It's Like Being An Archeologist But With Piles Of Tosh

There are some tasks that seem too intimidating to approach.

So gargantuan that it's hard to know where to start.

So daunting that every initial step seems steeped in discouragement.

For me that is the family home's rumpus room.

With the family's 'children' now firmly in their 20s it hasn't been a play room for over a decade.

We still use it to watch TV and my brother has his exercise equipment in there but it has acquired a third and less desirable role over the years - the dumping ground.

Anything we didn't want to get rid of but which didn't have a proper home got popped in the cupboard or in what began as a neat pile against the wall and evolved into a tribute to The Great Wall Of China.

Every now and then we mumble something about how we should do something about this.

Then we have a tentative poke around, become disheartened and leave it for 'later'.

Well these holidays 'later' arrived with a vengeance.

It started with a pile of defunct electronics that we'd put aside to 'take to the tip when we get around to it'.

I gathered them up.
I put them in the boot of my car.
I kicked my brother until he came and helped dig around to see if there were any more bits of electronic crap that needed throwing out.
I dragged him to the tip with me.
We dumped the whole pile at the tip's recycling centre so they could strip out the wiring and whatever else they wanted.


We went home drunk on victory!

Well, I was drunk on victory, my brother felt pretty neutral about the whole deal except the kicking and the being press-ganged into participation.

Once I got home, I was on a mission.

Old paperwork was thrust into the hands of the people it belonged to who were forced to go through it and either find a home for it or bin it.

Boxes were opened and emptied and sifted through.
Stuff was reorganised.
Stuff was thrown out.

Floor space was cleared.
Carpet was vacuumed.

More victory inebriation!

It is ridiculous how satisfying this was.

It probably  helped that it had now been so long since certain things had been stored away that we realised that no, we were never going to use them.

It also helped that we've all gotten past the ages where you attach emotional significance to junk.
I'm not saying we're a bunch of robots who threw out our childhood toys, we've kept those, but there were plenty of other things in there which given a few years we can now recognise as things that don't need to be kept.

We still need to go through the big cupboard, which shouldn't be in too bad of a shape as I went through it in 2007 when I was unemployed after coming back from Europe and Young Endeavour.

What I know is lurking in there, waiting for me, is our VHS collection.

Yep.

VHS collection.


The whole thing.

Taped-from-TV and store bought.

Obviously any home movies will be kept and transferred to disc - if they haven't already been - but the rest of it...

It's stupid I know but I feel shitty throwing out the store bought ones seeing as we kept them in such good condition and I feel annoyed throwing out the taped-from-TV ones when they contain things that haven't been released on DVD yet.

I'm going to.

I have to.

It's an obsolete format that we haven't used in years.

I'm going to feel weird about it though.

I hate throwing things out when they still work.

But my strange and pointless attachment to VHS aside, victory!

People are not going to recognise that room when I'm through with it.

And so help them God if they try and pile things up in it again.

Take No Prisoners, Show No Mercy, Leave No Witnesses

I know everyone has their own ways of dealing with stress and troubling emotions.

Some people exercise.

Some people drink.

Some people knit.

Some people clean their weapons* or do maintenance on their car.

Some people turn on the TV.

For whatever reason, I clean.

When I get super stressed out, I roll up my sleeves and attack.

I guess it might be something about not wanting to think about whatever is making me sad/anxious/angry because whenever this mood grips me, I acquire an intense focus that allows me to power through tasks that I usually have to drag myself into doing and there is no room in my brain for anything else.

It's also good to know that even if I'm using the cleaning as a way to procrastinate or distract myself, I'm doing something practical.
There's a tangible real-world effect.
I've achieved something that improves my surroundings or situation in some concrete way.

If you did an undergraduate degree in psychology, you could probably also argue that being able to organise and control your external environment may help you to begin attempting to organise and control your life.
Or help you deal with the fact that you have absolutely no hope in hell of managing to organise or control your life, at least at this point.

Whatever the myriad of reasons, I find wading into a room fists first and cleaning the hell out of it incredibly satisfying and soothing.

There's a system.
There's a sequence.
And it's wonderfully physical so you can work off anything that's bothering you.

The Procedure

1. Clear off all the flat surfaces.
2. Clean them down.
3. Throw away anything that you cleared off the flat surfaces which isn't needed any more.
4. Use the flat surfaces to organise those things you've decided to keep.
5. Empty out the cupboards or storage areas.
6. Clean inside the cupboards or storage areas.
7. Throw out the dross.
8. Use the flat surfaces to organise those things you've decided to keep**.
9. Clean off the things you've decided to keep, if necessary.
10. Put all the things you're keeping back into the cupboards or storage areas in an orderly fashion.
11. CLEAN THE EVER-LOVING HECK OUT OF ALL THE FLAT SURFACES, VERTICAL SURFACES, FLOOR TYPE SURFACES, BUMPY SURFACES, ALL THE SURFACES!
12. Make a list of anything you may need to replenish or replace now that you've gone through everything.
13. Sweaty and dishevelled, stagger off for a cup of tea and a collapse before a hot shower and further collapsing, exhausted but content.
    

