Footprints on the Moon

At some point over the weekend, I noticed that some of the tiles in my shower looked like they were coming off the wall. If I pushed on them in that area, the wall moved. Uh yeah, probably not a good thing, right? So I called it in this morning as I left for work, and at about 9am or so, one of the maintenance guys called to see if it was a good time to go look at my shower. I never heard anything back so I had no idea what I was going to walk into when I came home. The shower is obviously going to need re-tiled, and even though I didn’t want to have to make other shower arrangements for tomorrow, I was hoping the work would have been started. Except it wasn’t. Do you want to see what I found when I came home?

Oh yeah… Plastic wrap and duct tape! Sweet! That’s a high quality repair job right there. Okay, they’ll be coming back to “fix” it eventually, I’ll give them that but this I was not expecting. I suppose I should have… See that note in the corner? Here’s what it said:

So at “?” in the future, I’ll have a shower that’s been fixed. Until then, I have duct tape and a sheet of plastic. And time to figure out where I’ll be showering on “?” day in question… I’ll be packing my Rimowa luggage and hiking somewhere with my shampoo. If nothing else, there are showers at work I can use. In the meantime, sigh.

I came home from work this afternoon to find a surprise in front of my apartment door, and the following letter:

April 22, 2008 (Earth Day)
Jennifer,

Your frog has been mentioned by the people who clean our lobbies as the most deteriorated mat at (apartment complex). I said I had thought of buying you a new mat, but thought that there must be some sentimental value. I looked for another frog, but didn’t find one. I hope you like the cats. Maybe the frog could be made into a wall hanging? As I write, it’s been some time since I’ve seen it, but it seems to me the problem was more with the backing than the top side.

Uncle Jim

Accompanying this letter was a new door mat with cats on it, which I didn’t get a picture of. Hmmm… I don’t know what the problem was with my old door mat…

Okay, so maybe it was time to give up the ghost, but there WAS some sentimental attachment to it. Even I had to admit that it was time, and since my uncle (who is also a maintenance man here) went out of his way to buy me a new one I felt like I couldn’t put it off any longer. I could have pulled off the backing that has managed to come loose, but the rug was much worse off than even the picture does justice.

I thought about holding on to it for awhile longer, but I just couldn’t justify it, not when I’m trying so hard to weed out all the extra junk I’ve held onto for years. Even as I’m writing this though, there’s a small twinge that makes me wish I hadn’t… it’s just a rug. It’s just a rug. It’s just a rug. *small sigh*

Hi. My name is Jennifer, and I have a cardboard problem. (“Hi Jennifer!”) Okay, so I think I’ve figured out what my biggest problem is in my messy chaotic apartment. Yes, I do have too much stuff in a small space, no doubt about that, but I have another problem. Apparently, I hoard boxes. Now, some things you probably should keep the boxes for, at least for awhile, but I’ve taken it to an extreme. The box for the gold anklet you gave me in 7th grade? Yeah, I’ve got that. (Even worse, that means it MOVED with me!) I even have the box from both my GameBoy and my GameBoy Color… I got both of those when they first came out, so just think about how long I’ve held onto those boxes.

Yes, I have a serious cardboard problem. I’ve weeded them out quite a bit at this point, but I cannot tell you how many trips I’ve made out to the recycling dumpster downstairs over the last couple of days. Between trips to the recycling bin and taking garage sale stuff to my car I made 6 trips just today! I can see 3 boxes that need to be taken out just from where I’m sitting.

Do me a favor… next time I buy something, please make sure I don’t keep the box for the next 10 years okay?

I made some progress on the mess that is my apartment (except the bedroom! woot!) today. I went through another box in the living, cleaned out the linen closet, and the counter top in the bathroom. This also included putting all my “designer jewelry” back in the jewelry box, rather than just strewn about on random shelves in the closet. (Or on the floor, if Lucy’s been in the closet lately.)

Unfortunately, my back has been hurting all day today, so I didn’t get as much done as I would have liked. Oh well, slowly but surely, it’s getting done. And I’ve made sure to spend a couple minutes keeping the bedroom clean too. Cause it would sure stink to get the rest of the apartment done only to realize I’ve undone the first victory! I think the first step tomorrow is to organize the storage closet. I have a huge tote in the living room that needs to go in there, and a few more boxes by the time this is all done. Along with that, when I was fetching Christmas stuff, I found at least 2 boxes marked for the garage sale, so those have to come out. Ah the best laid plans, we’ll see how far I actually get.

Don’t forget, tomorrow is the deadline for your taxes, yes, but also for $25 free from Revolution Money Exchange. No strings attached. I’d greatly appreciate it if you go through my link and get us both some free cash!

I put a good amount of time in the last couple of days cleaning my room… and finally, FINALLY I can say “I have a clean bedroom!” This may not seem like a big deal but trust me, this is quite an accomplishment. I’ve lived in this apartment for two years, but I still had some boxes that hadn’t been unpacked more than rifling through them to find something I’m looking for. Most of these boxes ended up in my bedroom because it’s a place I could stow things away, shut the door, and allow the rest of the apartment to be clean for company! No more! See for yourself:

There are still a few things left to do in there, like find a better spot for my laundry baskets. Washing the sheets and ACTUALLY making the bed instead of just pretending for a picture , and I’d like to get my area rug swept up and put back on the floor. As soon as I wrangle some help, I’d like to rearrange the furniture too. Basically putting the bed where the dresser and TV are, and putting all the things on that wall where the bed is right now. That can wait for awhile though… I still have the REST of my apartment to reclaim.

