Dirt, grease, grime... OH MY!!!!

As some of you may remember, in my first entry I talked about 'Operation: Clean Stinky Fridge'. At the time, I figured that'd be my only marathon clean-fest. Oh how I was wrong. So very wrong.

While doing some late night dishes (It was around 11:30pm, but I wasn't tired enough to actually go to bed yet), I pondered on the state of my hot plate and decided that it could use a quick scrub. And hey while I'm at it, why not wipe down the wall behind it? That'll give the dishes time to soak for a few minutes. Well, a few minutes turned into approx. 2 and a half hours. Ah yes, another clean-fest was born. When I sprayed the wall, it took maybe 5 seconds for me to realize that "Hey, you're not beige. You're... bright white...." My next thought was a resounding "EWWWWW!!!!" I have never sprayed a surface before and have the cleaning spray drip down a muddy brown. The walls were discreetly camouflaged in grease and grime and only god knows what else and I quickly discovered that washing by hand wasn't enough to combat the filth, but it would require the assistance of my trusty scrubbing brush. I can almost guarantee you that my arms will be sore tomorrow, because I was putting everything I had into getting the 2 tiled walls in my kitchen back to their former whiteness. What's most discouraging is that there's still sections of the walls, mostly between the tiles, that are stubbornly refusing to let go of their beigeness. This can only mean one thing: Round 2 in the near future, which I'm hoping wont't lead to Round 3.

Oh but wait, there's more! While standing on a chair to aid in my mission of cleaning the top section of the wall, I caught a glimpse of the top shelf of the shelving where I've been keeping the little food that I have. The top shelf is quite high and I only started using it the other day when the box of cereal that I bought wouldn't fit on any of the others shelves. Well, now that I was face-to-face with it, to my great horror I saw that it was coated with a good half-inch of dust and again, god knows what else. And once again this lead to a resounding "EWWWWW!!!!" My precious, almost impossible to find cereal has been sitting on that shelf! Ok yeah, it's in a box and thoroughly protected from contamination, but still!!! So this lead to my scrubbing the entirety of that shelving unit and it turns out that even the sections that I believed to be clean still left my paper towelling a disgusting brown/black.

When I finally get around to taking pictures of my apartment, you'll notice that my kitchen is far from large. But with my 2 lenghty cleaning missions, I've used nearly an entire bottle of cleaning spray, close to an entire roll of paper towelling (I hate using paper towels for cleaning, but I quickly discovered that a rag just wouldn't cut it since I'd be rinsing it out every 2 seconds), and 3/4's of my package of antibacterial wipes. Am I crazy, or is that RIDICULOUS!!! The fact that I've used all of that for such small, but overly disgusting spaces boggles my mind!!! To make matters even more fun, I had a good look at the walls throughout the apartment this week and what I once believed to be a pattern in the wallpaper isn't a pattern at all. I'm thinking that one of the past tenants used to smoke in here which would explain the random dark swirls throughout the place. I did a spot test to see if it would come out and so far no luck, which in a sense is a bit of a relief because I wasn't exactly excited at the prospect of washing the walls. I may need to look into some posters though, because the walls look dirty, plain and simple.

Now I'm not a neat-freak, far from it; Mind you I'm not a total slob either, but I don't freak out over dust and dirt and have been known to live in it for probably longer than necessary. But this, this is beyond anything that even I can comprehend. I've believed my past apartments to be dirty when first moving in, but they were pristine compared to this place! How can such a tiny apartment be so filthy?! What I find even more disturbing is that someone lived in that! I honestly don't think I'd be exaggerating if I were to say that this apartment hasn't been properly cleaned in over a year. How did Adam go through his day-to-day without seeing how disgusting this place was?! I know that some people can be ignorant to filth, but come on!!! I'm already having a difficult time not sending him a snarky message commenting on the state that he left this place. It might be impossible for me not to do so when he gets back next month! The whole time I was cleaning tonight, images swam through my mind of my sticking Adam's face in it, like some people do to their dog when it makes a mess. I know, those aren't very kind thoughts (And if you're reading this Adam: 1) HI!; and 2) Bad Adam! BAAAAD!!!!), but you spend hours cleaning someone else's mess and then you tell me that the only thoughts you have in their regard are happy and positive. Someone has to teach that boy some housekeeping skills. And no, that person most definetly WON'T be me.

You'll be proud to hear that I have found a silver lining to all of this. Not that there was ever any serious though (or any thought all, for that matter) on one day becoming a housekeeper or joining some form of cleaning support staff, but I can now officially scratch those jobs off my 'Future Careers' list. And as an added bonus, I got in a pretty intense upper-body workout.

Wow, I just realized how much I've written on such a boring topic. Leave it to me to ramble on about cleaning! I promise that my next entry will be about something actually interesting, for example: My vacation, as somewhat disappointing as its turned out to be. But hey, I still have a few days left before it's officially over so hopefully I'll have something phenomenal to report back to you all! And if not, well, it can't be worst than this entry!

Jan ^__^