penn

Maintenance Update

So, since my shower fell apart, I haven't been able to shower since Sunday. Not the end of the world; I've been there before (oh, have I been there. I probably should not publicly state the length of certain shower intervals I've had while traveling).

Anyway, I had dance tonight. It was a blissful hour of modern dance in which I learned, once again, that I need to point my toes. Apparently, my toes do not like to point on their own, so I have to think about it all the time, and then my triceps get lazy. My body isn't into coordination (aside: I have this huge urge to write in all caps like dooce. I should not read dooce before blogging).

After dance, the weekly ritual is shower then supper with Gilmore Girls, which is the one and only TV show I purposely watch (damn my roommates for sucking me in). Tonight, since my shower still wasn't fixed, I asked my roommate before dance if I could borrow her shower or she could fix mine.

I came back to a beautifully repaired shower. As Turk says, there was a hairball the size of a hamster down my shower. I'd like to think none of it is mine, but I know that I have plenty of hair too. In the next day or two, I will be heading out to buy a drain cover. Turk also fixed the faulty shower plunger thing, but it seems fragile, so I might have maintenance replace that for me.

Turk also showed me how to get the drain apart, which I couldn't figure out before. I'm so excited, because my shower will now function nicely. In fact, I will even clean during my shower tonight.

Maintenance Issues

I live in an apartment, and my roommate and I just got in the dumbest fight about apartment responsibility. There are four of us, all girls with longish hair, who rent an apartment from the school. We've got four bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a common area. Every once in awhile, things break, and it's always a question of who is responsible for fixing it.

I found my RF converter while decluttering a drawer in my room. Maybe there is something to this whole spring cleaning movement after all. Hopefully, I'll find all the cool stuff I've lost over the years.

I blew out all the dust in my mom's computer today too. It's running quieter and smoother. I wish I'd learned this trick years ago.

Die, clutter, die!

I just cleaned out the entire linen closet in our bathroom (note: does not contain linen. contains lots of other things). I wish I had taken before pics, because then everyone could see the beautiful transformation. Still, suffice to say that I must have gotten rid of approximately 50% of what was in there, and I reorganized the rest to make it usable.

Highlights of what I found:

- medicine dating anywhere from 1992 (we moved here in '94) to the present
- fruit shaped soaps covered in dust
- about 20-30 combs (most now destined for the giveaway pile
- 15 tubes of travel-sized toothpaste; thanks to my dentist, we will never again have to buy these
- 15 things of dental floss . . . anyone need some extra?
- more shampoo than I thought it was possible for one family to own -- many of the bottles have been mated, and they're now neatly organized and ready to be used up in our shower. I think it will be a year or so before we have to buy new shampoo
- about 10 bottles of sunscreen, of which 4 may actually be good

glad that's done with. I still have the under-the-sink area to clean, but that has to wait until my mom comes home and can help me decide which cleaning items we do and don't need. I'm also hoping to tackle her bathroom sometime in the next week . . . we'll see how much energy she has. I'm now off to continue de-junking. yay! I'm glad my vacation is finally being used for something useful.

The Cleaning Frenzy

At Christmas, my household becomes a frenzy of cleaning. You would think that cleaning is best in the spring (after all, we do have the dreadfully cliched phrase). Or perhaps a little cleaning in the summer, because the kids are often home then. But the bulk of our yearly cleaning occurs at Christmas, when we are busy trying to decorate, get presents ready, and enjoy having the family together.

Since I got home a week earlier than my brothers, I've been trying to help out. I've cleaned a fair bit of things around the house (still have to wipe down the fridge, goshdarnit). I've also listed 40 CDs on ebay (username: elaypenn -- but they're all kinda weird CDs, or they're Christmas music).

The ebay thing is interesting. I'm hoping to list up some crap from my room, but I doubt I'll get that far over the break. I'm listing CDs that my dad gave me from a collection he's gleaned at garage sales and thrift stores over the past couple years. They're all CDs we thought would sell well . . . and there are always surprises.

Of my recently sold CDs, the two highest were a Grateful Dead CD and Amy Grant's Christmas CD. However, no bids on Oasis, and I didn't even bother to list some Aerosmith CDs because they hadn't sold well. It seems to me that the highest selling CDs are actually nostalgic ones; people love Best of John Denver or Janis Joplin. However, there is NO market whatsoever for TLC, Pearl Jam, J-Lo, and tons of other CDs now relgated to a "CD store trade" box.

I think we, as a family, are now giving up the "buy things to sell" mentality. It'll be healthier for all of us. Now if we (erm, I) can just clean up the house in the next day, the week before Christmas will go smoother than usual.

See why I have such a hard time cleaning my room?

(courtesty of my buddy Kibochan the princess ;-)

Cleaning and cleaning and CLEANING

I'm cleaning my room right now, and I am finding all sorts of great walks down memory lane in the process. First, I should state that I haven't really lived at home for the past two years. My room is basically a preserved image of what it was the day I left for sophomore year in college (because I did live at home for my first summer). Most of the things in drawers and in my closet are from high school or earlier. That said, here are some of the great things I've found:

(1) My planner from, oh, junior year of high school. I was so anal that I wrote down every piece of homework, every little meeting, and even every social event. It's chock full of phone numbers, logins to various programs, and probably every thing I needed to survive that year. In retrospect, all this may have been written down to counteract the effects of sleep deprivation, which was a real threat during my high school years. I woke up every morning at 6, was at school by 7, didn't leave school until 3 (at the earliest), and didn't get to bed until 1 am. It was not the most restful period of my life.

(2) Book covers, and book covers, and more book covers. Every book I had for each of my seven classes every semester had to be painstakingly covered in durable paper bags. Apparently, my friends and I decorated our book covers with duct tape to make them last longer (I had completely forgotten this). We covered all the corners and the spine. It looks like every cover had a different color theme. Philosophy was black and labelled "the GOTH book . . . otherwise known as Philosophy." Alg/Trig was brown, and I have three Alg/Trig covers, which proves that Alg/Trig was the book I loved the most, as I carried it around so much that it wore out all my covers. I even had a yellow and green book cover. And in the areas which aren't covered by duct tape, there are inummerable quotes. I had no idea I was so witty.

(3) I have a drawer full of socks. Some have matches. Some don't have matches. The real question is this: why aren't these in my sock drawer in my closet? Socks do not belong in a drawer under the bed.

(4) I have every paper I ever received throughout all of high school. My recycling bin will be full this week; I fully expect to throw out over half of these by the time I get through them all. Of course, unfortunately, some of them might still prove useful.

(5) I need to come up with a better method for managing all my cords and chargers and electrical devices. Right now, my ipod charger is sitting in a ziploc bag on my window seat. That's not quite optimal. I think I'm going to have to clear out a drawer and dedicate it to the electronics that have taken over my life.

(6) I have too much stuff. I'm really tempted to torch my room; that would make sorting go much faster.

Time to get back to the room after this brief blogging break. If anyone wants to lay claim to any of my discarded "treasures" . . . uh . . . let me know.