scrubjayspeaks

[Content warning: emetophobia]

Well, none of that was ideal. Horse has colic (she's on the mend). I have triggered whatever catastrophic gastrointestinal experience I had at the start of October again, which sort of implies it's not food poisoning but some sort of reaction. And dad managed to break a water pipe during the search for the leak today. You know what absolutely makes vomiting et al way worse? Doing it when there's no running water available in the whole house. *whimper*

Right, okay, cleaning report! I'm deeply confused to realize there's actually only a few days left to the month and actual National Clean Your House Month. At this point, this project has become A Project (tm). I'm anticipating probably a six-month timeline for everything I want to ultimately. The good thing is that there is still technically an end for the project, insofar as there are not infinite places in my home and on my property to clean. There is a point at which it will be done. That's good. That end is just...a lot farther away than I originally planned on.

This week, I finished off the dvd rack, which no longer has miscellaneous craft materials and old junk in it. It does still have an assortment of china teacups and a turtle candle from the 70s, but that's all by design. At some point, I want to arrange the pretty rocks and shells decorating the top into a color gradient, but that's a project for when I'm too tired to actually clean and sort things. The main focus, though, was the craft bench. The top has been entirely cleared of the dead plants, top dressing rocks, unused pots, and spray bottles of insect treatments. The inside is, I'm somewhat sorry to say, still full to the gunwales with yarn and jewelry findings and craft supplies. They are, however, sorted nicely, boxed separately, and no longer scattered around the house.

(When I uncovered a tote in the horse supply area outside, full of more skeins of yarn, I had a momentary psychological break. I'm pretending I don't know about them right now. I just--I can't deal with any more yarn right now.)

I did 4.5 hours across just five days this time. I listened to Hidden Almanac 2018 March 12-23, an episode of Says Who? podcast, and some Game Grumps episodes. I've gotten out of the habit of listening to stuff as much while cleaning. Sometimes it's just been music. Since dad wasn't cleared to return to work until later in the week, it's been a lot harder to get any peace and quiet in the house while I clean. People! Around! So much!

This Japanese indie song did come to my attention, though, and I am listening to it on loop. Very nice.

And it was another good day! The new iPad arrived and I managed to go through the setup process more or less successfully. Because the old one is SO old, the process of transferring things from it to the new one was slightly harder than it might otherwise have been. But I did it!

The one thing that pisses me off, though, is that the backup/restore process doesn't actually backup or restore the apps themselves. I mean, it loaded onto the new one the...the idea of those apps. But it still required all of them to be downloaded anew. On my shitty internet, that's one thing I was really hoping to avoid. This is more than just a petty annoyance, though. I discovered that some of the apps are actually obsolete now. As in, they no longer exist in the app store. Which means they CAN'T be downloaded anew, for love or money.

This blows huge donkey balls, because a couple of the now-inaccessible apps are ones I used constantly. I still have them on the old ipad, which means its new lot in life has been secured. It will be my alarm radio. It'll stay plugged in by my bed to wake me up and serve as a little radio. I can load music on it and keep some of the media apps that I might want to have on such a thing. I'll strip out the games and such to make more room. Still. Annoyed.

Anyway! NaClYoHo cleaning report! I had planned to clean the freezer, but I hadn't been anticipating the iPad arriving shortly after I finished with that. So the freezer ended up being the only thing I got to today. Mum helped with that, which was good because it was really a two-person job. It's now all sorted out, with things assigned to their proper shelves. One of those shelves? Exclusively tomato storage. We have--and I shudder to even think of this--FIFTEEN gallon bags of regular tomatoes and another three smaller bags of cherry tomatoes. Fuck. God. It's a whole tomato-based lifestyle we've got going on here. Tonight we're making dubious soup out of old vegetables to clear out some of the elderly stuff. That'll be something, won't it?

It was six out of seven days again this week, with Thursday being the off day. I just flat ran out of energy at the end of the week. It was an assortment of areas this week. I worked on cleaning off the window sill and fixing some of the things displayed there. Cleaned under the clothing rack--the clothing will be a later project. I dusted the glow-in-the-dark stars suspended from the ceiling and the moon lantern.

This week marked the first forays into cleaning beyond my room. Expanding my territory! The freezer in the house got partially cleaned, as did part of the spice cabinet, just because there was an urgent need for space. The area where my backpack and shoes live got a spinny rack installed in it (purchased for the high price of nothing at all from the storage container full of furniture that will one day be tackled). The dvd rack area has been started, but that will take all of next week to finish off. The table next to it got sorted out, but I put a lot of stuff back on it again. Some of those things will, hopefully, find a different permanent home eventually. But we're getting into areas where things have to just be shuffled around, because permanent homes are contingent on cleaning out other areas first. But hey, at least I know exactly what I'm going to focus on for the coming week!

Six and a half hours total, which is a big jump thanks to a weekend of dedicated cleaning time. Listened to King Falls AM #40, Hidden Almanac Feb. 19-March 9, and some music. Toward the end of the week, I either couldn't get any time alone to listen to podcasts or I needed to run the vacuum too much to enjoy them. Hopefully I'll get back to them during the week.

NaClYoHo cleaning report! Managed to do six out of seven days this week--I have no memory of what happened on Sunday, but I didn't note down any cleaning, so I guess I didn't get to it? I listened to Hidden Almanac January 22-February 16, plus King Falls AM #38-39. I spent about two hours total time on cleaning.

I spent all week working on one small, triangular rolling rack, which doesn't sound like much. But this is where I keep a lot of fandom-related collectibles, which are a dang nightmare to dust off. Top rack is all Pokémon figurines. Middle rack is a mix of My Little Pony figures, Gundam models, and some Avengers figures. Bottom rack is more Gundams, video game figurines, and some packaging from collectibles that I want to keep. Lots of small parts, lots of detailed crevices, all of which attract and hold dust like they're getting paid for it.

