clean at last! clean at last!

[mamajoan]

My friend Cyndi came down from Vermont today to help me clean my apartment. *falls over from exhaustion* I'm completely drained, but on the plus side, the place looks great!!!

Cyndi is about 50 and has been a staunch family friend ever since she was my brother's and my daycare teacher when we were teeny. Her energy, strength, and organizational skills are incredible (she did house-cleaning for a living, for a while, after she stopped doing childcare). She's unbelievable. She went strong for about eight hours straight today, on nothing more than a bagel and a powerbar and a couple handfuls of dried fruit ("I work better without food").

My apartment needed help in basically three ways. It needed simple cleaning of dirt; it needed de-cluttering; and it needed furniture rearranged in order to make room in the bedroom for the dresser-slash-changing-table and the crib. The first two are things that theoretically I could do myself, but I've been so tired physically and mentally for so long now that I haven't been able to force myself to tackle them, and so of course they'd gotten worse and worse. But Cyndi came in, took one look, told me I had my mom's genes ;), and got to work. Within like two hours we had cleared all the clutter off of several major furniture items and reconfigured them (Cyndi lifts large heavy furniture items with ease!). By the five-hour mark we had basically cleared the two main rooms (living room and bedroom) of almost all their clutter, gotten all my clothing hung up / in drawers / in storage according to need, vacuumed up approximately three cats' worth of furballs, and made room for all the baby furniture. And by the time we were done all the floors were clean, the bathroom was clean, the kitchen was clean, and we took out six bajillion bags of trash and recycling (conveniently enough, tonight was trash night on my street!).

Whew!!!

Then my mom came over and was bowled over by the improvements. Wow. Then we went to dinner and ate like crazed starving people. Then they brought me home and my mom took Cyndi off to her (mom's) place, where tomorrow Cyndi starts work on clearing out mom's two rooms that are going to be painted. (And then they called to say that I had left my purse in mom's car. D'oh!!!)

I can't believe how great my apartment looks. It makes me so so happy. Now if only I can manage to keep it this way.

Bini is fairly traumatized. ;) He hid all day and didn't come out until mom and Cyndi had left. Then after a small amount of sniffing around the apartment, he came to check out my lap and was all, "well, at least THIS is the same, thank goodness," and snuggled for a while, but now he's back to prowling around the apartment making little noises of distress. He was especially annoyed to discover that we had moved his table (which used to sit by the window where he could sit on it and look out at the world). Heh. Poor kitty. Ah well, he'll adjust. :)

Comments

[sydb42.livejournal.com]

Hi, I found your journal by doing a search based on people who had interests similar to me. My daughter was born July 11th last year. I think July is a great time to have a baby. :)

[tiggrrl.livejournal.com]

Did I miss something or did you cut off a lot of hair? That icon makes it look like you got a massive cut.

[mamajoan.livejournal.com]

I did mention it in this post, but apparently I didn't make a big enough deal out of it. ;) I thought of it as restoring my hair to its normal length, rather than as getting a radical change in 'do, so maybe that's why.