At the end of all that, I may have realised that whatever was bothering me wasn't so bad after all, or I might feel closer to being able to deal with it, or I acknowledge that whatever is bothering me is still a poop sandwich but I don't care for a while because check out this freaking spotless room and/or house!
And, honestly, some days that's good enough.



*Not with the intent of doing anything to themselves or others with said weapons, they just find the act of maintenance meditative.

**At this point you may need additional flat surfaces in the form of card tables or similar.

Farewell, I Guess...

Well.

This was unexpected.

I've just been told that Diane - the landlady of the sharehouse I lived in during my last year at university - has died from cancer.

And I'm not sure what to feel.

When I first moved into the sharehouse Diane was living in Thailand so it was just me, another Australian girl, a Norwegian girl and a German girl living in the house studying, sharing food and generally having a good time.

I had been a little bit thrown by the 10 page double-sided list of house rules that Diane had left for all new housemates to acquaint themselves with but after having a bit of a snort - and assuming they were for people who had up until now been living in the mouth of a mine - I'd forgotten about them.

Then the university year ended, our international housemates finished their exchange years and went home for Christmas.

And Diane came home.

At first she seemed lovely.

Well-read, well-travelled, easy to talk to, with one of those slightly plummy more-English-than-English accents some Australians over 50 develop.

But gradually things started to go wrong.

If you didn't do the vacuuming at the appointed time (according to the house roster) you were 'reducing your housemates to living in squalor'.

If you left your cooking things in the sink whilst you ate your meal instead of cleaning them first you were being 'terribly inconsiderate'.

She would, with a gentle smile, say things like 'your mother never really taught you how to scrub, did she dear?'

You would slowly realise that she had this weird 'noble savage' view of the Thai people whom she claimed to love so much, whose language she was learning but whom she patronised with every word she spoke about them.

And just when you were ready to throw your hands up, pack your bags and get out of there, she'd crack open a bottle of wine and spend an entire evening talking to you about Australian troops in the Great War or her time travelling in Asia and completely discombobulate you all over again.

The most frustrating thing about her was that she was Never Wrong.

Not literally, she just would never take anyone else's arguments on board.

She wouldn't deviate from her beliefs and if you had given into the urge to start arguing with her about this, swearing or raise your voice this would have just confirmed her view that you hadn't been raised properly.

I spent the last 6 months hiding in my room, not wanting to interact with her and unwilling to bring friends home when they were left with no doubt that they were fundamentally unwelcome.

Finally, she kicked me out of the house.

A week before Christmas.

Literally seconds after I'd just read the most upsetting part of Harry Pottter And The Half-Blood Prince. Which is neither here nor there but was terrible timing as far as I was concerned.

She'd been dropping hints that I'd completely missed for weeks along the lines of 'Gosh that's a lot of groceries, will you need that much?' and 'Well, I'm feeling quite nostalgic, this is the last time you'll pay rent!'.

She had told me that the next year she wanted the house to be 'a student household again' and as I wasn't studying any more I expect this was as good a reason as any to kick me out and get in her preferred boarder - international students, preferably Asian girls who are too nervous about being in another country to speak back.

So I assumed I had until late February or early March to find a new place before the new semester started. I hadn't even started looking yet when she knocked on the door and told me that she'd need me out before Boxing Day so she could paint and redecorate.

No problem, I said numbly, that would be fine.

So I packed up all my things, bunged them into the back of my Dad's car and went home for Christmas.

I then spent all of January living in my Uncle's house - while he and my cousins were out of town - so I'd be close enough to the city for work and to look for a new place to live.

My self-esteem was in the trash.

I spent a whole month getting squiffy every night and as someone who hadn't started drinking until she was 19 and had never got drunk until she met Diane, guess who I blamed?

I moved into a new sharehouse with an easy laid back group and after about 3 months I had managed to relax properly and stopped drinking so damn much.

But I couldn't forget Diane.

It drove me crazy that she got to keep thinking about me.

Being wrong about me.

Being patronising about me.

Then years later when she'd finally drifted from my mind I found out she'd had an operation and chemotherapy but was in remission.

For a second I thought 'serve's her right' and then felt terrible.

I knew from little comments she'd let drop that she'd had a truly awful childhood and it was fairly clear even to someone as self-absorbed as I was at the time that her entire personality had been constructed as a way to distance herself from that and protect herself from the world.

I still didn't think it was fair on me or any of the other people who came into her sphere of influence.

And now I've heard again from the only housemate to stay in contact with her that Diane has died.