This weekend, I also dusted off the blue china vase, which contains two swords and two hobbyhorses (like you do) that in turn serve as a hat rack. The hats could still use a session with a lint roller, but they're better than they were. I cleared off the little wooden stool that serves as a catchall spot by the bedroom door. It had an assortment of scratchpads, books, video game cases, spare change, fingerless gloves, and rocks. Which...is about par for the course on any surface near me. It now has less of the same, some of which is getting tossed and some is getting stored elsewhere. Scratchpads and rocks are not going anywhere, though.

Book stacks and miscellaneous boxes have been removed from the floor in that area. Everything has been aggressively vacuumed. This space had probably the worst level of just cluttered garbage. Shit that didn't need to exist at all. Murderous hordes of dust bunnies. Because it's right by the door, so stuff either gets dumped there as I wander in or it drifts in from elsewhere in the house on its own recognizance.

So only a small territory conquered, but one of the most offensive ones in the room.

One week into NaClYoHo and this salty pirate is buckling all their swashes! Do I know what that means? No. Assume it's a good thing. I have not slept much, and I am very wired. This post about the past week feeling like an ADHDx2 speedrun feels VERY ACCURATE.

Point is! Cleaning report!

The bedroom end table has been cleaned off, polished, and set to rights again. Two stacks of books on it and the jewelry box have been relocated. All the tchotchkes have been dusted. The tote in front of it has had many stacks of books and video game cartridge cases removed from on top of it, the paperwork inside has been winnowed and organized, and the books inside have been reduced. The box itself now lives in the corner of the room, which has been newly cleaned out.

The tall rack, which came from a clothing store originally, has mostly just been dusted. It's where I display a lot of nerdy doodads, like enamel pins and badges from conventions I've attended. It also has several windchimes and metalwork art figures, and one area is devoted to mementos of past pets. So nothing really left. I did finally attach a few more pins that had still been in bags. I'm starting to run out of room on the pirate windsock streamers I use for that. Thus, a set of Eevee fanart pins have been attached along the edge of one curtain instead. Very cute. I just stood there chanting "happy~!" for a while after arranging them.

The craft supplies in the corner have merely been moved around--they won't get relocated until I tackle the storage bench in the living room, which is a ways off. The costume elements have been hung up, though, and the handle of the ax that lives there has been polished. (I have so much weaponry in my room, I sometimes forget just how much it looks like a disheveled armory in here.)

The spare blankets have either been added to the bed (so chilly lately!) or stashed away.

Thus is the south-west quadrant defeated!

Moving to the north-east quadrant, I have also overcome the dresser, which I expected to take way more time than it did. The whole top was cleared,dusted--jesusfuck, the soot sprites had taken over up there--polished and partially rearranged. The photo frames and ceramic figures are all back in their normal places. The fringe lamp has been slightly repositioned. Some miscellaneous papers have been tossed out. I polished the brass dish, which had become a junk drawer.

The biggest change, though, is that the sand babies have been taken out of their customary drawstring bag home and put on display in the brass dish. The sand babies are little fabric figures filled with sand, which I bought for many years from a particular booth at the county fair where I used to live. They're mostly lizards, turtles, and snakes, though there's also one frog and a couple of dragons. And all but four of them are representations of characters from Yu Yu Hakusho (the others are Harry Potter and Gundam Wing). Back when I was in high school, I decided to start picking out sand babies with fabric patterns that seemed fitting for the characters. I started with the main team, but I just kept adding more as the years went on, bringing in allies, rivals, and enemies of note. The collection is 35 pieces strong now. They've always brought me a lot of joy, but I've mostly kept them in that bag to keep them safe. Now they're all nicely displayed in the huge brass bowl where I can see them every day.

The corner next to the dresser has also been dusted and vacuumed. The old cat fountain, unplugged for many years, has been taken out to storage.

I've listened to 3.5 episodes of King Falls AM, January 1-19 of the 2018 season of Hidden Almanac, and several of the Halloween horror episodes of Game Grumps. I spent about five and a half hours across the week on cleaning. My hands smell of wood polish. I will by dying of sneezing as well.

Happy~!

So this year, I'm doing copperbadge's National Clean Your Home Month. It's intended as an alternative to NaNoWriMo. I've done NaNo many times before, but it hasn't been a relevant tool for my writing goals for a few years now. That's fine. But I liked the idea of having A Project with goals and structure and community of some sort.

Ahead of time, I worked out several areas of the house that I wanted to work on and the order of priority. That ended up being basically "start in bedroom, work outwards as able." I also broke those areas down into smaller chunks, zones of a room that could be tackled more or less independently of anything else. The goal is to make it possible to clear an area in a day on weekends. Weekdays, obviously, are going to be much more limited. But I have a lot of absurd knick-knacks that need to be dusted off, and I can work on a few of those each day during the week in preparation for tackling their home area on the weekend.

I'm taking before and after photos, but I'm going to save posting those until once an area is completed. That will minimize the pic spamming, not to mention the effort on my part. The goal is to clean, after all, not just to document.

Today, I cleaned the end table in my bedroom. It's not quite done yet. I need to do the rest of the table with wood polish--I only got the tabletop today. There's also a box in front of it that counts as part of the zone and needs to be sorted through, as it's full of a mix of important books and important paperwork, neither of which necessarily need to be kept right there, even if they do need to be kept somewhere. So that'll get finished next weekend.

Part of the strategy is to listen to some sort of media while cleaning to keep it pleasant. I decided I would use this as a chance to catch up on the King Falls AM podcast. I cleaned through episodes 35-37 plus the Election Night Special today (~1.5 hours).