Day Seven - Home Maintenance and Pretty Lights

 Still unseasonably warm. I was planning to spend the day painting, but Matt wanted to do some patching and filling (more than he wanted to show me how to do it), so I spent a couple of hours doing other tidying jobs and then went to have dinner and hang out in a friend's back yard because hello, 21 degrees in November (this afternoon I was feeling happy that everyone else was so happy but not really thrilled with experiencing underboob sweat the month before Christmas, but it's very pleasant for the evenings). 

I have a very basic IKEA bedside table against the closet door that doesn't open where I have four stacks of books that don't have another home. I've realized that about twice a year I have an inexplicable manic surge of energy for cleaning, reorganizing and purging that disappears as fast as it comes, so I have to capitalize on this odd phenomenon while I can. Today I actually picked out more than a dozen books to get rid of, and then dusted the books from the little table before sorting which ones can fill in the empty places on the bookshelves.

Pro tip: books get VERY VERY GROSSLY DUSTY when you stack them instead of shelving them. Oof. The dust bunnies. The sneezing and wheezing. 

On the bright side, I found a book, far down one of the stacks, that I went to a book launch for, met the very nice author who was a friend of a friend, and then promptly lost for five years when I got home. I was torn between feeling happy and disgusted with myself, which is something that invariably accompanies these twice yearly bouts of Tasmanian devil-like housekeeping. For the rest of the year I just walk around happily oblivious to the squalor. Then suddenly it's all FRONT AND CENTER IN VIVID HD and I'm like WHAT IS WRONG WITH US? ARE WE ANIMALS? THIS WILL NOT STAND. While the rest of the family hides and waits for the inevitable return of my usual blinders.

Then I read for a bit, then I picked up Pad Thai from a Vietnamese restaurant (I'm quirky like that) and went to my friend's backyard where we sat on the patio wrapped in fuzzy blankets and talked about our awesome children, people we like, people we don't like, horny adolescent rabbits and horses, narcoleptic and otherwise.

It was a really good day. 


Comments

StephLove said…
My shelved books are super dusty, too. I guess that's what happens when you (almost) never dust them.
November 8, 2020 at 6:41 AM
Nicole MacPherson said…
We had that nice weather for like, five days, and now it's back to severe wind warnings and snow. It was great while it lasted.
November 8, 2020 at 7:00 AM
Ernie said…
Under-boob sweat month before Christmas is unfortunate, but I'm still embracing the weirdly warm weather we are having in Chicago. I essentially still wear a training bra, so that might be part of why I am not bothered.

Glad to know I am not alone in my inconsistent house cleaning tasks. I do most of my books from the library, so I don't need to dust books . . . its just everything else. When I go hard core 'let's get this place cleaned up' my kids look around bewildered and ask if we are having people over. As if cleaning the house is only necessary when we have visitors.

Glad you had such an enjoyable day.
November 8, 2020 at 1:39 PM
Suz said…
Inexplicable bouts of energy are the best. Sadly, they never linger....unlike underboob sweat. It's almost all year round in Florida.
November 10, 2020 at 6:10 AM
Smothermother said…
I have the same manic cleaning and purging episodes. Max and Marty know to hide all the things they want to keep because if it ain’t nailed down, it’s outta here.
November 10, 2020 at 12:58 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Super Dark Times

Image
 To my American friends, I'm sorry. Not in any kind of distanced, pitying, smug way, because I believe we are headed in a similar direction here in Canada, and I am sad and sick at heart. I told myself I wasn't hoping for the other outcome because I was afraid to, but I realize that I absolutely was, because I was not prepared for how bad this would feel.  Some random thoughts I am having about the whole thing. 1. I'm going to try not to hate anyone. For a while at least. I am totally cool with anyone else hating people that helped this happen. A lot of them did it out of hate. Some did it out of ignorance. Some are struggling and desperate and thought this was a solution. I know that's not an excuse, but it makes me think of when I read The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levi. He said that he didn't feel like he could judge people who betrayed their fellow Jews for favours from their captors, because he was never given the opportunity and if he had he couldn't ...
Read more

Books Read in 2021: Four-Star YA Horror

Image
I am pretty well ensconced in the January doldrums. We are in a deep freeze, and after the major snow dump on Monday I never catch it snowing, and yet there are a few centimetres on the driveway by every evening. I'm happy with my decision not to take any office shifts for a few weeks - it's incredibly stressful, will only be more so now that people are pissed that we're not supposed to be reporting Covid cases, and I don't even get paid my regular library rate. But it does sort of make the days run together. I try to walk Lucy, but it's so cold she starts dancing around lifting up one paw after the other for me to warm with my mittens. We've tried paw covers but haven't found any that fit. So I walk her around the block and then bring her home and keep walking. It's been cold but not very windy, so walking is quite pleasant (I'm finally not too warm!)  I am rewatching The Golden Girls, which I don't think I ever watched all the way through befor...
Read more

I'm Sick

 Seriously you guys, I am SO SICK, and I have been stupidly engaging in presenteeism even though I am STRONGLY DISAPPROVING when other people do it. It's not because I think I owe anything to the school board (oh my goodness I do not). It's not because I have delusions of grandeur about how important my job is - wait, maybe I do, because at some of my schools my classes have already missed two weeks of library because of EQAO (which necessitated students writing exams in the library), and it's almost the end of the year, which means most of the librarians are closing the library to circulation soon if not now, and I really didn't want to make them miss one of the last library periods.  Also, and I am putting myself out there so try to be kind, I have realized that there is a dumb little part of people-pleasing oldest-child self that always suspects that if I call in sick people think I'm faking, so it's a tiny bit gratifying to go in and have people say oh my GO...
Read more