The Ramblings of a Mental Meanderthal

It can get too late to clean. Vacuums are loud, and apartment walls can be thin. But you can tidy around the clock! (Wheeeee.) Marie Kondo talks about tidying, and that is part of the cleaning process. What do I want to keep? What can I discard? What no longer has any use? What am I scared I'll need again someday and don't want to let go of? What we own and where we put it is tidying. But we shed skin and hair and we stomp them into the carpet, we spill and sneeze, cats track litter in between their toes, dental floss flings tooth goop onto the bathroom mirror, and soap scums up the shower. Taking care of that is cleaning. I've spent hours today gathering stuff and sitting with a recycling bin, trash can, and shred bin, and I decide what to keep-or-recycle-trash-shred. This is the verb I invented: KoRTS. I will continue to korts the bedroom until I am sleepy, but quiet hours are 9 pm to 9 am. My mess is big enough that I don't think I'll korts enough to be a...

Because I'm not working and am too sick to sing, the most exciting thing in my life is that I have the spring cleaning bug. Circumstances have made it necessary, though. The toilet decided to stop working Monday night, and there was very icky stuff on the floor and in the tub by the time the plumber arrived Tuesday morning. It really wasn't that big of a mess, but the nature of the mess grossed me out. Neither Mom nor Dad was able to help, so I did a deep cleaning of the bathroom and hall yesterday. Two loads of clothes that had been touched by the yuck in the tub, so I was in the laundry room. I am easily distracted and take lots of breaks, so it took me over ten hours, start to finish. Now the bathroom is SPARKLING. I decided I might as well go all out, so I cleaned the ceiling and walls, outsides of cupboards, and got on my knees (ouch) three times to scrub the tub. The floor got mopped twice. Dad normally takes care of the dishes, trash/recycling, and his laundry. He di...

WARNING: Here be swearing. So I follow a blog/Twitter/Facebook page called "Unfuck Your Habitat." The creator of the blogs is pretty sweary, and I sometimes am, too. So I didn't let the profanity deter me from a method of keeping my home habitable that might actually work. I will abbreviate the name of the blog and method to UFYH from here on in. I think UFYH started on Tumblr with photos people submitted of their before and after spaces. The creator also outlined her method, basically saying that you do what you can when you can. If you're physically or mentally disabled, neuroatypical, mentally ill, or emotionally disabled, you can still get stuff done. And something is better than nothing at all. Bringing in help is good if the help understands you make the decisions. Being of help to someone else is good, so long as you bring in kindness and leave judgment at the door. What to do when the people you live with don't feel it's their place to take care of m...

Mom's out of town. Dad went to my cousin's to watch football. (He's back now.) I stayed home and did eight loads of laundry. No television, no conversation. In between trips to the laundry room, I sat in the living room and read or played sudoku. So quiet and pleasant to sit in the sunshine and read with a cat on my lap. It was idyllic.

No resolutions to 2020. Just trying to keep my head above water and find a job so my parents, cats, and I don't live in our cars. The temp job I mentioned almost a year ago is done. I'd got very good at it by the time my hours ran out -- eleven months will do that -- and I was sorry to leave. The boss tried to keep me, but they don't have the budget for it. I'd much rather be employed than not, and I would gladly take it if offered, but the position never felt like a place to settle, more like a step on the way to something else. Here's my Year in Books, as defined by Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/user/year_in_books/2019/38060115 My favorite books I hadn't read before were Becoming , Into the Drowning Deep , Internment , Circe , The Urban Cycling Survival Guide , and An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth . I read at least that much fanfiction as well, if you count repeats. I keep fanfic on a basic Kindle and read that before bed. I've fa...

The time around the equinoxes is when the sun appears to make the most progress northward or southward every day, so I've been moving things around the garden every week. At the moment, I have: 1. a compost bin with worms doing their thing 2. a few empty pots or pots with dirt waiting to be used 3. a patch of dirt covered with wood chips and pretty rocks (the rest is concrete) 4. a pot of lavender 5. a pot of daisies 6. three pots of amaryllis 7. a pot of geraniums 8. a pot of grass for the cats to munch (and then puke up once they're inside on the carpet) 9. a cheap utility table with boxes of:   a. kale   b. spinach   c. two kinds of lettuce in three boxes The light is complicated because my patio is a 13 by 8 foot rectangle, the long ends north and south. Apartment 8 (directly upstairs from me) has a balcony that shades different parts of the patio as the sun moves each day. The building to the south is two storeys tall, with the added joy of two satelli...

I see weekend and morning bike riders on their ten-speeds with the bike shorts and helmets and looking all sleek and cool and zooming down Pacific Coast Highway. I want to be one of them. I haven't ridden a bike since 1994, though. I rode daily from when I was 6 to when I was about 16, though, so I hoped the adage "It's like riding a bike; you never forget" was true ... about riding bikes. I'm working as a temp at City Hall. The department I work in does several different things, including overseeing the city's bike share program. Once I settled in and learned most people's names, I asked one of the people who oversees bike sharing about it -- specifically, the weight limit for the bikes. Excess weight can pop a tire or cause damage to the frame, so I wanted to make sure I wasn't going to murder a bike by riding it. He gave a number that is more than 100 lbs more than my current weight, so I created an account with the website. And then I d...