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Sleep did not come easily or lightly and I went to work around 3 AM returning home a bit before noon.  At home, my house was being purified by the sacred attendants of Merry Maids who were tearing a sanitizing swath through the second floor.  They were at their task, and my office was designed off limits, so I did what any reasonable person would do and distracted them with a missed spot in the master bath, grabbed my pillow from my room and slept on the floor of my office.  This would have gone smoothly but max was fascinated by having someone to sleep with on the floor, so excited in fact that he refused to lie down and kept walking in and out of my room, requiring me to open the door each time.  I think the housecleaning team became alert to what I was doing as each door open was met by a slightly more disheveled me with a few more carpet  marks on my face.

At the end, I had to cut a check and the service people left.  I shambled towards my bed, pillow under arm, but had trouble sleeping.  The smell of clean was keeping me up.  It smells nice.

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My day was dedicated to cleaning out the rec room of our house which hadn’t received a really thorough cleaning in at least five years and hadn’t had the carpets cleaned in over a decade.  Armed with the Bissell CarpetViolator 2000, this room would know fear.  I thought my plans were ruined when I got a call from my brother to pick up his wife from a local brewfest and bring her home, but this turned into an unexpected opportunity.

BRA HA HA HA.  Under the logic that she was my brother’s wife thus everything he owned was hers too, I felt no compunction about using her permission to throw out things my brother hadn’t gotten around to moving out.

Me: Think he wants slightly mess up Clapton tapes?
Her: Nah, he listens to bad music now.
Me: Does that mean we keep the Kris Kross tape?
Her: I think it’s just better we throw out everything that has mouse poop on it.

And knowing my house, with one pen stroke I got all the permission I needed to help my brother finally move out.

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Each year I prepare for the Klondike Derby stations later and later as in 2009 I started prep work a solid six days ahead of time and last year starting it on the Thursday before.  Today I wanted to box up and have ready at least 12 of the 22 stations giving me a solid foundation for the next day so I could finish at a reasonable time but things got in the way.  For instance, our house was completely devoid of bruschetta and had no good table cheeses.  How was I supposed to work under these conditions?  Also, my office hadn’t been vacuumed in at least two weeks and the curio filled with my brother’s shot glasses was criminally underdusted.  Around 11 PM I I finished these vital tasks but then realized that none of my home computers had been updated from Windows Home Server Connector 2.2 to 2.2.1.

ODTAA

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This was my first Sunday in a while where I could tackle the caravan of minutae that passes through ones life and I fealt a primal link to every man who’s ever spent an afternoon ‘cleaning up’.  I don’t like the term “cleaning” for the rearrangement of items we call stuff and entropy incarnate we call dust and dirt and much prefer to call it “sorting”.  My arrangement system is as ideopathic as the next man’s as despite using my scarves but once or twice a year and my 7 7/8ths Lock and Co hat never they both have a more prominent place than the gloves and ushanka that are my talismans of winter.  Such is the way of things.

I enjoy the act of boxing, whereby disparate items undo their diaspora and are containerized into the embodiment of forgetting of the attic.  This was different as I was moving Scout stuff that is pulled out with an insistent seasonality that rivals the migration of geese.  Looking over the list makes me look like some mad pack rat or alternatively MacGuyver’s supply division:

1) 130 glass eye droppers
2) 600 flexible straws
3) 1.5 miles of sissal binder twine
4) 300 wooden yellow pencils
5) 12 pairs of scissors

All these items went into “Fall Scout Program Box #6” and were placed in my attic which is slowly turning into a program armory that is strangly exempt from my normal organizational rules.  Every January 1st I reseason my cast iron cook wear and reverse everything in my cloths closet.  If by the next Jan 1 the wearable hasn’t been used, the hanger will still be backwards and will be moved to a box in the bottom of my closet.  After another cycle, the box moves to the attic where I will theoretically donate it to charity after another year but I’ve yet to do this.  I’ve been slowly losing weight over the past 8 months and it tickled me to rewear something I’d expanded out of but my tastes have changed and the golf shirt is now the acme of a different Terry.

I found a boat model piece my brother made when he was 14 or so, clocking in at 15 years ago.  Is there a statute of limitations on how long I have to wait after someone moves out before I can trash their stuff?  I hope I never find out and can depend on something like the roof collapsing to serve as my mnemonic brushfire, clearing out the weeds to make room for more things.  That, or I could build shelves.

