My life up and got purdy on me the past two days.

I’ve been blaming it on that post-sickness energy that you get.  Y’know the kind — where you wake up after being a giant pile of mucous for a week or so, and realize that HEY…I really AM human under all this snot! and suddenly, there’s all this energy that you never thought you had.

Maybe that’s just me.  People keep looking at me like I’m crazy, but I get it every single time I’m sick/healthy again.

And it really *is* partially the ChoreWars thing.  That stupid competitive side of me keeps telling me that all these people with the Really Clean Houses don’t have NEARLY the kind of raw material I have to work with.  Just getting to a place where my house doesn’t look like it’s been rescued from Condemned status would be one helluvalotta points.

Case in point….and you might want to shield the eyes of small children and the elderly from this one.  The shock may scar them for life or strike them dead on sight.  Seriously.

This is my bathtub, AFTER nearly a half-hour of scrubbing at it with salt and vinegar:

Tell me it doesn’t look like someone murdered the Tin Man and left his ass to rust in there.  Go on, tell me.

That, my friends, is literally TWO WEEKS of iron build-up.  TWO. FREAKIN’. WEEKS.  Not two DECADES.  Not even two YEARS, but two WEEKS.

Our water is THAT hard.  Well water.  I usually have to use these really noxious chemicals to clean it every other day, but it was broken two weeks ago, and I’ve been a little afraid to run a full tub.  So JUST FROM SHOWERS…..we get the Death of the Tin Man.  Seriously.

And since the vinegar/salt thing is working less than well, tomorrow, I’m back on the acid cleaner.  I think, when I use it, I can actually feel it giving me cancer.  But if it’s cancer versus the Dead Tin Man, I’ll take the carcinoma.  (Don’t they give you chemicals as treatment for that?  Am I the only one who sees the irony inherent in that?)

But seriously, for every picture like the scary one there, there’s this kind of thing emerging now, too:

That would be my newly-cleaned, newly bedecked-with-curtains, JUST SHY OF EMPTY (as in, all laundry completed) laundry room of comfort and joy.  Complete with the world’s sexiest dryer, which is from the 1950’s and still has a foot pedal to open the door.  I love it just a little bit.  And now that the laundry mountain is tackled and vanquished, the floors are sparkling, and the washer/dryer themselves are be-scrubbed and glowing, I kind of want to sit in there all day.  Like, ALL DAY LONG.  I think it’s the one truly, completely clean part of my house.  I love that.

There’s the half-done spots:

Like my dining room/part of the living room.  The floor’s still disgustingly being held together with duct tape to keep the ants out, but the vinyl’s mostly clean.  (Need to swiffer again tonight.  Four dogs.  Vinyl floors.  You do the math.)  But it’s getting there.  Two days ago, you couldn’t see the tabletop, and the dog hair was so thick that I could have literally knit me a new dog, if I was in the market for a fifth.

All of this is being compounded by the universe, too.  In the mail today, Jane Brocket’s “Gentle Art of Domesticity” and the new Everyday Food  (O Martha, how I love you so…).  Think it’s trying to tell me something?

So now….Ironing.

I don’t do it if I don’t have to.  I’m sooo bad at it.  I put creases where there aren’t supposed to be any, and flatten out the ones that are supposed to be there.  I learned this about myself a long, long time ago, and finally came to the realization that I need clothes with no ironing required.

Or I put things in the dryer with a damp washrag, which usually fixes everything anyway.

So if you come to my house and expect a nicely-pressed tablecloth and starched napkins…welll….you’ll be a little disappointed.  Just sayin’.

One other small thing of note:

I realized today that through ChoreWars, some of you from my Other Life might be able to figure out who I am.

Doh.

If you do, or if you suspect, please…keep that information to yourselves.   This is the place that I’m kind of trying to keep to myself.  Where I can work out all this domestic stuff without worrying about the public eye, or how it will reflect on that Other Life.

It’s not that that Other Life isn’t *me*.  Because it is.  But so is this, and while it might seem kind of like the Anti-OtherLife, it’s all part of this crazy thing we all do, called living.  I’m a little one-dimensional in that Other Life, intentionally.  Keeps a safe distance between us and the ones who know us through that other thing.

So, please….if you find this, and you know or think you know or have a sneaking suspicion that you know who I am in that Other?  Forget you know.

Thank you.