01 09 00

cleaning

Behold! The dishes are done.

Well, mostly done. 99% done. There are some plasticware things that are still sitting in the fridge holding rotting food, and I'm sure a few random plates and forks will show up in a week or so. But for all intents and purposes, I'm calling the dishes done.

I started on the dishes around 3:00pm. I finished at about 5:30pm. Straight through, no breaks, no moseying out to the living room for a smoke. First I did the silverware. Then the glasses and mugs. Then the pots. Then the dishes. Then the random things I found lying around the apartment - a spoon here, an encrusted glass there. Finally, it's all dried and put away. Finished.

BIG sigh

It's such a relief. I can look in the kitchen now and see nothing sitting in the sink or on the counters or on the stove. There's no dirty dishes hiding in the microwave or the oven or the toaster. (Yes, sometimes I hide really dirty dishes.)

The stove is a total wreck, however. It needs scrubbed and cleaned in a bad way. But I think I did enough cleaning for today!

Yesterday I did a little bit of tidying up the living room, and vacuumed most of it. (Using the new vacuum cleaner.) It still needs work. The coffee table is covered with random stuff: squirt bottles full of water and window cleaner, hand lotion tubes, headphones, a thesaurus, a cup (augh! a cup! A dirty cup! Noooooo!), scissors and a salt shaker and other things. A pile of cardboard is sitting against the wall, waiting to be thrown in the recycle bin. Stuff like that.

The "dining room" (it's really just a corner between the kitchen and the living room, but I call it the dining room because it has my dining room table in it) is still a mess. The table is covered with piles of stuff.

But it's all starting to come together. When I get it all done I'll feel really good.

Of course, there's still upstairs. The bedroom (total disaster). And the bathroom (really gross. No, I mean really nasty stuff is going on in the toilet.)

The Plan is starting to see fruition. My Plan is to clean the apartment, top to bottom. (Err, bottom to top, actually.) Then I'll get to rip it all apart again when I dish out stuff to get rid of.

This might seem ass-backwards to some people. Why clean first, and then get rid of stuff? Wouldn't it make more sense to get rid of still during the cleaning?

Possibly. To a normal person that might make more sense. But I am Not Normal.

If I tried to declutter my apartment while I was cleaning, two things would happen. I would a) never finish cleaning and b) never get rid of anything.

While in the process of getting rid of stuff, I'd find myself sorting through all that stuff that I've accumulated over the years. Before I knew it, the day would be gone and I wouldn't have accomplished a thing. And forget cleaning.

No, cleaning must be done first.

But the dishes are done. The dishes are done! The dishes are done! (Mostly.)

In case you cannot appreciate the magnitude of what this means to me, think of this:

I have not completely (or mostly completely) washed my dishes since I started this journal.

Scary, huh?

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