Today’s Start Walking blog:
Sunday, 6 Aug 2006: Cleaning isn’t as bad
I really much prefer cleaning out an old apartment than packing & moving. And today I had a lot of good energy for it. So much so that when I discovered the surprise inside of Jesse’s home-made dog bed, I laughed instead of cursed.
The dog bed was one of the things we needed to haul out to the carport for later hauling to the dump. It was made out of queen-size air mattress bed that was so leaky that we gave up on it, & then Jesse gave up on it, & then he made a bed out of it. We had wondered vaguely what it was stuffed with, but never enough to find out.
Until today, when I dragged it to the door of his room & couldn’t get it through. So I tried to tip it up to get it through, & that didn’t work, & then I thought, well, I’ll see what’s inside, maybe we can pull some of it out & divide the load.
Thus did I discover where all our missing bath towels had gone. Oh yeah, & a dish towel. Oh, and… “Rozz, c’mere, you gotta see this.”
She started sorting through the dog bed stuffing. Thereafter, periodically from his room could be heard the words, “I’m gonna kick his butt!” There’s that sheet that went missing that Rozz uses for her massage table. There’s an almost brand-new pair of trousers — no wonder Jesse complained about never having anything to wear. There’s a bed sheet, & another. And his blanket that we made when he was younger, with each yarn tie in it representing a special wish we made for him. It went on & on.
By the time Rozz was done sorting, there were two large Dell-computer-sized boxes plus a couple of kitchen garbage bags full of stuff that Jesse gets to launder when he gets back to Anchorage. That was besides the bath towels & massage sheet & other things that don’t belong to him, that Rozz laundered herself.
When I was a kid we sometimes tried to get around really cleaning our rooms by shoving all our messy junk under the bed. But it never occurred to me to shove it under the dog’s bed. Or to raid the linen closet to add to the dog bed.
Went on to get about half the apartment-cleaning done, including a very thorough vacuuming. I figure that hefting a Hoover vacuum cleaner in the air so that the hose will reach the cobwebs up in the corners between the ceiling & the walls counts as some form of weightlifting, but I didn’t count it.
Day total: 6,162 steps plus apartment-cleaning, dog-bed hauling, & vacuum-cleaner wielding.
