Spring Cleaning

So my long-time girlfriends and I, despite the cross-country distances, have spent the past month (or more!) in cleaning mode. There really must be some kind of cleaning instinct, or else all that traditional spring cleaning our mothers pushed onto us while growing up has made its sneaky way into our very beings. Here's my little blurb about it.

I keep trying to get my house in order before Baby Boy comes, but it sure seems like the moment I get one room clean, I turn around and the room I had cleaned before that is already a mess. Well, I guess that's really how things have always gone; maybe it's more of an annoyance now because I'm doing more cleaning than I used to! ;) My main goal now is to at least get each room vacuumed between the time I get it all cleaned up and it all falls apart again. Tonight that involved staying up until midnight in order to get the sitting room and the hallway vacuumed, as well as doing the weekly pre-Sunday sweeping of the kitchen and entryway--not to say I only sweep once a week. In reality, I sweep nearly every day, and some days twice! I guess floors have become my cleaning obsession . . . probably because I walk around barefoot all day and don't like the feeling of stepping on crumbs or dirt or whatever. It always seems there's something that I try to keep decently clean while the rest of the house goes to pot around me. Is that a typical mother-of-children survival technique, or is it more a sign of OCD? Anyway, I started typing up all the things I've completed, but then I decided to delete it because it was just depressing to see how little progress I have really made. So much of my cleaning is simply shoving junk around from place to place, despite how badly I want to and try to get rid of so much of it. I still haven't fully figured out how our previous apartment hide it all so much better than our three bedroom, two living room house!

Well, anyway, today we worked on the sitting room (where we've piled everything we haven't unpacked the past 9 months and anything else we just wanted out of the way for a while), passing on more empty boxes to Freecyclers (thx, S!) and filling up the car trunk filled with the donations that have been piling up in that room for the past six months (thx for carrying everything out, S!). It's nice to be able to actually walk around in that room again, although I'm sure that won't last long. Something will happen. Just you wait and see. And this is even though I'm trying to get it cleaned out so it's open for G&G S to stay in the last week of the month.

However, as I try to do for my own sanity, my "once it's done it's done" project is nearly complete! We picked up blueberry bushes this week, and I know S was able to finish planting at least most of them. I also ordered raspberries and blackberries from a friend who was doing an online order, and I received quite a surprise when I got an email from her this morning saying that they'd arrived! Poor S. That wasn't exactly what he'd wanted to hear, though, with already needing to get four berry bushes in the ground! He always has to bear all the brunt work of my projects. . . . at least there's not much brunt work required for the indoor planting I've been doing!

I put berry bushes before the dishwasher installation. . . . Probably not the wisest thing. I hadn't expected (ha, as usually happens with anything I attempt to do or have done) the bush planting to be such an ordeal, though. How long can it take to dig a hole, set in a start, cover it back up with the dirt, and spread a little mulch on top? Ha. . . .

Well, the "topsoil" here is heavy, heavy stuff--not as bad as the hard layer of solid, orange clay underneath, but it's pretty bad nonetheless. We had to mix potting soil and the clayey topsoil together by hand, picking out rocks and driveway gravel as we went. That's not nearly as easy as it sounds--at least if you've grown up with dirt that actually fell apart when you handled it. This stuff . . . I'm trying to avoid being crass, but this is the only accurate comparison I can think of . . . it's the consistency of poop--the kind when your infant/toddler hasn't gone for quite some time. It doesn't just mix together with anything. You have to get your (gloved!) hands into it and squish and squash the hard, nasty bits apart. It was gross! I finally had to admit that my next project of trying to salvage our ground for growing our veggies is just not going to work. S is a happy man there! It just seems ludicrous to me to spend money on dirt when you're surrounded by it--not to mention to have to pay to grow things!--but I now see it's just plain what we're going to have to do if we want to garden. Kinda loses the whole money-saving point of gardening, though, doesn't it? Maybe I will just stick to a couple pots of tomatoes, peppers, and herbs. . . . That is, after these bushes are in!

Well, at least our dirt isn't nearly as bad as our friends' ground in Hillsborough. They don't have the benefit of a "topsoil" layer, and their rock is embedded throughout their thick clay. . . . Although, now my fear is that this topsoil layer really won't drain water as I had naively supposed--it's on an incline, so it'll drain just fine, right?--and that our well-prepared holes will just become stagnant ponds, drowning our newest investment. I guess we'll just have to see.

It's 1:30 a.m. I was afraid I'd stay up late after not napping. (Sounds backwards, I know! And if I nap too long, I'm up too late as well; it's a careful balance, but at least I've been doing much better the past week or so.) I'd better go. . . .