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Because of the Council Dinner we had to hold the Magic Tournament in Handicraft which is the old dining hall, an old dusty building that uses benches instead of chairs.  I sniffed and sneezed my way through the evening damning the acoustics and difficulty in controlling traffic and at the end of the evening I was looking forward to moving back to the Dining Hall.  Then I noted that the tournament ended at 9:49 PM and that my car was packed and the site was cleaned by 9:55 PM consuming 1/9th the normal amount of time as we had to do no mopping and I could back my car right up to the door.  With some Claritin, I think I can deal with the new site and reclaim some of my Tuesday evening.

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There are some little tasks I do around the house that I consider important sorting mail and filtering out things that shouldn’t go into the fridge.  I was worried about these being completed during my time away but returned to see that they’d been done with mixed results:

1) The mail was sorted into two piles: My dad’s mail and everyone else’s

2)The Roomba was on charge and had appeared to run a few times based on the tracks in the carpet but the carpet was dirty.  The operator doesn’t seem to have ever emptied the device.

3) The fridge was very clean.  Partly because whomever cleaned it out threw out the baby with the bathwater in chucking not only the leftovers but the containers they were in.  Also, I’m pretty sure before I left there was 2 lbs of sealed Irish bacon that was nowhere near expiring.  Either something went very wrong with it or something went very right.

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I’ve used the three day weekend to clean out a lot of stuff.  I got rid of 20 lbs of computer cables, two computers, one sold, one for free and have started shedding books. I’ve accumulated about 80 pounds of RPG books with about 30 pounds of D&D, 35 pounds of Mage: the Ascension and 5 pounds of miscellaneous stuff.  I’ve only ever run one long-running campaign in each despite spending hundreds of dollars and dozens of hours crafting stories of such imaginative caliber that experiencing one would guarantee one a place in the afterlife (at least in my head).

I know some of these tomes are worth at least some money but the time involved to recoup pennies for dollars was constantly fighting my urge to simply reduce.  I started writing Craigslist posts but they sounded like I was giving away kittens or a child I couldn’t care for;  “free to a good home”, “condition: used but loved” and so on.  I didn’t have this difficulty with my textbooks when I simply ripped off the covers and threw the remains in Southampton’s Paper Retriever bin at 2 AM in the rain.

If I’m torn over this, there’s a much more painful choice in the future: Magic cards.  Maybe I’ll be lucky enough to have them stolen or possibly an electrical fire will wipe them out so I can collect on the Homeowner’s Insurance Policy rider before I ever have to decide how to get rid of them.

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This weekend my house received a bit of an enema as, in concert, the three Robinson men removed nearly the last of my mother’s things.  Gone were the cedar chests full of bigenarian clothing with tags and scores of cloth templates for clothing most appropriately sized for the cat.  At around 11 PM the last piece was moved from my room by my dad and myself when I learned the first rule of home rearrangement: always clean out underneath any furniture before letting parents move it.

The best “discovery” was a collection of three different lubricants that’d somehow gravitated in the sartorial dustbowl.  One was a surgical lubricant I used during my failed attempts at water cooling my PC whose tube was largely taken up by the words “High Performance”.  The second vacuum grease which I suppose isn’t a lubricant but looks similar and finally my favorite, the silicone base to keep my treadmill working properly which comes in a non-descript tube simply marked “lube”, like I’d gotten the Safeway brand of KY or purchased it under the rationing of the Gulf War.

In addition, I discovered a backpacking pillow, 3 Scotch Brite sponges, the collected works of Robert W. Service and bag of 25 “Keep Pennsylvania Beautiful ’96” patches.

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These are the boxes that are strewn about the room as I clean:

  • Rope
  • Recognitions
  • Name Tags
  • Explosives Parts
  • Crappy Fireworks
  • Patches I Don’t Want
  • Card Sleeves
  • Atlatl Parts
  • Glues and Screws

Note, fireworks have been added to my list of free crap.  To PA residents only.

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These are the boxes that are strewn about the room as I clean:

  • Rope
  • Recognitions
  • Name Tags
  • Explosives Parts
  • Crappy Fireworks
  • Patches I Don’t Want
  • Card Sleeves
  • Atlatl Parts
  • Glues and Screws

Note, fireworks have been added to my list of free crap.  To PA residents only.