Cleaning Out

I was asked to clean out my boss's things today
What is is about other people's things I find so fascinating? She had a piggy bank filled with farm animals. She had notes and letters, some with names I recognized. She had postcards and tiny books on plants. She had organic soap and vegan soaps and even preserved blueberries. She had letters, some of them from prison, and one from the prison itself, telling her she couldn't come back. Seeing all of this just reminded me of how much I liked her, and I wondered what is making her so sick she can't even get her own things, and worrying about her a little, and, considering the prison things, feeling sorry for her, and mostly, just missing her. I miss her. I wish she hadn't left, or at the very least, was coming back.
Maybe no one else wanted to pack up her things because most of the people around here knew her better than I did.
The packing itself was okay. I wrapped things in bubble wrap, organized it so it was nice, hope that she is okay. I was tempted to stick a note in there myself, wishing her well.
I teared up a little at the thought of her.
I did that thing were you eat because you're sad. I've never done that before, and I guess I'm not going to again, because it didn't really make me feel better. I basically just felt the same. I guess I should be grateful the vending machine wouldn't let me have the chips and I got crackers instead. (If only it worked that when you were sad you suddenly would eat lettuce.)

The Cleaning Lady

As I was staying at Nate and Megan's, I tried to be a good houseguest, which meant being as out of the way as possible.  Megan and two of the other roommates went out for the weekend, so it was just Nate and I hanging out.  I was thinking about blogging here to you, but then I decided that I should do something nice for Nate and co.
I had just taken a shower, and, perhaps feeling like there needed to be some cleaning, I started working on the kitchen.  In my pink bathrobe.  I started on the dishes, but then realized there were just too many, and many of the things were caked on.
So I went looking through their stuff for one of those brillo pads that scraps stuff off really good.  That was my first clue that people didn't clean too often, because there weren't any.  There were just one sponge.
Then I noticed that someone had tried to bake stuff.  There was a small cake in a pan.
"Should I put this in the fridge?" I called to Nate, holding the pan up.  Nate was on the other side of the room, on his computer, working on his online class.
"Yeah...that's a good idea."
There was a cupcake pan with chocolate cake still stuck, glued really, to it.  I would need to soak this.  Soaking something requires that I temporarily plug their sink.  So I went looking for the rubber stopper that every house has.  Nothing.
This of course led to the next best thing: filling the two bathroom sinks with water and then plugging both of those up.  And then putting in the pan, silverware, plates, a water bottle, Tupperware.
On the way to the first bathroom sink, I found a spoon sitting next to a sock.  If I had seen it in any other context, I would assume it was a piece of modern art.  I showed Nate and he was grossed out by it.
Putting things in a different part of the house would mean I would need to carry it.  They had a plastic dish holder/rack thing that was meant to hold dishes as they dried.  I was about to use it when I noticed that too was stained a orange color.  I imagined it was meat sauce from something.  But I could be wrong.  So I started scrubbing it.
In the meantime, Nate saw me and decided I needed some music to help, so he put it in some Lady Gaga, a favorite of mine.  He put on one of my favorite songs, "Bad Romance."
As I was cleaning, I bounced around and sang the song, as Nate almost certainly knew I would.  Nate, for some odd reason or another, really likes me singing.  He sang along too.
There was something nicely and bizzarely domestic about the too of us.  I could totally see us living together, doing this sort of thing.  Nate would make food, I would wash dishes, we would pretend to be in a musical about the woes of college life.  We'd be bigger than Rent.  
After "Bad Romance," Nate put on "Telephone," which I am embarrassed to say is a song I'm actually working at perfecting.

I scrubbed at the rack thing.  The tough thing was it's odd shapes and little crevices that I couldn't get to with the sponge.  If I had a toothbrush on me, I could have used that, but I wasn't willing to sacrifice my own, and I was afraid going to look for one wouldn't work, since I had already tried to find a vacuum cleaner, to no success. 

Wave at the Window

My Dad came and visited me today. I got up early and tidied my room up a bit first. I cleaned it about a week ago, so it's mostly nice looking, but I did things like made the bed, cleaned up all my Vernors bottles, and Febreezed the place. Last semester, my father gave me a ten minute warning before showing up at my place at 10 o'clock on a Saturday morning, and I scrambled to make the place look respectable. He came in, and noticing the bed, said "What? You can't make your bed?" I was still in my jim-jams and my hair was still as messy as an explosion in an umbrella factory. Thankfully, that did not happen today, because my Dad called last night.
Because I recently had my birthday, he also bought me presents. I was thinking, since I didn't come home for the holiday, that I wouldn't be getting anything. I got Lost season five, Mary, Queen of Scots, Anne of a Thousand Days, and a crucifix. Obviously, I loved all of it. I'm still watching Lost, though I sometimes find myself wondering why. And I'm a huge history nerd, so the two movies depicting Tudor royalty is totally awesome. (I actually saw Anne of a Thousand Days, but it was years ago; I was at most fifteen.) I also collect crucifixes, so having a new one is nice. It's not the sort of design I would pick out for myself. I kind of looks like something a Spanish conquistador would wear over his breast-plate, and thinking about it like that makes me like it. Also, I love gauche jewelry in general, so it was a good choice. (In fact, I want to decorate my future home/apartment with as much ticky-tact stuff as possible.) Is it tasteless? Then I'm in love. I was actually surprised I didn't get a book, given that I am a literature dork and that my Mom told me she had bought The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. I'm wondering, since she said she had enjoyed the first few chapters, if she decided to keep it for herself. If so, then I'm proud of myself, since the last time my Mom read a book it was while we were on a family vacation in 2002 and it was House of Sand and Fog. (Take a wild guess who gave her that suggestion.) If I accidentally got my Mom reading, then I can hold off on getting my book.
My Dad and I went out for lunch. We mostly talked about my Dad's new job. He's decided to go back to teaching. He's going to be teaching a science class for elementary education majors. He's already decided that the students are probably going to be idiots, even though he hasn't met them yet. (Sounds like most professors I love. They already have contempt for people.) He complained that he's not sure what kind of labs he can run, and asked for my lab books and notes. I almost certainly have something, since I'm a bit of a packrat, but they're probably at home, and I don't like to send people to dig through my stuff, since they might find something they're not suppose to.
He also complained that he doesn't like the way the lab classroom is set up (not enough safety stuff, only one exit). I told him about my evolution lab that I did when I was in basic biology. Basically, we had spread out four types of beans on a table and called then prey and used utensils as predators. We then had thirty second periods to "eat" (grab with utensil and deposit in a cup) the food, charting the kinds of beans that it was easiest for our utensils to eat, and watching predators and prey select on one another. My Dad thought this was a great idea, even though my labmates were not necessarily impressed by this "experiment." (I have to admit I wasn't either, if only because evolution already made sense to me.) But it's a good conceptual way to think about it, and it requires some activity.
We got some housekeeping stuff done (figured out graduation stuff, etc.) and then he decided to leave. My Dad is always trying to get out of here when he comes, since he hates driving at night.
When I was a little girl, every time one of my parents would leave, I would go run to one of the windows in the front of our house and wave to my parents as they drove away. When I came to college, I started doing a similar sort of thing, only this time waving from one of the door windows at the bottom of the stairwells. I did this again today, one of the last times. It' s a nice tradition. Sometimes I tear up a little, but I'm not even totally sure why.