100 Days

With eight day left before I begin the move to the greater San Francisco area, the hard part has officially begun.

Now, to make everything clear, the hard part is not the saying goodbye to the countless friends I have made here in Colorado. I don’t have that many. Nor is the hard part trying to do all the stuff I always enjoyed doing in Sterling. Actually, I didn’t enjoy doing anything in Sterling. Nothing here is conducive to anything. You know how most towns have at least one cool thing? Like a town will have an awesome park with a bunch of trails that you can walk around for hours? Or it will have a sweet sports complex with batting cages and stuff? Well that shit doesn’t exist here. Nothing in this town is top notch. Everything is below standard. Everything sucks.

Nope, it will be easy to tear myself away from this town. But that hard part is cleaning up my apartment. See, I am gonna be poor in California. I need every damn cent of that security deposit back. Unfortunately, in the nearly two years that I have lived in this space, this is the first time I ever actually cleaned.

The concept of cleaning is quite foreign to me. It wasn’t until I moved into this apartment that I realized the difference between cleaning and straightening up. I am pretty good at making the place presentable. Of course, I haven’t had company since Feb. 2005, so I predictably fell behind in the straightening up department. But anyway, I used to think that clearing the floor of debris and straightening out the coffee table was sufficient cleaning. Same with doing the dishes and taking out the garbage.

Well, apparently, something called dust collects all over the place. Also, something along the lines of grime just accumulates in nearly-impossible-to-get-off deposits on all kinds of surfaces. Who knew? Not me.

To my credit, I began a few days ago, cleaning the kitchen counters and the stove. So I got a head start. But then I couldn’t carry over the momentum to subsequent days. So that kind of sucked. Thursday night I decided to attack the bathroom with a passion. The bathroom, because I am generally a dirty scrub and because I have neglected it for a long, long time, figured to be the most daunting task of cleaning.

My attempt to clean my crapper was comedy at its finest. First, I decided to use the all purpose cleaner WITH BLEACH. I didn’t really figure that it might almost make me pass out, even with no windows open. So imagine my surprise when my eyes started watering and I got so dizzy I almost fell down. I think it was the fumes. I know this because it was definitely the fumes. What else could it have been? Certainly not the effort, since that was lacking.

I had to scrub every inch of that fucking bathroom. And still, it wasn’t totally clean. Perhaps the most embarrassing part, which I will enthusiastically recount here, was the mopping. See, I don’t really know how to mop and I think that sort of came back to bite me in the ass. I read the Pine Sol directions and everything and I tried my best to figure out how much to use and how to do it. But I think I did it wrong. I ended up with puddles of dirty water all over the floor. Is the mop water supposed to be brown? If so, then I am a natural. But really, somehow I don’t think it is.

So it became apparent to me that I had to sop up this water somehow. I really had nothing to do it with except for me last clean (read: only) bath towel. So I sopped up all this filthy water with the towel. I did one of those things where you throw the towel on the floor, stand on it and dance your way to clean tiles? I was listening to the Arctic Monkeys at the time, so the floor got extra dry. All in all, the bathroom doesn’t look too bad right now. So I guess I did ok. Perhaps a little unconventional.

Anyway, that is my first adventure with cleaning this week. I am sure there is more.

I need a little help here. Since I am about to embark on a three-day road trip halfway across the country, I am looking for music to burn. I want to make about 10 mixed CDs. At least two will be comedy-based. The others will be music-based. So, I need some suggestions that I might not think of. So, if you people have any ideas feel free to post them in a comment below. However, if you want to be super awesome, then you can attach the MP3 file in an email to nieddan@yahoo.com. There is an example of what I am looking for below.

All right, gotta get back to cleaning.