Poorly hidden between the lines of yesterday's essay was the confession that I was horribly behind on housework. I'd been burning the candle at both ends too much over the summer, and the tide of clutter swamped me. This morning I had to have a maintenance guy come over, and that prompted me to panic clean, as it usually does. Once I was making headway on the mess, I kept going, even after he left. Coming home after Rotary with a bagful of crickets to feed Bruno and Dahlia inspired even more enthusiastic housework.
When the exchange student was here, I pulled half of the contents of my dressing room into my bedroom, so she would have a place to stay. She moved out over two months ago, and I had only partway reclaimed that room. I still had an overflowing closet in the bedroom, and one of my dressers in there as well, the one that was full of t-shirts and stretch pants. I had to walk back and forth between the rooms two or three times to dress pretty much every single day. It was rare that I could accomplish it in only one room. That got old quickly. Sitting on top of that dresser was the lizard tank. It had been in my bedroom for two years, so that I would remember to feed and water them because I saw them every day. Instead, with them back in a corner that was blocked by a bunch of junk that I'd moved out of the other room for the exchange student, it was so inconvenient and annoying to walk around to them, I dreaded watering and feeding them, and grew to hate doing it.
I've moved most of my clothes back into the dressing room, in batches. I also thinned out clothes that were too small, that I wasn't prepared to give away. But with all of the construction labor at the cabin, I ran out of energy to box up the too-small clothes or finish the move back to the dressing room. Today I used the momentum of the morning to finally make giant leaps forward on all of it. While I was at it, I had the Mr carry the lizard tank to the kitchen to be scrubbed out. (I can neither lift the tank nor catch the lizards, and I needed him to help.) I swapped the dresser for the empty one that the XS was using, and now I'm almost completely consolidated into one room.
The lizards did not appreciate being captured into a large Pyrex casserole with a lid. They were quite miffed when I carried them to their new digs in the dressing room. (Technically this is the old location of the tank, but since neither of them were alive when Agnes occupied the space, I struggle whether to call it their "former home.") I want to think they liked that the walls were clean, that the plants were buried in the soil instead of drying in pots set too close to the heat lamp, or that I scrubbed the poo off of the lizard ladder and cactus spine where they hang out. It's probably closer to them feeling annoyance that they were moved and stressed out. They didn't even hunt the new crickets I gave them for the first half hour. Instead they glared at me and at Athena who loves to lurk on top of the screen lid, trying to figure out how to kill them without me stopping her.
My biggest hope is that they feel less stress where they are, and maybe turn green once in a while during waking hours. They're only green when they're sleeping, and that doesn't seem like a good sign.
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