back to plotting/pre-writing on some of the fics I desperately need to finish writing before people start coming after me with shotguns. And I've tentatively settled on a class schedule for the fall - I'm taking the Genre Fiction class, and either a Chinese Culture class or a South Asian Music & Religion class, depending on which I like more/whether I can deal with super-long days twice a week. It should be pretty fun either way!

I feel like I need to counteract all this maturity now by watching Korean dramas and reading the Blue Beetle comic I got for my birthday. :) In the meantime, though, have some recipes!

( my transformation into food blogger continues apace )

PS: Congratulations California for sucking less at gay rights! I know this isn't the end of the Prop 8 fight, or even close to it, but I'm willing to celebrate the small victories when they come. And some of the points made by the deciding judge are...kind of a big deal. So there's that to hope for.

The last couple of weeks, I've been on a big spring cleaning kick. I've got to-do lists and everything - written down on actual paper, even, and not just in ballpoint on the back of my hand! The level of forethought and organizational skill this requires for me honestly cannot be overemphasized.

Last week Freshman Roommate and I vacuumed for the first time since winter break, after months and months of having the same conversation EVERY SINGLE FRIDAY about how awful the floor looked and how this weekend, absolutely for sure, we were going to suck it up and get the vacuuming over with. This weekend I decided to try to get my bookcase tidied up - I didn't bother putting away the books I used for my classes last quarter, and between that and the constant taking down and replacing of books I was reading for myself, it had gotten pretty awful. But now it looks all neat and pretty!

( I have proof! )

Lesson learned: if you leave a bar of chocolate in your fridge, and then unplug your fridge and leave the state for three weeks, you will in fact come back to a fridge that has been overrun by the green fuzzies.

*SCRUBS SCRUBS SCRUBS*

Sometimes I feel like this journal - and by extension my life - is an exercise in watching me pretend to be a grown-up and fail at it miserably. On the other hand, at the grocery store today I bought more fruits and veggies than junk food, even though I was using the gift card I got from my aunt and uncle for Christmas, and I resisted buying ice cream even though they had the really good ice cream sandwiches they always run out of immediately. That vaguely resembles maturity!

Obviously I'm going to have to watch cartoons all night to get the grown-up cooties off me.

Hard at work reconsolidating the massive sprawl into something that can be compressed into one small-ish suitcase and an overnight bag, and I have two observations to make:

1. I have more pairs of jeans than any sensible human being should. No skirts, no shorts, no slacks, just eleven million pairs of boot-cut blue jeans. And apparently I've reached some kind of critical pants-mass where they become self-sustaining, because I swear they are breeding. I put away at least three pairs today that I have never seen before.

2. I went looking for my knife, and instead I found my sticker-maker. So now I'm thinking that Friday needs to be Sticker-making Day, y/y? Since it's too bulky to fit in my suitcase and thus this is my only chance to make stickers until Christmas break. I'm thinking Booster Gold Fan Club stickers, and Rahm Emmanuel stickers, and maybe something Star Trek. Or something else! I'm running out of room to put stickers on my laptop though.

My Saturday To-Do List:

~~go grocery shopping~~ - two weeks' worth of groceries, the toys necessary to experiment with hair-taping this week, and flirted with the very cute cashier boy at TJ's.
~~do laundry~~ - two loads in the dryer, will be done in a few minutes
~~clean room~~ - desk is tidied, trash is not taken out, in hopes that roommate will do it instead
~~apply for housing for next year~~ - using my crappy tier 3 draw number to apply for, in order: Naranja (living there now), Adelpha/other Lag dorms, Roble, Mirielees, any dorm in Flo Mo, Branner, Okaada. I really don't care where I live though.
~~write email to academic advisor~~ - just sent my advisor, who I haven't met with in a year and a half, an email asking if we can set up a meeting so I can talk through my decisions about my major. Hopefully will hear back soon.
~~buy~~ ~~Telyanofcelore a birthday present~~ - hope you like it, dear!
finish financial aid forms - no go. Dad still hasn't gotten my tax form from school, so I don't have a 1040 and can't finish my FAFSA. But I did send both my parents the number to fax their W2s to the financial aid office, so check one more thing off.
dye my hair - I very bravely resisted the urge to buy pink dye, because that would just be silly. I'll be dyeing my hair purple after I finish laundry and eat dinner.
read Lotus Sutra for JRel class - eh, maybe later. Or tomorrow. ;D

All in all, that's not too shabby! I had a lot of lingering guilt over being incredibly pathetically useless last weekend and basically spending four days in my pyjamas mainlining Buffy, so I decided today I had to be Incredibly Productive Girl. And it worked out well! Plus I have to work tomorrow, so I really needed to get all my chores done today so I can just do schoolwork tomorrow.

There comes a time in every ~~man's~~ woman's life when she must do battle against a foe so vicious, so terrible, that the very thought of it makes her tremble in her boots; if she rises victorious from this battle, only then may she call herself a true warrior.

Today I did battle against just such a foe: my refrigerator.

Now, several times recently when I have, offhand, mentioned my fridge and the fear it inspires me, the people I was talking to expressed disbelief that it could be all that. "Surely," they say, "When you say it has months-old leftovers in it, you are using a form of hyperbole or exaggeration to impress upon us the untidy state of your vegetable drawer." Oh, how I wish that were so.

But no. When I say months-old leftovers, what I mean is that the sole contents of my fridge for the last 5-odd months has been two take-out boxes, containing within them the last mortal remains of a meal that was eaten on September 21st. When I endeavor to fail at house-keeping, I really and truly fail. Many times have I thought of cleaning it out, only to realize that if, as I suspected, the leftovers had in fact achieved sentience and mobility, opening the door would unleash a terror unto the world, or at least the part of the world that is the Bay Area.

But today I said no more, and I took arms against the terror of the fridge and the Leftovers That Should Not Be. And by arms I mean a ziploc bag, several plastic grocery bags, and a can of lysol, by which means I subdued the take-out boxes until I could dispose of the corpses in The Rubbish Bin Outside Ujamaa. Frankly I was a bit disappointed; the smell was most odorous and foul, certainly, but I expected the leftovers to put up much more of a fight.

In any case, I emerged triumphant, and this weekend I'm going to Trader Joe's and buying the fuck out some fancy cheese and shit to celebrate having a fridge again.

I decided, as a way of pre-empting any random scary college-related thing my grandma would try to force me to do, to offer to go through all my clothes and sort out what I wanted to give away, what I wanted to store, and what I wanted to take with me to school. Ooooh, was that a mistake. I now hate ALL my clothes. I'm thinking about becoming a nudist, just so I never have to see them again. And good gods, I can't believe how many things I have in the "taking to school" pile.

A List of Things I Found While Clothes Sorting

a friendship bracelet
a book weight
pocky
more pocky
a completely empty container of pomegranate body lotion
a book of matches from the Qingdao University International Centre
a pair of shoes I've looking for in my closet for six months, which were actually under my bed
a toothbrush
a reading light
a much-doodled on logic puzzle from Pathways
a stuffed zebra
ONE red sneaker
three renegade socks - partnerless, which is okay since I make it a point to never wear matching socks, but I had rather thought there were more.

Conclusions to be drawn from this? I have issues. And too much stuff. And I definitely need to clean under my bed more often.

Current Mood: shocked
Current Location: Buried Under a Pile of Lost Junk
Current Music: MCR - I'm Not Okay