To give you some small idea of where I started, you can check out the “before” picture below. This picture was actually taken in November, and you’ll just have to trust me when I say it ended up being much, much worse than this when I finally started digging it out. Wow, this is embarrassing to even think about sharing lol

Did you all have a lovely first day of April? I did, because nobody played any pranks on me! Or, if they did, they did such a lousy job at it that I had no idea. I have a sneaking suspicion that if my boss hadn’t been going on such little sleep, he’d have been a bit more mischievous but I’m not complaining. The weather was a big enough April Fool’s joke. Finally gets warm and then rains on and off all day long.

I did get my rent paid. On time! For the first time in months. LOL If it wasn’t family, I’d have been kicked out by now, I’m sure. Hey, it’d be easier if I could electronically pay them like just about everyone else– all THOSE people get paid on time! But I had an ulterior motive for paying today, and paying in person rather than sliding an envelope under the office door like I usually do. I “officially” put in my request to move into a downstairs apartment. Now I just need one of my neighbors to move out.

It’s officially spring, at least according to the calendar. Today it’s starting to look a little more like spring outside. The birds were back in the tree outside my window this morning, the sun is shining, and there’s only a little bit of snow left out there to remind us what happened yesterday:

This was the view from my living room window yesterday afternoon. It continued to snow long after this, and much bigger snowflakes for awhile. When I went to leave for work this morning, I had to scrape an inch or two of icy snow off of my windows before I could go anywhere. I have no idea what the temperature is out there, but it LOOKS like a gorgeous spring day.

This is the time of year where I really wish I didn’t have the apartment I did. I am on the second floor, with no balcony. All of the first floor apartments have sliding glass doors with small patios. It’s not much, but it would be nice to have a little spot to sit outside when it’s nice out. I really REALLY miss being able to sit outside. When I still lived with my dad, I would spend a lot of evenings on the porch reading until it got too dark out. I’ve been thinking about telling the apartment people that if one of the downstairs apartments opens up, I’d like to move. I’m torn between my desire to set up my teak patio furniture so I can spend my evenings outside reading, and my desire to not have to pack up my crap and move it!! Though, now that I’ve decided to pay down my debt, and I’ve spent some time mapping that out, I’m realizing I might be here longer than I originally planned thought I might… in which case it might be totally worth moving all my junk and bribing my dad to move my extremely heavy couch one more time even though he swore the last time was the last time… all so I can have 3 square feet of outside space. Of course, all of this is contingent upon one of the neighbors downstairs moving out. There’s one college student downstairs, so maybe he’ll leave at the end of the school year.

I really don’t like platform beds, but when I was attempting to gather up my laundry yesterday, I was briefly envious of people who have them. They never have to get down on their bellies on the floor and crawl halfway under the bed to retrieve dirty socks that their cats found it necessary to drag down there. And that’s not to mention the mound of Kleenex. I have a bad habit of falling asleep with a Kleenex in my hand. After I fall asleep, at some point, I naturally let go of it and 9 times out of 10, it makes its way over to drop off the side of the bed between the headboard and the wall.

So I’m on the floor on my stomach, retrieving socks, and I’m thinking how nice a platform bed might be… and then I remember how convenient it always was to have space under the bed when I was a kid. Eventually I had a water bed with storage drawers underneath, but before that it was great to have a bed with space underneath to shove all sorts of things when I was supposed to be cleaning my room. Closets were great for that too… though, usually mom checked both of those places and made me keep cleaning, every once in a while I got away with it. So the next time you come over to my apartment, if I don’t close my bedroom door to keep you from seeing it, please don’t look under the bed.

Am I the only one who thinks cleaning just for yourself, and cleaning for company are two separate things? For example… I spent a good deal of Saturday morning cleaning my apartment. But then I decided to invite my mom, her husband and my grandma over for lunch on Sunday so I did MORE cleaning to make it “company clean.” I actually called it Grandma clean… it was clean enough for me to have mom over cause she’s been over when there’s no room to sit on the couch, but Grandma hasn’t. Not to say that I wanted it as clean as her house… I’m not sure that’s possible!
In the end, I was happy with it, but I still closed the door to my bedroom leaving it just open enough to let Pudge go in there and hide. Not that there were bustiers laying around or anything, but the dirty laundry piled up on the floor and (if I’m being honest) the extra crap from the living room is just not something that anyone needs to see.

This is a good Saturday to be spent inside. I do need to run to the grocery store at some point, but mostly I’m just going to be in the apartment, hiding from the snowy-slushy icky-ness that’s outside. Since a royal caribbean trip is not really an option, I figured this would be a good second option. I’m cleaning off and on today… more off than on, actually and I need that to be the other way around. I’m going to get up and start working on my scary bathroom in just a minute, but I’d rather sit here and catch up on the blog stuff I’ve gotten behind on. Or play games on the internet, whichever. But Sarah’s coming over later and I need to have been productive before she arrives, so I guess I better get started.