Adventures in House Cleaning

My apartment is in shambles. I don't really have the energy to go into the WHOLE reasoning behind this, but I'll just say that the last few months of my life have been filled with beer drinking, cigarette smoking, real life boys, online boyfriends, and absolutely nothing productive. Including keeping house.

So today, finally, I came home from work and felt the urge to clean something. I started by unclogging my kitchen sink. Having a clogged kitchen sink was a really good excuse to not do dishes. But now I'm out of clean dishes. Also, the food on my dishes has started to smell like a combination of sweat and mildew.

While I waited for the trusty Drano to work, I put away my clothes. I use the term "put away" as loosely as possible, for clothes that smelled clean got shoved in drawers, but mostly everything just got thrown in the laundry basket for later washing.

Finally I tackle the dishes, and I learned something new: Frank's Red Hot will stain good dishes if left to its own devices for too long. Now all of my plates have a red stain.

Why all, you ask?

It may or may not be because all I've eaten for about two weeks are LOTS of Jose Ole Taquitos. Covered in Frank's Red Hot. There also may or may not have been gross dried chunks of sour cream on all of my plates. Because when I started getting sick of the Taquitos, instead of buying something different, I may or may not have just bought a giant tub of sour cream to add some new flavor to the Taquito/Red Hot combo.

So yes, literally every plate I own was covered with this gross and/or staining combination of condiments. Oh, except for the one pot, which had moldy macaroni and cheese in it. When I dumped the mac and cheese out of it I just poured water in it and put the lid on, and then let it sit there for a few days. Or a week.

Needless to say, the foul stench that bombarded me when I finally took off the lid made me violently gag, run from the room, smoke two cigarettes, and chug a Miller High Life before I could confront it again.

Once the dishes were done (mostly) I decided to haul my recyclables down to my car so I can drive them to the recycling center tomorrow. Why, WHY is it that no matter what I do, a puddle of nasty beer collects at the bottom of my recycling bag?

I am anal retentive about dumping my empties. And when I have guests, I ask them just to set their empties aside so that I may properly dump them myself. Evidently I'm just wasting my time. I pulled the bag out of the bin and was at first relieved to note that nothing was leaking. I set the bag down to fill it to capacity with as many beer cases as possible, and wouldn't you know, when I picked it up again there was a huge puddle. FUCK.

I tried to get it outside as quickly as possible, but I live four flights up. Halfway down my hall I knew I'd never make it. Old beer was pouring out the corner of the bag. So I trekked back to my apartment for another bag, to double up. Despite my best efforts, my nice hardwood floors are covered in a sticky mess of stale beer that I am entirely too lazy to Swiffer Wet tonight. On top of that, on the way downstairs with my double bagged mess, it STILL leaked a bunch, and onto ME. So now I smell like stale beer. Which I suppose isn't that different from usual.

I finally decided that enough was enough for one night (even though I'm pretty sure I made a bigger mess than I cleaned up). I've been lounging on my couch, drinking Miller High Life and creating yet more recyclables to cause me distress later this week.

I WISH that were the end of this story, but no. I either have a problem with depth perception or some sort of mutant strength I wasn't aware of before. I reached for the ashtray that sits on my coffee table (a constantly full ashtray) and managed to push it HARD off the table and rolling to the floor. Now there are cigarette butts and a giant pile of ash on my hardwood floors. Luckily, its not in the same place as the sticky beer residue. And insteady of vaccuuming THAT mess, I figured some Pledge and a paper towel would do the trick.

It did.

Housecleaning ftw.

Oh, this also seems like a good time to mention that the carcass of a giant dead flying insect is still hanging out in my floor lamp. This was a product of Giant Bug Incident 2010. My floor lamp is unusable. I wonder when I'll ever have the energy to take care of THAT situation.

Maybe I'll just get a new floor lamp.

Giant Dead Bug ftw.