rachel@home

Down the Drain

Two weekends ago, a friend of mine who I hadn't seen forever was coming to visit. And because my basic mode of operation since I've been back from vacation was something like, get up, go to work, come home, go to bed, get up, go to work, my apartment was sort of feeling the effects of all that working and not cleaning.

So I had great plans to really clean everything up. I spent a lot of time buying new cleaning supplies, because you know, buying cleaning supplies is a whole lot more fun than actually cleaning.

On Friday night, the day before she was to arrive, I decided that my carpet simply must be shampooed before anyone saw how grungy it had become. Nevermind that probably cleaning the kitchen and bathrooms and just vacuuming would have really made a much bigger difference than having clean, yet still damp carpeting, I was on a mission.

Saturday morning, I went to Target and bought a carpet cleaning machine, then went home and thought about cleaning the carpet for a while. After that, I leapt into action and dragged furniture around and vacuumed and put together the carpet cleaner and had finished cleaning exactly half of the living room when my friend arrived, a couple of hours earlier than I thought she'd be there.

As it turns out, when she said early afternoon, she really meant it!

With all of that, it wasn't until last night that I put my new can of bathroom cleaner, scrubbing bubbles, to work. (I know, cleaning the bathroom on Friday night is almost too much excitement, but I'm just that wild and crazy.)

While the can promised all sorts of miraculous no-effort cleaning, I was highly unconvinced. My usual method of cleaning the tub is to sprinkle a whole bunch of comet in it, then scrub and scrub and scrub, growing crankier and crankier all the time. (It took me a long time to discover that it wasn't just that cleaning the bathroom made me cranky, but that I was having a mild allergic reaction to the smell of bleach, which made me feel all sneezy and congested in the head.)

So I removed all my shampoo bottles and sprayed the so-called scrubbing bubbles all over the tub, (with two fans running, to help with the smell!) and by the time I finished spraying the tub, I could actually see the grungy parts running down the drain. It was just as miraculous as it promised! All those wasted years of endlessly scrubbing out the tub on my hands and knees -- down the drain.

I totally would have cleaned the tub before my friend came, had I known that it only took five minutes.

In other news, I still have two more entries I want to write about my trip, and, I really need to change the look of the site, now that I'm home again. But both of those are going to have to wait a while.

I'm also thinking about ordering some larger prints of some of my pictures, and framing them. The ones I'm considering are here. What should I do? I'm decorating impaired!

Posted by Rachel at August 21, 2004 09:53 AM