Spring Cleaning

Pledge Cleaner is my new best friend.

Since the post-flood maintenance is finally definitively completed - walls patched up, shower replaced, carpet padding replaced, walls retextured and painted, drains replaced - I've finally been able to make steps toward getting my living space back in order.  Chatting with my friend on speaker phone for entertainment, I spent two hours today running a Swiffer duster over literally every surface of my apartment (minus the bedroom, which remained unaffected throughout this whole thing).  It was a dusting fiesta - not just tabletops, but books, dvds, even individual sheets of paper.  Grimy white dust from the sanding of the walls had covered the entire room.  If the US government had walked into my apartment a few years back, it would have been condemned as an anthrax scare and HazMat guys would have taken over the scene while I was questioned under a spotlight about my evil intentions.  It was that bad.

Still, even the dusting wasn't sufficient, and I continued the cleaning process by wiping down every bit of furniture with pledge cleaner (minus the sofa), polishing everything up with a dishcloth as I went.  Let me tell you...my furniture is GORGEOUS.  Seriously.  I'm not sure it's ever been this clean.  It certainly hasn't been this clean since the moment it was first delivered.  That stuff is magical.  I felt like I was channeling Monica Gellar in my cleanliness obsession, cleaning more thoroughly than I've ever cleaned before - I was even polishing my glass coasters.  It was epic.  It was fantastic.  I feel as though, until today, I have never really cleaned.  That's how amazing it was.

Now it must be remembered that I was starting with a particularly dirty apartment, so my excitement at the effects of the Pledge cleaner is probably much more exaggerated than the usual response elicited by its shiny results.  Whatever.  It was an exciting moment.

The cleaning will continue tomorrow; an impromptu pizza/movie night with friends caused the process to be put on hold, and there's still a good amount of clutter going on.  The kitchen and bathroom also need attention, and my bedroom is laying in anxious anticipation of the day when it can stop being a storage area for random decor objects and assorted kitchen appliances.  A good vacuum run is also called for.  Much remains on my quest...but I will make this apartment the cleanest that it has ever been.

I will be victorious.  Always be victorius.  All rising.

My Apartment = Titanic

So this post was originally intended to be a witty contemplation of the ridiculousness of the TV version of Rogers and Hammerstein's "Cinderella", starring Brandy, but that will be put off to a later date, because my apartment has become a scene from "Titanic".  And not the happy beginning part where things are joyful and there's dancing to fiddle music and people are in love.  The second part, when there's a lot of water in places where water was not intended to go.

I was walking through my "hallway" today when all of a sudden my foot was wet.  Surprised, I felt the carpet and it was all wet, which was weird for two reasons: first, the water was in the absolute middle of the apartment, far from any source of water; second, I had been out of the apartment the entire day and hadn't turned anything on to have opportunity to leak.  I put a towel down and didn't think too much about it, thinking I might have spilled water there and forgotten about it...but then a half hour or so later, the towel was completely drenched.

Enter 24-hour maintenance hotline.

The thing I do like about my apartment complex is that they're REALLY fast about maintenance.  I called in the problem around 9:30pm, and by 9:40 a maintenance guy was in my apartment, poking around and turning on all the faucets and water-related appliances and pulling up carpet and eventually unhooking the baseboard from under the dishwasher, where an entire POOL of water was found to be sitting.

Not cool.

The weirder thing, though, is that it's not actually the dishwasher.  Maintenance Dude turned it on, and nothing was leaking.  It was then decided that the water was actually coming from the wall between the dishwasher and the cabinet under the sink, where all the pipes of the sink reside (apparently unhappily).  Looking closely, he discovered a watermark on the other side of the wall (my sink is on a pass-through counter into the dining room), and found that there was water seeping up through the carpet all around the baseboard surrounding the kitchen walls...of course, since that's the one area of my apartment that I never walk on, I hadn't noticed until the water had had time to spread out to the hallway.

Having established the source, Maintenance Dude left with a promise to come back first thing in the morning (at like 8:00...so much for sleeping in...).  Obviously, since it's the middle of the night, the lead maintenance supervisor isn't here, and he needs to come see it before any workers start "banging out some sheet rock," to use Maintenance Dude's words.  This could be a hefty ordeal...although, Maintenance Dude says that it's not as bad as it could be.  And like I said, the maintenance service here is REALLY fast.  So it'll get fixed.  I've gone ahead and moved the necessary furniture around, cleared off the kitchen counter and cleared out the cabinet under the sink, moved valuable/sentimental objects off the floor (including the Wii Fit board and the basket my Dad brought me back from Ghana), hid the guitar in the far corner of the bedroom away from the source of the leak, and put all available towels on the floor to soak up whatever water might arise during the night.  Now all there is to do is wait for maintenance to return in the morning.  In the meantime, I just feel ever so slightly like Rose floating on that board in the ocean.

I'll never let go, Jack.