I did so much cleaning this weekend, it's absurd. Though, to be fair, it really only makes up for the period of time I had the apartment and totally avoided doing any cleaning whatsoever. So really, I'm probably still considerably behind in 'amount of cleaning that the apartment deserves.' But I'm fairly impressed with myself nonetheless.

Partially I'm impressed with the difficulty level of the task completed. Some of the apartment was pretty filthy. I hadn't realized the level of the squalor I was living in until it was pointed out to me. As a for instance, I was having trouble cleaning the handle on the refrigerator door. I noticed that it was considerably more discolored than the rest of the fridge, and the scrubbing I was giving it was doing no good. So I took a straight razor, and ran it along the length of the handle. It did the trick, taking off a millimeter-thick film of what can only be described as the very distillation of nasty funk. And not funk in the Bootsy Collins In Star-Shaped Glasses way. If you find yourself having to clean with a sponge in one hand, and a chiseling tool in the other, you've definitely let it go too long.

A few weeks ago my mother had, in what I now realize was a silent attempt to get me to clean the apartment, dropped off some cleaning supplies. Among the supplies she had left was a bottle of some yellow substance which I have been able to find no information about online. Instructions on the bottle suggest to dilute the liquid anywhere from 10:1 to 20:1. Turns out, they weren't kidding. By the time I finished cleaning, the liquid had eaten all of the stiff green substance off of my sponge. When I showed Ally the effect of the cleaner on the sponge, she responded (and this is one of the reasons I love her) "Cool! Can I use it?" I was very glad I was using rubber gloves (even if they were bright pink).

The upshot to all of this is that my apartment is prepared to be lived in by civilized human beings. I was living in it before this, of course, but one would be hard pressed to call the way I was living civilized. The kitchen is completely ready to be used (in fact, we made our second cooked meal in there. This time it was gluten and lactose-free pizza. I remember one summer when I was still in college, I was on Sugarbusters, which is something like only eating whole wheat products, or maybe it was only wheat that had been ground with heavy rocks which had to leave pebbles in. I can't really recall. Now I eat wheat-free. On average, I have a nice and balanced diet, but my averaging window is something like 8 years. Along with the pizzas, we had melon and prosciutto. And a bottle of champagne. Because I know you're interested). My bathroom is no longer appalling (I didn't think it was appalling before, but I'm not the one who matters. Nor am I the one who cleaned the bathroom, so really I think that it worked our fairly equitably). Almost every shelf in the living room is full of consumer electronics, so that's good to go. Really, it's a completely livable place right now.

The only thing left to do is hire a biweekly cleaning lady so I never have to do that again. If I were a different kind of man, I'd be a little ashamed of that. But I'm not.