Aint nobody dope as me... so fresh and so clean clean...

So I could have left for New Jersey yesterday or today, but I'm waiting until tomorrow morning. So why did I want to stay in Baltimore for that extra day? Wild Christmas parties? Exploring the nightlife of White Marsh (which, as far as I can tell, consists of the TGI Friday's by Ikea)?

Nope. I set aside today to do something I haven't done in a long time - clean.

See, for the last 6 months or so since I moved in, I've looked at the mess around me and said "well, I don't have time, I'm too busy with class/work/hustlin' to do any cleaning. I'll get to that when things are quieter".

The problem with making excuses is eventually you run out. And today it did. Plus I figured it would be nice to come home next week to a clean house and to be able to invite friends over without hoping they don't ask to use the bathroom.

So today was the someday I finally cleaned. I decrudded the master bath, which had gotten to the point where gas station bathrooms were a standard of cleanliness for it to aspire to. I scraped the disturbing brown ring that had built up in the toilets in the other two bathrooms, which I never use. I vacumed. I did about 6 loads of laundry. I carried ski boots into the basement, since I closed my ebay ski boot store last week. I cleaned out the closets in my bedroom, shoving a ton of XXL shirts that are too big for me into boxes while I try to figure out if I should donate them to goodwill, have a yard sale, or keep them out of a fear that the day I get rid of them will be the day I'll gain 90 pounds and need them again. (It's also made me realize that this whole losing weight thing is costly - and not just the gym membership and better food. I had a bunch of shirts I really liked that I've aquired over the years, and now I need to start over. I've been trying to stop in any Old Navy I pass at any chance I get, to scour the clearance racks. But I guess it's better to be a slightly oveweight guy who has to keep wearing the same couple shirts over and over again than a morbidly obese guy with a closetful of cool threads).

The house looks way better, and I'm proud of it. That isn't to say I'm going to be featured in Better Homes and Gardens anytime soon. In fact, most people would say it's a mess. But for me it's an improvement.

My next big project is going to have to be tackle the basement. About 2/3 of my basement is a storage/laundry room that I've pretty much just dumped stuff I don't know what to do with in, and I need to bring some order to it. I'm dreading it - it's wall to wall boxes, many of which are stuff I never unpacked when I moved. Much of it is the kind of stuff I probably never should have moved in the first place, but now that it's in my house I figure there must have been a reason I kept it - so now I need to figure out what to do with it.

And that's not it. My office (aka the second bedroom) also needs a ton of work. I've got piles of stuff that I'm dragging to two hamfests at the end of January, so hopefully some of that will be converted to money. My dining room still has piles of painting supplies in the corner, and I still need to buy a dining room table, the one piece of furniture I haven't purchased yet (mostly because I eat my meals either in front of the TV or at my desk in front of the PC). And I still need to bug bsom to finish rewiring my house (we did get a new motion detector light installed outside and a broken ceiling fan switch done last weekend - and by "we" I mean he did all the work and I occasionally handed him a screwdriver (which is why as a joke he got me a toy "my first craftsman tool set" for Christmas).

But for now, my house looks the best it has since I moved in - and to keep it that way, I'm leaving for the next 10 days. So at least it will remain clean for the next, oh, 11 days.