And that she was so estranged from her family that she left strict instructions that they weren't to be informed of her death until after her estate had been settled and her ashes scattered.

She was a very lonely but stubborn woman.

And I don't know how to feel that she doesn't get to keep thinking about me anymore.

Staring Into The Void

I don't know what happened.

I really don't.

I was planning to go out shopping, maybe buy a dang chest of drawers or some new pens or something.

But then I found myself in the laundry.

The laundry at my family home is awe inspiring.
Unlike the laundry at my flat which is just an alcove containing a broken washing machine, the laundry at my parents' house is reasonably large, mostly made up of bench and storage space and looks like it has been hit by a meteor made out of the contents of a dozen kitchens' third drawer down.

We have a bad habit in our family of completely covering the flat surfaces in certain rooms with drifts of things that we either 'plan to put away later' or 'don't know where they go' because we haven't got a place for them.
This gives parts of our home a permanent 'tidy but slightly cluttered' look that magically doesn't vary.
It doesn't get any worse but unless we're having a big party, guests or inexplicably go a bit strange it doesn't get any better either.

This whole situation is partially a result of having shifted house about six times in four years when moving for my Dad's work when we were younger.
Every time we moved we went through a cycle that went something like this:

• We should get rid of some of this crud before we move, why waste space and effort taking it with us?
• Crap, we've left it too late! I don't want to risk throwing out something important, we'll do it when we're unpacking at the new place.
• Jesus on a sailboat, I am waaaaay too tired to look at all that stuff now. We'll just put it all in the shed/cupboard/wherever and work it out later.
  

Anyhoo the point is that the laundry is usually a big old mess.

And on this day, this would not stand.

I went in there to feed the cats or something and somehow spent the entire day shovelling things off the benches onto a folding card table, wiping down the flat surfaces, scrubbing out the dang sinks, finding places to put the homeless items, throwing out a tonne of things that should have been thrown out in the first place and mopping the floors*.

And even though I didn't do any of the things I planned to do today, didn't even leave the house, I feel it was time well spent.
It won't take long for things to creep back onto the counter-top but at least we've been reminded of what it looks like.



*I found a sock underneath the washing machine that nobody can remember missing which might be an indication of how long it has been there.

Sparkle Sparkle!

I have been cleaning the ever-living heck out of my house this week.
'How domestic!' you might think, 'How quaint!'.
But this is the first time I've given my place 'The Business' since I bought my lightglobe changing ladder and there are parts of the place that I didn't even know existed that are filthy.
I suppose I shouldn't be surprised.
The ceilings are so high I need a ladder just to reach the lights and the people who lived here before me were in their 70s and not exactly suited to balancing on the tops of ladders and wiping door lintels. Or being able to see, bless their slightly blurry eyes.

My newly officially identified allergies have been going gang-busters but I'm consoling myself with the fact they'll be a lot happier once I'm finished and the place is actually dust-free.

I keep making little multi-pronged plans of attack.
All the high-up stuff first, then I can put the bloody ladder away and coax my calves back into talking to me again. Then the two carpeted rooms so I can vacuum and be done with it. Then I can cram everything from the lounge into those two rooms so I can scrub the kitchen and the bathroom and attack the damn wooden floors.

Those floors are the bane of my rental existence and a big part of why I don't mop very often.
They are sealed pine boards with a 5mm gap between each board that make sweeping inefficient and vacuuming time-consuming as you have to follow each line up and down the room whilst imitating an inverted L. The shellac, or whatever it is, is older than I am and flakes off if you scratch the floor even slightly and as the wood seems to have the consistency of a none-too-firm cheese which you could gouge a groove in with your fingernail if you tried.
This makes moving the furniture very bloody annoying so I tend to avoid doing it.

My flat is what I like to call 'venerable' so a big part of my relief at the end of this process will come from having managed to clean the place without making any bits of it fall off or disintegrate and knowing when to leave well enough alone.
As the previous part-time abode of several doted upon grandchildren it features several clusters of exciting texta marks low down on some walls and surprising patterns of brightly coloured nail polish blobs on different parts of the floor and a Peter Rabbit sticker next to the bath which I have been affectionately protecting.
I get the feeling if I tried to 'fix' any of these problems I would do more damage than I would good and would take away part of what I find so charming about the place which is that it is so very definitely lived in.
I've never been entirely comfortable with new houses as they feel sort of 'unfinished' or as if they have no personality whereas this slightly daggy, slightly banged up place is very definitely a home. Mine for now.

And after all this cleaning and moving and arranging I can collapse into an exhausted grubby heap in my nice clean flat, feeling smug and self-satisfied and at the same time quite quite glad that I won't have to do some of that stuff again for months - I'm not sure the old place could take it and frankly neither could I.
My finges are all pruney and scraped and my back and legs have taken out a restraining order against me.
But at least I've stopped sneezing long enough to type this now!